What does Willy Loman sell? It’s one of the great unanswered mysteries of American theatre. 38 years the man trudges around New England, hawking the Wagner Company’s whatevers to stores without number, but what does he have in his valises? Who knows – it’s the sale, not the sold, that counts. Whatever they contain, the cases are real enough. We see them early on in the heavy-hearted revival of … [Read more...]
Propwatch: the pencils in Fun Home
The urge to rewrite the past is irresistible. To make yourself more cool, your family more content, to turn grim endings into happy ones. Fun Home (at London’s Young Vic), the engrossingly imaginative musical based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, writes, draws and redraws the author’s past. Early on, it announces its two defining plot questions: how did Alison come out? Why did her father kill … [Read more...]
Propwatch: the book in The Inheritance
A companionable slump of young men sits on the floor and frown over notebooks and laptops. They squirm to tell their story, but they’re struggling. One clutches a cherished volume – Howards End by EM Forster. Speaking in the third person, he announces, ‘he opens his favourite novel, hoping to find inspiration in its first familiar sentence.’ That sentence, which we’ll hear more than once in The … [Read more...]
Funny or die
What makes a comedy? Perspective. Ask Shakespeare’s Malvolia, Titania, or Andrew Aguecheek if they’re living in a comedy and they’ll gaze at you with tear-stained incredulity. Publicly shamed, sexually humiliated, drugged and tricked into – oh yes – public sex with a donkey. Oh, how they laugh. Whether we laugh – or whether we’re encouraged to do so – depends on the production. Perhaps we … [Read more...]
He got game
Who is Mike Bartlett? Is the writer of sawn-off theatrical shooters like Cock and Bull actually the author of the decade-straddling Earthquakes in London and Love Love Love, let alone the teasing pageant King Charles III? Will the real Bartletts stand up? Bartlett’s two most recent plays suggest the borders of his territory. Bull (premiered at the Sheffield Crucible Studio and transferred to … [Read more...]
On the brink
Katie Mitchell directs The Cherry Orchard It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there. I haven’t seen Katie Mitchell’s polarising 2071 at London’s Royal Court – an animated TED warning about falling off the climate change cliff – but the honed steel of the director’s Cherry Orchard at the Young Vic makes a similar argument with baleful panache. Snowclouds of cherry blossom, a backdrop shimmer … [Read more...]