The Rest of September

I took the opportunity of a slow start to business post holiday season to catch a lot more culture than just theatre this month and here’s a summary.
The Art highlight was Seizure. Artist Roger Hiorns sealed up a disused ground floor flat, drilled a hole in the ceiling, filled it with a copper sulphate solution [...]

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A Slight Ache / Landscape

This was another of my rules broken – No More Pinter!; I simply can’t resist seeing two of my favourite actors – Simon Russell Beale and Clare Higgins – together for just the 2nd (?) time.
Landscape is the better of the two, though I’m not sure I understand what it’s about. A Slight Ache was third [...]

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Round & Round the Garden (The Norman Conquests)

This is the third of a trilogy of plays which take place in different part of the same house / garden on the same weekend with the same characters. In this one you get the 1st, 5th, 7th and last of 12 scenes; if you see the others you will be filling in the gaps. [...]

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Ivanov

I broke my ‘No More Chekhov’ rule as I’m a fan of most of the cast – Kenneth Branagh, Kevin McAnally, Malcolm Sinclair, Andrea Risborough & Lorcan Cranich amongst them – and the production team are virtually heroes !
I still don’t think it’s a good play – it moves from pathos to farce to melodrama [...]

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Small Craft Warnings

There are three very good reasons to head to north London to the Arcola Theatre to see this.
Firstly, it’s a rare sighting of a fascinating late Tennessee Williams play – not a great play, the usual collection of dysfunctional folk, but an interesting one.
Secondly, the return of Bill Bryden – one of the greats, in [...]

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Kicking a Dead Horse

For a Sam Shepherd fan, this is a huge disappointment.
It’s a very slight play – a monologue, in fact – which is too obtuse for its own good and just dull, dull, dull. Stephen Rea over-acts mercilessly.
This isn’t a patch on his great plays – or even last year’s pair of new ones.

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Helium

You’re greeted in The Pit Theatre foyer by chirpy boiler-suited stewards who issue instructions and a party invitation. When your allotted time comes, you are escorted to the first of a series of 5 boxes which you enter alone to be told part of a story – three with live actors and two with video [...]

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Six Characters in Search of an Author

I’ve always loved this early 20th century Pirandello play and I love the work of the co-adapter / director of this revival, so I was possibly over-excited at the outset.
How much of my disappointment at the interval was due to Ian MacDairmid’s under-cast and under-prepared understudy I don’t know – it was certainly clunky and [...]

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Under the Blue Sky

I’m a bit puzzled why someone thought that these three short plays about the personal lives of six teachers in the 90’s belonged in the West End in 2008.
The first two are OK, but its only the third that fully satisfies. On an empty stage, this is entirely due to the performances of Francesca Annis and Nigel [...]

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The Merry Wives of Windsor

This is the perfect play for Shakespeare’s Globe (in the same way that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the perfect play for the Open Air Theatre) and at last they stage it.
Christopher Luscombe’s production extracts every laugh possible – and much more. An elevated pathway curves from stage right to stage left through the auditorium, with a small stage [...]

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