I can’t remember how I missed the Pulitzer-winning Ruined when it played in London in 2010. It was at a favourite theatre (the Almeida) and starred favourite actors (Jenny Jules, Lucian Msamati). Maybe I was busy, or distracted. Maybe I didn’t feel great urgency simply because Lynn Nottage’s 2008 play sounded too much like an adaptation of Mother Courage, taking Brecht’s dogged anti-heroine from … [Read more...]
12 Plays of Xmas: 2 Birth by TW Robertson
What does reality look like on stage? I’ll tell you what it doesn’t usually look like: a play that sets the finale in ivy-covered ruins on an aristocratic estate. Or a plot of exemplary neatness in which two pairs of brothers and sisters each fall in love with their opposite (heterosexual) number and temporarily repair the rents in the Victorian class system. I chose one of TW Robertson’s … [Read more...]
12 Plays of Xmas: 1 Owners by Caryl Churchill
Caryl Churchill is the presiding playwright of our era. At 78, every play she writes is an event – not because of their rarity, or a forelock-tugging spirit of sentimentality, but because each text explains our time to us, shows us the paths we are taking. She ended 2015 with Here We Go, her devastating shard about death and old age; she began 2016 with Escaped Alone, … [Read more...]
Propwatch: the whisky glasses in The Red Barn and No Man’s Land
The past is another country: they drink things differently there. After the gin-marinated 1950s of John Osborne’s The Entertainer, this week I hit the whisky: in the 1960s Connecticut of The Red Barn and then with the 1970s Hampstead topers in Pinter’s No Man’s Land. Gin, in Osborne’s play, is predominantly a woman’s tipple: mother’s ruin, and the ruin of Archie’s maudlin wife Phoebe, loosening … [Read more...]
Madhouse/playhouse
When the great Victorian actor Ellen Terry was preparing to play Ophelia, she visited a London asylum to observe young women who might unlock the character. However, the madwomen were, she wrote, useless for research: ‘too theatrical.’ The interplay between playhouse and madhouse is a theme running unobtrusively through much of Bedlam, a fascinating exhibition at the invaluable Wellcome … [Read more...]
We’ll have a real good time
I rarely meet a revival I don’t like. Classic plays are good for thinking: they re-reveal themselves in each new production, and choices in text and staging function as a conversation between a past and present moment – whether sympathetic discussion or knockdown argument. And then comes Rob Ashford’s benighted retread of John Osborne’s The Entertainer, which doesn’t so much converse with the … [Read more...]
Queering the canon – the new normal?
In John Tiffany’s absorbing production of The Glass Menagerie (seen in New York in 2013, now playing at the Edinburgh International Festival), isolation is a defining note. The Wingfield family’s St Louis apartment is lapped by inky water, so that the rooms appear like islands. They’re marooned. The Wingfields are feely – so much feely – but rarely touchy. Cherry Jones’ mother … [Read more...]
The world is broken. Smile!
Tales from Edinburgh 1 What do you do when the world is broken? You can do worse than laugh. My usual taste is for dystopia, plays for endtimes that will sob you to sleep. I don’t go to the theatre to enjoy myself, thankyouverymuch, I get enough of that at home. And yet, a brief scurry through the Edinburgh Fringe unexpectedly skewed towards the bright – raucous, ramshackle theatre which took … [Read more...]
Propwatch: Richard III’s spine
When archaeologists excavating a Leicestershire car park in 2013 uncovered a battle-scarred skeleton, the emergence of its severely curved spine was the first strong indication that these were the remains of Richard III: England’s most notorious monarch, Shakespeare’s irredeemable villain. Further research and DNA testing supported the archaeologists’ theory: hitting a nerve at the juncture of … [Read more...]
Stainspotting
It’s the pale grey sweaters that are so creepy. Thin, tight, high necked, they cling to the performers’ bodies. They’re nubbled by nipple and you can practically count the ribs. And, within minutes of the two performers launching into the rancid domestic intensities and dance-lunge routines of I Heart Catherine Pistachio, a dark seep of sweat becomes visible. Rockpools under the armpits, rivulets … [Read more...]