Theatre review: A Little Life

I think it's the first 2023 show to self-identify as "the theatrical event of the year" - certainly A Little Life has become a hot topic, whether because of selling out so conclusively it's already added a second West End run, or the discussion of whether it represents the apex of misery porn, or just because people like celebrity cock (something this blog has never had any strong opinions about, obviously.) Then there's the fact that it's had a decidedly marmite response from the critics - my personal experience with Ivo van Hove has been very love/hate as well so this really could have gone any number of ways. van Hove and Koen Tachelet adapt Hanya Yanagihara's 2015 novel about Jude (James Norton,) one of a quartet of university friends who stay close throughout their lives. He's well-liked but it's openly acknowledged among his friendship group that he's so private they don't know the most basic things about him.

Theatre review: A Doll's House

The seasoned veteran in 2019's round of Artistic Director Musical Chairs, Rachel O’Riordan taking over the Lyric Hammersmith means she's run theatres in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and now England. On the other hand she could be seen as the one with the most to prove to a London audience, considering her last outing here was last year's catastrophically misjudged revival of Foxfinder. Well her opening production feels like it's done a good job of catching the Lyric's brand, taking as it does a well-loved classic - Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, a play that seems to be on a lot of people's radar at the moment - and giving it a fresh twist. It's also, despite the fact that the story's been kept in the year of the play's premiere, 1879, a reinvention that ties in to a lot of current concerns, namely the way the rose-tinted view of Britain's colonial past has finally come back to cause destruction in Britain itself, and that past is ripe for reevaluation.

Theatre review: Shipwreck

Now a regular name at the Almeida, American playwright Anne Washburn’s previous plays there Mr Burns and The Twilight Zone (about to get a West End transfer) have taken well-known popular fiction and refashioned it into something different; the former in particular explored the blurring lines between made-up stories and what we believe is true, so it makes an inevitable kind of sense that Washburn would be at the front of the line of playwrights to tackle Donald Trump, whose reality is made up of confidently-asserted fictions. She does this in typically sideways fashion in Shipwreck by looking at the guilt and panic of a group of upper middle-class liberals wondering if there was more they could have done to prevent Trump’s election and the worst of what he did once in office. The Trump presidency always offers up new topics of conversation but in this instance the latest is former FBI director James Comey’s revelations about a private dinner between the two of them.

Theatre review: Les Blancs

It was left unfinished on playwright Lorraine Hansberry's death, but the National saw enough merit in Les Blancs to get adaptor Robert Nemiroff and director Yaël Farber to create a stageable version of this African epic: In an unspecified post-war, colonial African country, a European mission operates a very basic hospital. The influential pastor is unseen, off on some apparently regular trek into the jungle, but his blind wife Madame Neilsen (Siân Phillips) is there to meet American journalist Charlie Morris (Elliot Cowan,) there in search of the real story of a country whose decades of foreign rule have finally led to increasing black-on-white violence. Not satisfied with only getting the white side of the story, he focuses on a trio of brothers, all of whom are outsiders in some way, who've returned to the area for their father's funeral; particularly middle brother Tshembe (Danny Sapani,) who's spent years travelling the world and has a white wife in London.