Theatre review: The Weir

Before nabbing that big franchise cash with The Hunger Games Conor McPherson rounds out his big year of paying the bills by directing his own plays with a revival of The Weir, the 1997 play that made both his name as a playwright, and his reputation as someone who should just write an unambiguous ghost story and get it the hell out of his system. In a rural corner of Ireland, most of whose community are struggling, Brendan (Owen McDonnell) runs the makeshift local pub that has Guinness on tap but only if the pump's working (it's not,) requires him to dig out old Christmas bottles if someone orders a wine, and only has room for a handful of customers but is unlikely to ever need more (except in the summer when the German tourists, who might actually be Norwegian, descend on the area.)

Theatre review: The Brightening Air

Playwright and director Conor McPherson recently received a massive tax bill - at least that's the most obvious explanation for the frantic flurry of activity he's got planned for this year, when he'll be writing new shows, directing some of his old ones and, to start with, doing both: His new play The Brightening Air gets its debut production at the Old Vic, with the playwright himself directing and, to be honest, not doing much to dissuade me from my general rule of thumb that this is A Bad Idea. With nods to Chekhov that are acknowledged when one character jokingly refers to another by a Russian patronymic, the play sees a family reunite a few times at a remote family home - in this case a dilapidated farmhouse in Ireland. Middle child Stephen (Brian Gleeson) lives there with his Nonspecifically Neurodivergent little sister Billie (Rosie Sheehy,) who finds as much comfort in the familiar place as she does in discussing her wide range of fixations.

Theatre review: Oedipus (Old Vic)

Oedipus cements his place as London's favourite motherfucker by returning with a new face mere weeks after he finished appearing in the guise of Mark Strong, while the Old Vic continues to pair Indira Varma with Bond villains: She plays Jocasta in Ella Hickson's new version of Oedipus, opposite Rami Malek as the titular king. A couple of decades earlier, the Corinthian prince arrived in Thebes and solved the riddle of the Sphinx that had been tormenting its people. The hero of the hour, he married the newly-widowed queen Jocasta, becoming king of the city and ruling successfully while raising a young family. But now a drought has brought misery back to the citizens and, supported by his queen, he proposes an extreme solution: Abandon the ravaged land completely, and move the entire city to a place that can actually support them.

Theatre review: The Importance of Being Earnest

Oscar Wilde's famous comedy about an imaginary friend who seems to have a busier social life than any of the "real" characters is one I do think is very funny, but it's produced so often and the aphorisms are so famous that it's hard to be surprised by it. So I need a good excuse to see any particular production. Max Webster's new revival of The Importance of Being Earnest has a big selling point in that it's always a big deal when the current Doctor takes to the stage, but what sold it for me was that Ncuti Gatwa was just part of a cast heavy on openly LGBTQ+ stars. The rather dubious "fact" that keeps getting rolled out for this play's title is that "Earnest" was a private Victorian code for gay people to identify each other, like an early version of Polari. The fact that I've never seen this referenced in any other context makes me suspect the only real pun in the title is the one that's right there in the last line of the play, but I did think we might be in for a version that focuses on the campness of the characters, and the metaphor in their double lives.

Theatre review: Hello Dolly!

Recently-upgraded Dame Imelda Staunton finally gets to take the title role in Jerry Herman (music & lyrics) and Michael Stewart's (book) Hello Dolly Exclamation Mark: Dominic Cooke's production is another holdover from 2020, delayed even further by the leading lady's prior commitment to try and elicit sympathy for the Queen having to give up her favourite yacht. In an unusually widow-heavy Broadway classic, Dolly Levi has dealt with the loss of her husband by throwing herself into matchmaking. But after several years she's decided she's finally ready to find a new match for herself - except the man she's decided on has already engaged her services to find him someone else. Scrooge-like Yonkers shopkeeper Horace Vandergelder (Andy Nyman) is the half-a-millionnaire she'd originally matched with New York milliner Irene Molloy (Jenna Russell.)

Theatre review: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

I've not really enjoyed Complicité's work much so their latest, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, was an easy one to skip; until Kathryn Hunter was announced as the lead, making it a much more exciting proposition. Unfortunately Hunter has been taken ill, with Amanda Hadingue taking over the lead role of Janina for tonight's performance, which leaves me back where I started, with a Complicité show and no real selling point. And as it turns out, Simon McBurney and the company's adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk's eco-thriller is almost entirely narrated by its leading lady, so while Hadingue delivers a strong and likeable performance, having her perform the three-hour show with three teleprompters feeding her her lines is no substitute for Hunter's unique talents.

Theatre review: A Doll's House, Part 2

Previously, in A Doll's House...

In an unpredictable year for theatregoing the Donald and Margot Warehouse has proven the most disaster-prone for me personally: We're now up to two shows I had to reschedule because the company had Covid; one I had to miss entirely because I had Covid; and one that had Kit Harington in it. Now, a couple of weeks after I'd initially planned to, I'm getting to see a show that follows a major pre-lockdown trend of plays that rewrote, reinvented or deconstructed Ibsen's proto-feminist classic A Doll's House, a play that famously caused an international scandal when its heroine, Nora, walked out of the door at the end. The title of Lucas Hnath's take on the story, A Doll's House, Part 2, gives away that his approach is to write a sequel: 15 years after she dealt with an unhappy marriage by walking out on her husband and children, Nora Helmer is back.

Theatre review: Paradise

Kae Tempest's Paradise was originally due to run in the Olivier last summer, which makes it the latest rescheduled show to have me wondering how much rewriting or reimagining it had over lockdown - one of its themes is of people who've been isolated for some time, baulking at the thought of returning to the outside world. Then again this new version of Sophocles' Philoctetes is so full of themes and musings that it would no doubt strike some topical notes at any time. Certainly in light of the last few days' news, it finds an instant relevance in the setting for Ian Rickson's production - a dusty Mediterranean or Middle Eastern refugee camp, where the chorus of women (Claire-Louise Cordwell, ESKA, Amie Francis, Sutara Gayle, Jennifer Joseph, Sarah Lam, Penny Layden, Kayla Meikle and Naomi Wirthner) talk about wars that, after decades of fighting and death, only ever go round in circles when they look like they're about to be resolved.

Theatre review: Walden

My first trip in over fourteen months to yer actual West End, much of which is hoping to go right back to normal in the next couple of months at full capacity. A few venues are more gradually dipping their toes back in with smaller-scale productions, playing to the socially distanced audiences allowed by current regulations. At the Pinter this takes the form of a short warm-up season, ReEmerge, courtesy of Sonia Friedman Productions and curated by Ian Rickson, who directs the first of three new plays. Amy Berryman's Walden is named after Henry David Thoreau's proto-Environmentalist book and is set entirely in a remote cabin in the woods that barely has electricity, but its genre is Sci-fi, not pastoral or slasher horror. It's some decades in the future and twin sisters, both Duchesses of Malfi, are the daughters of the NASA astronaut with the most Air Miles: Over a number of missions their late father spent a total of five years on the International Space Station.

Theatre review: Uncle Vanya

I can never quite decide which, of the plays so bleak even Chekhov didn't try to pass them off as comedies, is the most gut-wrenching: On the one hand Three Sisters spends its three hours relentlessly, unforgivingly tearing every last vestige of hope from its title characters; on the other there's Uncle Vanya, whose meditations on mediocrity and wasted lives get many a knowing, sad laugh of recognition out of its audiences. After a couple of high-profile outings for the former last year, it's the turn of the latter and Ian Rickson's production at the Pinter manages a lot more moments of dark comedy, while still packing a devastating punch. Vanya (Toby Jones) has spent his life managing the country estate that used to belong to his family, but was given away as his sister's dowry when she married a celebrated academic. The sister has long since died, and Vanya and Nana (Anna Calder-Marshall) have pretty much raised her daughter Sonya (Aimee Lou Wood) themselves.

Theatre review: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Lucy:
- Runs off with a suspicious stranger who offers her cake.
- Takes her siblings to Narnia in the full knowledge it'll put them and Mr Tumnus in danger.
- Is a PreCIOUs pRiNCEss.
Edmund:
- Runs off with a suspicious stranger who offers him Turkish Delight.
- Betrays his siblings only because he's enslaved by magic.
- Is a nasty little traitor who's probably going straight to Hell LOL.
Yes, it's one of the most famous stories of Christians living in the closet, C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe getting a new staging as the Bridge Theatre imports Sally Cookson's Leeds Playhouse production. And no, I'm not sure why I booked again to see a story I mainly grumble a lot about, except I probably quite like grumbling about it.

Theatre review: The Night of the Iguana

The latest Tennessee Williams revival features many characteristic elements from his most famous work, but also feels like a departure that hints at the more experimental phase he went into later in his career: Set in 1940 in a ramshackle, inaccessible Mexican hotel at the edge of the rainforest, The Night of the Iguana is a melodrama touching on a number of characters, but predominantly focusing on a trio of Americans: The Rev T. Lawrence Shannon (Clive Owen) is an alcoholic, not-technically-defrocked minister driven out of his church and the US for statutory rape; he makes a living as a tour guide, but his tendency to fall off the wagon every 18 months – and the ensuing meltdown – doesn’t endear him to the busloads of middle-aged women he shows around the area. He’s just had his latest lapse as the play begins, and instead of taking his tour group to the city hotel on their itinerary has brought them here, in the hopes that spending time with his friend the owner will help him.

Theatre review: Rosmersholm

Rosmersholm seems to get variously described as Ibsen’s masterpiece, or one his most obscure and difficult works. I would lean towards the latter description – it’s certainly not as frequently performed as the likes of Hedda Gabler or A Doll’s House, and although Ian Rickson’s production makes a stronger case for it than the last time I saw the play, it’s still a dense and wordy evening. Rae Smith takes advantage of having a West End stage (and even pushes it out a bit past the proscenium arch) to create the set, a huge hall in the titular house in rural Norway. The house is a character in the play inasmuch as it represents the legacy of generations of Rosmers, the family who own the adjacent mill and have been the town’s main source of work for centuries. The portraits may still look down imperiously from the walls but it’s onto a crumbling room – Smith’s set takes particular inspiration from the fact that room’s had water-damage.

Theatre review: Translations

With the high-profile flops it’s hosted over the last year the usual arguments have come up about how the Olivier’s size and shape make it hard to fit anything but the biggest epic on it, so Rae Smith’s design for Ian Rickson’s production of Translations comes along to comprehensively disprove them: Brian Friel’s play takes place almost entirely in a schoolroom, and that’s what Smith puts downstage, but she surrounds it with foggy moors that suggest the country whose future is being discussed inside it, in ways whose significance is more far-reaching than it may first appear. This is a “hedge school” – a small private school teaching basic literacy and numeracy – in 1833 County Donegal, where a weekly class teaches those of the town’s adults who want to improve their skills. For Sarah (Michelle Fox,) who is almost mute, this can be as basic as building up the confidence to say her own name.

Theatre review: Nightfall

Nicholas Hytner’s Bridge Theatre launched with the announcement of its first three shows, designed to be a showcase of the three main seating configurations the auditorium could use. Of these the third, Barney Norris’ Nightfall, stood out as an unusual choice for a new, large-scale venue: He’s been building a name for himself Off-West End but it seems a big ask for Norris to fill a 900-seat theatre for a month, especially without a headline-grabbing cast. There’s also the fact that the playwright’s previous work has all been very intimate, and I wondered how he’d handle something more epic. As it turns out that’s not really what he’s aiming for anyway: Rae Smith’s set, putting the yard of a farmhouse on the thrust stage, could happily stage a naturalistic Uncle Vanya, but unlike Chekhov’s multiple story strands there’s only four characters to follow here.

Theatre review: Macbeth (National Theatre & tour)

Remember when Anne-Marie Duff was best known as Fiona from Shameless, rather than as a harbinger of dodgy plays? Me neither.

Duff and Rory Kinnear were paired up as the Macbeths in a scene for the RSC’s 2016 Shakespeare celebration special, but it’s the National that’s brought them together again for a full production. Much has been made of the fact that this Macbeth is Rufus Norris’ first time directing Shakespeare in 25 years, and only his second ever, an admission that’s inevitably come back to haunt a production whose negative critical reaction has been hard to miss, even if you try to avoid reviews and spoilers. Coming in with low expectations can sometimes mean you’re pleasantly surprised, and I guess at least we can say that Duff hasn’t landed herself in something quite as unwatchable as Common again (Ian and I both actually came back after the interval this time.) Norris has moved the play’s setting from mediaeval Scotland to a post-apocalyptic near future where supplies are scarce and gangs in makeshift armour fight over what’s left.

Theatre review: Saint George and the Dragon

To Rory Mullarkey falls the dubious honour of giving the Olivier stage its best piece of new writing this year; a bar set so low the only challenge it could provide is in a limbo contest. Straight after I saw Albion, another play's title gives away the fact that it'll touch on English identity in the face of Brexit, as Mullarkey gives us his centuries-spanning, epic twist on Saint George and the Dragon. John Heffernan plays failed dragon-slayer George, who returns to the country of his birth only to find that one of the creatures he's been running from has taken up residence there too, turning it into a dark place in constant fear. Charles (Gawn Grainger) begs the knight to slay the beast, but it's only when he sees and instantly falls for Charles' daughter Elsa (Amaka Okafor) - who happens to be the Dragon's next meal - that he agrees to challenge him.

Theatre review: Barber Shop Chronicles

If my way home from the theatre is by bus, which includes trips back from the National, even if the show finished quite late chances are the row of black barber shops in Camberwell will still be open and doing business. Clearly there’s a cultural significance that’s built up around barber shops rather than a huge market for 10:30pm haircuts, and this is what Inua Ellams’ new comedy-drama at the Dorfman explores. Barber Shop Chronicles is made up of vignettes from barbers’ around Africa, but the central thread is set in a shop that – based on the local references the characters make – could easily be one of those in Camberwell: Three Kings Barbers was set up years ago by three friends, but only one is still working there. Emmanuel (Cyril Nri) has taken over the business after an incident between the other two we don’t hear about at first. Samuel (Fisayo Akinade) has taken over the second chair from his father, and harbours some resentment towards Emmanuel for something he believes the older man failed to do.

Theatre review: wonder.land

It's the clichés you always hear about musicals - that they're not written, they're rewritten; that every "effortless" hit has spent years in development - that come to mind during wonder.land, the National's much-maligned big winter spectacular. Perhaps going into it with low expectations helped, but it seems that under what is, undoubtedly, something of a mess, a pretty good show is struggling to get out and, given time, might well have done. As the title suggests, Moira Buffini (book and lyrics) and Damon Albarn's (music) musical takes Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland stories and transposes them to the digital age. Following her parents' breakup, Aly (Lois Chimimba) has moved to a new school where she immediately becomes a target of the resident mean girls, who bully her in real life and online.

Theatre review: The Light Princess

A lot of long-awaited projects have been finally making their way to the stage at the National this year; after the Lester/Kinnear/Hytner Othello and before the SRB/Mendes Lear, comes Tori Amos' debut as a composer of musical theatre. With Samuel Adamson she's adapted The Light Princess from a fairytale by George MacDonald. Two warring kingdoms separated by a dangerous forest, Lagobel is rich in gold but plagued by drought, a problem that, as its name suggests, Sealand doesn't have. When Princess Althea of Lagobel (Rosalie Craig) loses her mother, she deals with it by becoming unable to find anything serious again, her lightness of spirit manifesting itself literally as she starts to float. When the same thing happens to Prince Digby of Sealand (Nick Hendrix) he goes the other way and becomes a humourless warrior. When the nations' animosity finally breaks out into war, the two are pitted against each other but, of course, opposites attract.