Theatre review: Into the Woods

When Stephen Sondheim died in 2021 I thought we'd see theatres falling over each other to revive some of his greatest hits, but fair play they've largely taken their time, staging about as much of his work as usual (including his not-quite-finished final work.) Of course maybe all the falling over each other was going on behind the scenes as people fought over the rights. If the Bridge's production of Sondheim's (music and lyrics) and James Lapine's (book) Into the Woods is anything to go by, what they were waiting for was the chance to really go big, both in terms of spectacle and of recognisable performers to take on what is an almighty ensemble piece. The Baker (Jamie Parker, who I think we can all agree is the first History Boy ever to take on the role) and his wife (Katie Brayben) can't have children, which it turns out is down to a curse placed on his family.

Theatre review: Oedipus (Wyndham's)

The same plays or themes do sometimes crop up several times in quick succession - particular stories will strike multiple people as topical after all, and theatres can be too far into their own production by the time they find out someone else has had the same idea - but earlier this year two competing productions of Sophocles' Oedipus were announced within minutes of each other, which has to be some kind of record. At least they're not quite overlapping, and first motherfucker out of the gates is Mark Strong, who plays the tragic king for adaptor-director Robert Icke. It's a return to Greek Tragedy after Icke's epic Oresteia, but while there's a lot that's powerful about the performances, the overall show didn't live up to its predecessor for me. We're in a modern political story, in a state that isn't named, but the Greek writing on the screens suggests it's a version of the original's Thebes.

Theatre review: The Cherry Orchard

The Donald and Margot Warehouse is back in its occasional in-the-round configuration for Benedict Andrews' version of The Cherry Orchard, with Magda Willi covering the stage and walls in heavily-patterned orange carpet, signalling from the start a different aesthetic for Chekhov's final play, and the one widely interpreted as anticipating the Russian Revolution. The formerly wealthy family hurtling towards a doom they refuse to see coming have owned a large estate for generations, but are now seriously in debt: Gaev (Michael Gould) has been in charge of managing the estate, which he's done good-naturedly but ineptly; his sister Ranevskaya (Nina Hoss) on the other hand seems to actively haemorrhage money, whether through her attraction to dodgy men who invariably rip her off, or through genuinely seeming not to understand the value of the cash she spends or gives away.

Theatre review: King Lear (Almeida)

Given that it doesn't look like Yaël Farber’s going anywhere anytime soon, I feel like Rupert Goold's Almeida has really found the right match for the highly ritualistic South African director, by sticking to those Shakespeare plays where an apparent complete absence of a sense of humour isn't a major obstacle. So after her Macbeth we now get a nearly four-hour long King Lear that despite being a particularly nihilistic take on the play is easily the best work I've ever seen Farber do. Regular readers of this blog may both decide for themselves how much of a compliment that actually is - but I'd say it's also one of the better Lears I've seen in general. We begin at a live TV broadcast by the Royal Family where the succession is to be formally announced. Lear (Danny Sapani) asks his three daughters how much they love him, and the eldest two go along with the ritual, singing his praises.

Theatre review: Pygmalion

Future Dame Patsy Ferran and Bertie Carvel both return to the Old Vic to pair up as Eliza Doolittle and Professor Henry Higgins in Bernard Shaw's* Pygmalion, in a typically stylised Richard Jones production that reveals the play as a dark comedy. It doesn't need to reveal its social and political concerns - compared to its more famous musical adaptation, Shaw's play lays those bare pretty forcefully itself. Ferran's Eliza is a flower-girl in Covent Garden who tries to sell to middle-class theatregoers on their way home, and when her basket of flowers is knocked to the ground she unleashes her loud cockney accent, strangled vowels and tendency to express her emotions through random wailing noises. This happens to be in front of the first chance meeting between two celebrated linguists with an interest in regional accents and dialects.

Theatre review: Kerry Jackson

The Dorfman's final piece of new writing of 2022 takes a despairing look at the polarisation of opinion by politics and class in modern Britain, and the impossibility of reconciling the warring points of view, but chucks it into a blender with a pretty frantic comedy. What comes out isn't exactly gazpacho, despite April De Angelis setting Kerry Jackson in a tapas restaurant: Opening a new restaurant is a risky business at the best of times, but Kerry (Fay Ripley) has taken a punt on launching her business in the middle of a cost of living crisis. Walthamstow Village is up-and-coming so her opening weeks don't go too badly, but she's concerned that homeless Will (Michael Fox,) who sleeps rough across the road, is putting off her customers. When she aggressively confronts him she makes matters worse, and soon he's leaving dirty protests by her wheelie bins.

Theatre review: All of Us

All of Us opens with a neat little reverse: Two women sit opposite each other, Jess (Francesca Martinez) needing some help to get to her chair because she has Cerebral Palsy, Rita (Lucy Briers) apologising for being late and taking out a pad to take notes on the session. But Jess isn't the patient, she's the therapist, who's making slow but steady progress with Rita's OCD. Martinez is probably most recognisable as a comedian but here doubles as writer and star of a tragicomic play tearing into the last 12 years of austerity cuts to vital benefits, particularly to people with disabilities. Jess is busy, productive and independent in everything except her own body, whose "wobbly" nature means she needs help from flatmate Lottie (Crystal Condie) and care assistant Nadia (Wanda Opalinska) to dress herself and cook.

Theatre review: The Merchant of Venice(Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

Measure for Measure, Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice doesn't sound like the most exciting season imaginable on paper, but the Swanamaker has been firing on all cylinders this winter, and in what could have been the least promising offering of all it turns out they've saved the best till last: Abigail Graham's is probably the best Merchant I've ever seen, and not just because she's cut the entirety of Act 5. In fact, as we've come to expect from the Globe, it's not a production that's precious with the text, cutting and reshuffling to serve its purpose. In this instance, it's to set the action in the high-risk, masculine, bullying culture of modern-day city traders, so we open with Aaron Vodovoz' geeky Launcelot Gobbo asking for a job with Bassanio (Michael Marcus.) He's made to play a drinking game as part of his application, which mainly involves a penalty every time he says the word "Jew" - and as he's talking about wanting to leave his current employer, the Jewish moneylender Shylock, he says it a lot. He ends up very drunk and humiliated, but gets the job.

Theatre review: Swive [Elizabeth]

I'm starting to think of the 2019/2020 Swanamaker season as "the chipboard season," given the material that's covered the stage for Henry VI, Richard III, and now the winter season's only premiere, Ella Hickson's Swive [Elizabeth]. It's revealed in a flourish that makes a very early bid for coup de théâtre of the year, as Hickson and director Natalie Abrahami remind us that for all its atmosphere and quaintness this theatre is actually barely six years old, and a biographical play about Elizabeth I (Abigail Cruttenden) might turn out to be surprisingly devoid of courtly niceties. In fact it's an 85-minute race through Elizabeth's life from toddler to menopause, and how her treatment by men throughout her life might have led her to dig her heels in against all the pressure to marry and produce an heir, and instead make the rule of England's only unmarried Queen one of the most iconic eras in history.

Theatre review: Vassa

Of course, Vassa isn’t the original title. The full title is Vassa Matter You? (Hey!) Gotta No Respec’?

The last time Mike Bartlett wrote for the Almeida he did it in the style of Chekhov, and he’s back with the Russians now, although this time it’s a direct adaptation. Maxim Gorky’s Vassa Zheleznova turns out to be a play I’ve seen before, although either that adaptation or this one (or both) must be pretty loose, as the stories appear to have some massive differences. Bartlett’s is a claustrophobic family drama: Vassa (Siobhán Redmond) is the matriarch of a wealthy industrial family who rules with an iron fist and absolutely no velvet glove – the tone she’s established for the household is one of undisguised cruelty and personal attacks. It’s not just their business fortunes that are built on blackmail and corruption: Every relationship in the family seems to have come about because Vassa or her henchman Mikhail (Cyril Nri) has dirt on someone, right down to the servants they despise, but who they keep on because they have leverage that means they can treat them like shit.

Theatre review: Anna

On the one hand, it's disappointing to have a show at the National where cheap tickets are very thin on the ground; on the other, I can't complain if this is part of a new policy not to sell Dorfman side seats if they offer no view of the stage whatsoever. The reason you need to watch Anna head-on or not at all is that Vicki Mortimer's set is entirely behind a letterbox of sound-proof glass. This is because Ella Hickson's play is co-created with star sound designers Ben and Max Ringham, and making sure the audience hears, through headphones, only exactly what the creatives want them to hear is at the heart of the show. This is another show built on binaural sound, and the technology has obviously now progressed to the point that it can be made portable. And so everything we hear comes from the perspective of Phoebe Fox's titular character as she walks around her East Berlin flat.

Theatre review: The Writer

“I’m not sure what that was but I liked it.” That seemed to be the general impression I got from people on Twitter who’d been to see Ella Hickson’s The Writer in previews, and it’s a fair response to a metatextual headfuck of a play that challenges audiences on at least two levels: First by confronting the ongoing discussion around the status of women in the world, and as creatives in theatre in particular, and then by playing with format – but then this structural experiment also folds back into the gender discussion, providing a further looping nature to the way the play works. It plays out in five distinct acts, starting with a confrontation: A young woman (Lara Rossi) goes back into the theatre after a show to collect the bag she’s forgotten, and bumps into the play’s director (Samuel West,) who asks her what she thought.

Theatre review: A Midsummer Night's Dream(Young Vic)

My first two Shakespeare productions of the year fell on consecutive nights, and while both are comedies they couldn't present more of a contrast, even before I got to their respective theatres: Where I'd been looking forward to Twelfth Night, last year saw A Midsummer Night's Dream even more overexposed than usual, so I was approaching it with some trepidation. Added to that was the publicity promising a particularly dark approach to the play, a cliché that can usually be taken as meaning "we failed to actually make it funny," and in any case the nightmare flipside of the Dream is frequently-explored territory. In the runup to a royal wedding Hermia (Jemima Rooper) and Lysander (John Dagleish,) whose love is forbidden, escape the threat of death by fleeing to the forest. They're pursued by Demetrius (Oliver Alvin-Wilson,) in love with Hermia, and Helena (Anna Madeley,) in love with Demetrius.

Re-review: A View From The Bridge

You can read my original review here, of the production that eventually made it to #2 in my best shows of 2014 - a result only unusual in that most other blogs and reviews put Ivo van Hove's production of A View From The Bridge at #1. The original cast from the Young Vic's production has come along for the West End transfer to Wyndhams, led by Mark Strong as Eddie Carbone, the Brooklyn longshoreman whose tragedy is that he never recognises his own attraction to his niece Katie (Phoebe Fox,) even as it makes him bring his life crashing down around him. The production originally played in thrust, something Jan Versweyveld's design attempts to replicate by putting two banks of seating on stage, either side of the enclosed performance area; it's a successful recreation of the design, and even from a seat much further away than last time, I didn't feel the experience was lessened - after all, the effect was always one of making us distant, helpless observers of the inevitable tragedy.

Theatre review: A View From The Bridge

Arthur Miller imagined commuters using the Brooklyn Bridge and barely registering, let alone caring, that there were people living in the neighbourhoods around it. Hence the title of A View From The Bridge, in which Miller imagines the stuff of classical tragedy taking place in the cramped apartments of Red Hook. A mostly Italian-American neighbourhood, it will sometimes see families putting up illegal immigrants from Italy, fleeing desperate poverty and glad to find work on the docks, hoping nobody rats them out to Immigration. Eddie Carbone (Mark Strong) has just put up such a pair of his wife's relatives, brothers from Sicily. Marco (Emun Elliot) is a married man sending money back to his wife and children and hoping to return to them when he's made enough; but Rodolpho (Luke Norris) is single, entranced by the bright lights of America and determined to make his life there.