Stage-to-screen review: The Beast Will Rise - Gators / Zarabooshka / Chihuahua / Origami

A lot of exciting-sounding shows got cancelled or postponed for the current lockdown, but some losses hurt more than others; a new Philip Ridley play is always something to look forward to and the blurb for The Beast of Blue Yonder made it sound like a particularly crazy, epic ride. Let's hope it's not too long after Southwark Playhouse reopens that they reschedule it, but in the meantime Ridley lost no time providing an alternative. And frankly, who better to whip up something for quarantine out of nowhere than a writer who deals in the apocalyptic as his bread and butter? With The Beast of Blue Yonder's production company Tramp, director Wiebke Green, and intended cast, he's put together The Beast Will Rise, a series of 14 monologues for the actors to record in their own homes, released on a weekly basis. But I couldn't wait that long for the whole set to be available so I'm going to be catching up with it every few weeks, beginning with the first four.

Stage-to-screen review: A Midsummer Night's Dream (BBC Wales)

Russell T Davies' TV adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream first aired in 2016 as part of the BBC's commemoration of the fourth centenary of Shakespeare's death. I had planned to watch it at the time but never got round to it - that summer was one of those particularly full of competing productions of the play and I'd seen quite enough of them. Apart from that, it was clear from the opening shot of Athens as a fascist state draped in red, white and black ersatz-swastika insignia that Davies' version was going to be one of those defined entirely by the line "I wooed thee with my sword" (not necessarily a problem in itself, by this point I think I was mainly tired of people thinking they'd discovered a uniquely dark take on the play, when in fact I would say bad-guy Theseus was the standard interpretation of the 2010s.) In any case, with "Culture in Quarantine" the latest BBC strand to heavily feature Shakespeare, the film got repeated on BBC Four, giving it another month on iPlayer for me to finally catch up.

Stage-to-screen review: What the Butler Saw

A second virtual trip to Leicester, where the Curve Theatre has actually been ahead of the curve so to speak as one of the first venues to get its online alternative to live performances up and running. As with Memoirs of an Asian Football Casual the next show they've made available has a Leicester connection, as it was the birthplace of Joe Orton (I don't think he had much good to say about the place, but in fairness he was Joe Orton, he didn't have much good to say about anything.) What the Butler Saw was his final play, in which he delivers every beat of the perfect farce while breaking all the genre's unwritten rules. The setting is the Hampstead mental health clinic run by Dr Prentice (Rufus Hound) and his wife, and as the curtain rises the doctor is "interviewing" prospective secretary Geraldine (Dakota Blue Richards,) a process which involves making her strip for a medical examination with a view to sexually assaulting her.

Radio review: Elizabeth and Essex

A few words about an odd little (but in some ways huge and epic) audio drama, written by Robin Brooks as an original Radio 3 play but feeling like it has a strong theatrical connection in the sense that I can imagine Simon Russell Beale was probably going to find a way to play Elizabeth I sooner or later. Although technically in Elizabeth and Essex he's playing the writer and Bloomsbury Group member Lytton Strachey, whose writings the play is based on, and reveal him as a drama queen imagining himself as the Virgin Queen while writing his book about her relationship with the Earl of Essex. Strachey has recently become besotted with Roger (Harry Lloyd,) a much younger man who's star-struck by the writer and becomes hugely fond of him, but clearly doesn't feel anywhere near as strongly about him as the older man does, and who is gradually drawn away from Strachey as he falls for fellow Bloomsbury Group member, the economist John Maynard Keynes (Julian Harries.)

Stage-to-screen review: Twelfth Night(RSC / RST & Marquee TV)

Christopher Luscombe's Shakespeare productions tend to have a touch of the Merchant/Ivory to them, and so it is with this 2017 production of Twelfth Night, one of the few productions of the RSC's current run through the complete works that I'd missed until now, when it's just been added to Marquee TV's roster. Simon Higlett's set and costume designs are of a sumptious, solid kind a thrust stage like the RST rarely seems to need or bother with, and Nigel Hess' music is used like a movie score, much like he and Luscombe experimented with a decade earlier in their Merry Wives of Windsor for the Globe. The period movie they're making here is a Victorian one, where Shakespeare's fictional Illyrian coast becomes London and the countryside, by now comparatively easily accessible by train.

Stage-to-screen review: Flowers for Mrs Harris

My latest virtual visit to a regional theatre is to one I've been to before in person, although not for a couple of years: Chichester Festival Theatre, and Daniel Evans' production of Flowers for Mrs Harris, which he transferred there in 2018 after a run at his previous job in Sheffield. Rachel Wagstaff (book) and Richard Taylor's (music & lyrics) musical is based on a novella by American author Paul Gallico better known as Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris, which is perhaps a helpful indicator of the kind of salt-of-the-earth working-class image of a London charlady Ada Harris (Clare Burt) is. Widowed in the Second World War and childless, she has little in her life except making ends meet through the various ungrateful clients whose houses she cleans. She ploughs through stoically until one day she covers a friend's shift cleaning for a deluded minor aristocrat (Joanna Riding,) where she spots a Christian Dior dress and becomes determined to own one some day.

Stage-to-screen review: It's True, It's True, It's True - Artemisia on Trial

I think any attempt for me to see It's True, It's True, It's True live is cursed: After hearing nothing but raves for Breach Theatre's show I snuck a performance into a packed schedule when it ran at the New Diorama, only to get bronchitis and have all my theatregoing go out of the window for a few weeks. It recently spent a month available on iPlayer but I didn't watch that because I'd booked to catch its return to London for a run at the Pit; well I was due to have seen it this week, so we all know how that worked out. Now the company have put it online for another month on their YouTube channel, and let's hope finally managing to see it will break the run of bad luck. The title comes from the repeated testimony of 17th century painter Artemisia Gentileschi (Ellice Stevens) in a rape trial where she was the key witness, but it also describes the piece itself, which Stevens and director Billy Barrett have translated into vernacular modern English from the almost-complete transcripts of the 1612 trial in Rome.

Stage-to-screen review: Henry V (Barn Theatre)

Another regional theatre uploading an archive production online to fundraise while the doors are closed, and another grungy show to contrast with the slick offerings from the likes of the West End, National and RSC, this Henry V comes courtesy of the Barn Theatre in Cirencester, with Hal Chambers' production consciously using the ambiguity of Shakespeare's patriotic hero to reflect on the rise of populist, xenophobic politics in the 21st century. In a frantic opening, speeches from this play and the Henry IV ones preceding it are mixed with soundbites of frothing Brexiteers on Question Time, and the wild past of Prince Hal is referenced with real headlines about the current Prince Harry's party lifestyle. That Prince Harry has in recent years shown a more serious side, and so too does Shakespeare's Hal, now King Henry V (Aaron Sidwell), put on a much more serious face once he's running the country.

Stage-to-screen review:Memoirs of an Asian Football Casual

More online theatre is being announced all the time to fill in the gap left by the buildings being shut, with the majority of what's coming up being shows I've already seen in person and reviewed. But that mainly applies to London and Stratford-upon-Avon, and the regional theatres I don't generally get to have been releasing material as well. In return for a donation, Leicester Curve are offering a recording of their 2018 show Memoirs of an Asian Football Casual for a week - this is an archive recording that was never intended for public release, but I guess even those have moved on in quality over the years, and instead of a static shot this is a perfectly watchable recording done with multiple moving cameras. Riaz Khan's original book was a response to the resurgence of racism on the football terraces in the noughties, through the lens of him finding an identity in the eighties in the unlikely family of the much-derided gangs of violent football hooligans known as casuals.

Stage-to-screen review: An Ideal Husband

With London theatres now closed for the foreseeable future the focus has very quickly shifted to how those of us who spend far too much time there can get our regular fix from home. Streaming quickly jumped in to take the strain and there should be plenty of culture available soon with the BBC planning a whole online festival, and a number of individual recordings starting to show up. In the meantime there's also a few existing platforms available; Marquee TV is one I only heard of recently, and which seems to lean heavily on the side of opera and dance, so its theatre offerings consist almost entirely of shows I've already seen. Their library does include almost all of Classic Spring's Oscar Wilde season from 2017-18 at the Vaudeville, including one installment I skipped at the time, An Ideal Husband. Jonathan Church directs a Wilde play with a more overtly political slant than most.

Theatre review: The Mikvah Project

The Mikvah Project feels a bit of an unlikely play to get a major revival within a few years of its premiere, when I was interested but not entirely convinced by it. But I've got a certain reputation to live down to as far as plays with extensive male nudity go and besides, I wanted to know if a different perspective would make it feel a bit more focused than it seemed last time. And Georgia Green's production - her professional debut, following its appearance last year as part of an Orange Tree new directors' showcase - does go some way towards filling in some gaps. The Mikvah is a Jewish ritual bath, more commonly used by women, but there are ones available for men as well, like the pair in Josh Azouz' play who meet there every Friday for particular reasons of their own. 35-year-old Avi (Alex Waldmann) goes to pray for the child he and his wife are trying to conceive (or as he puts it, he's praying to his balls.)

Theatre review: Love, Love, Love

I imagine there's a hiatus coming up in my theatregoing and reviewing, thanks to a certain global situation targeting the Baby Boomers, but in the meantime here's Mike Bartlett's own dig at that generation. After the Brexit result came in I predicted Love, Love, Love would be a play that kept coming back over the years, and here it is as Rachel O'Riordan's second directing gig in her inaugural Lyric Hammersmith season. It follows Sandra (Rachael Stirling) and Kenneth (Nicholas Burns) from first meeting to happy ending - but every chapter in their story has collateral damage they've become uncannily adept at ignoring. The first of these is Kenneth's brother Henry (Patrick Knowles,) whom Sandra has just started dating at the beginning of the play; older by only four years he appears to be from an entirely different generation.

Theatre review: Women Beware Women

Seeing two Shakespeare productions in a row isn't that unusual, especially once the summer season kicks off; two Middletons (Thomas, not Kate and Pippa) is rarer. Women Beware Women concludes the current Swanamaker season in a production by Amy Hodge that's fully aware of the potential for the play to chime with #MeToo, and gives Joanna Scotcher's design a 1980s aesthetic that nods at a time a lot of current cases date back to. The Florentine court becomes a gilded Art Deco hotel where Leantio (Paul Adeyefa) brings his new wife Bianca (Thalissa Teixeira,) only to immediately demand she be hidden away from public view because their elopement is still a dangerous secret. But on a public walkabout the Duke (Simon Kunz) spots Bianca at her window, and decides he must have her. Enter Livia (Tara Fitzgerald,) who's got a plan to get the Duke access to her in return for her own advancement.

Theatre review: The Revenger's Tragedy(La tragedia del vendicatore)

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Theatre review: La Cage aux Folles [The Play]

I've had misjudged or unlikely musical adaptations on the brain recently, and not just because of the obvious suspect - announcements in the last couple of weeks have suggested that Joe diPietro alone is going to be flinging a hell of a lot of insanity at stages both sides of the Atlantic over the next few months. But then there's the other extreme, where a musical adaptation has worked so well it's overshadowed the original: The Jerry Herman / Harvey Fierstein musical is what comes to mind when you hear La Cage aux Folles, to the extent that Park Theatre have felt it best to append [The Play] to the title, to clarify that Simon Callow's new version is based on Jean Poiret's original French farce. Any songs that show up are going to be lip-synced because the title refers to a drag club run by Georges (Michael Matus) in early 1970s St Tropez.

Theatre review: Trainers, Or The Brutal Unpleasant Atmosphere Of This Most Disagreeable Season(A Theatrical Essay)

Part of the Gate Theatre's USP is that every Artistic Director is allowed free rein on how they interpret the venue's remit as an international theatre. And while I've yet to see a cast get naked and throw food at each other, there's no doubting that Ellen McDougall's tenure is all about channeling the spirit of European avant-garde theatre. It's apparent again in Hester Chillingworth's staging of American writer Sylvan Oswald's Trainers, Or The Brutal Unpleasant Atmosphere Of This Most Disagreeable Season (A Theatrical Essay), whose cast of two greet the audience in a white room filled with random objects which will come to represent people and things in the story. Such story as there is, anyway - as the final part of the title says, this is intended to be an essay rather than a traditional play, and part of the attraction of an essay is that it's a medium without a defined form or structure.

Theatre review: A Number

A Number premiered in 2002, a few years after the Dolly the Sheep story and with the possibility and ethics of human cloning still a subject of much discussion. The amount of times it’s been revived since is a testament to the fact that Caryl Churchill created something out of that story that far transcends topical controversy, finding an enduring human side that Polly Findlay’s production at the Bridge explicitly focuses on. This is the third production of the play I’ve seen, and the first not to cast a real-life father and son, although Roger Allam and Colin Morgan have worked together in ersatz father/son roles before. And despite the genetic material there’s something ersatz about the father/son relationships they play out in A Number as well – I told the people I went to the show with to go in knowing as little about it as possible, and would recommend that to anyone planning on seeing it; in which case save this review until after you’ve been as well, as it’s a hard play to write about without major spoilers.

Theatre review: Pretty Woman

It's the film that made a generation of little girls write "crack whore" in their "what I want to be when I grow up" essays, so it was only a matter of time before Pretty Woman got turned into a musical. The movie's enduring popularity means that there was always going to be a ready-made audience for it, so the question was going to be whether the creatives would put in much effort, or just figure that the cash will roll in whatever the reviews say. One positive sign is that instead of the unholy union of jukebox musical and film adaptation (neither of which are necessarily a problem on their own, but together...) we've got original songs by, of all people, Bryan Adams and his long-time songwriting partner Jim Vallance. On the other hand neither of them had written for musical theatre before, which has a tendency to go one of two ways.

Theatre review: Be More Chill

Is any other country's art as disproportionately about High School as America's? You have to believe that all the angsty teens we've seen on stage and screen for decades aren't exaggerating, and it's an experience that really does scar everyone for life if so many people are willing to spend the rest of their lives telling stories about it. The dog-eats-dog race to be popular gets a sci-fi twist in Joe Iconis (music and lyrics) and Joe Tracz' (book) Be More Chill, which felt to me like an endearing mashup of Loserville and Little Shop of Horrors. Alarmingly skinny video game geek Jeremy (Scott Folan) seems happy enough with his status as a loser who'll come into his own when he gets to college, but when the bullying gets too much for him and even Christine (Miracle Chance,) the oddball girl he likes, falls for a jock (Miles Paloma,) Jeremy becomes desperate enough to try anything to become more popular.

Theatre review: & Juliet

Given the amount of terrible shows I've seen over the years when the signs really should have been there, regular readers of this blog might both have surmised that FOMO has a certain amount of influence on what theatre I book. So an expensive West End show that, despite a cast and creatives I like, I don't feel compelled to spend money on, comes as a bit of a relief. The idea of a jukebox musical of the songs of Max Martin - songwriter for a seemingly endless list of artists that includes the Backstreet Boys, Katy Perry, Broccoli Spears, P!nk and Bon Jovi - built around an alternate ending for Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet seemed perfectly skippable when it premiered last year. Except, proving that my instincts can be an absolute disaster in what I avoid as well as what I see, David West Read's & Juliet got rave reviews both from offical critics and, more importantly, theatre Twitter, and started to sound very much like my kind of thing.