The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Oh, what a beautiful morning! In Jo Davies’s production of Oklahoma! the audience spends the overture staring at the side of a barn. Then, as birdsong rises from the orchestra, corrugated-iron doors slide open on a dustbowl farm of the 1930s. Aunt Eller (Claire Moore) is fixing a tractor, and a wind pump spins slowly
The National has made its largest stage available to one of the nation’s smallest talents. If Brian Friel had been born in Dorset rather than in Co. Tyrone he’d have enjoyed an unremarkable career writing episodes of The Archers with the odd stint on Emmer-dale. He’s a champion witterer whose plays lack suspense, pace, depth
Tracy Letts begins his trailer-trash comedy Killer Joe with the corniest of platitudes. A runaway druggie named Chris Smith needs $6,000 to stop ‘some guys’ from killing him. He asks his dad who declares himself skint but together they plot to bump off Mrs Smith, Chris’s mum, and collect her life insurance. Interesting idea. Luckily
Regime change at the Globe. The new boss, Michelle Terry, wants a 50/50 ratio of males to females in each production. Rather eccentric. Why cast a drama to reflect the distribution of sexual organs across the general populace? Imagine hiring an orchestra to represent the ratio of citizens who can play an instrument. And didn’t
The Bridge’s big summer show is Nightfall by prize-winning newcomer Barney Norris. Widowed Jenny wants her grown-up kids, Lou and Ryan, to help her run their farm in Hampshire following their dad’s death. But Lou’s boyfriend, Pete, has been offered work abroad. That’s the only major snag in this low-wattage rustic melodrama. The back story
Describe the Night opens in Poland in 1920 where two Russian soldiers, Isaac and Nikolai, discuss truth and falsehood. Next we’re in Smolensk, 2010, where some strangers scream at each other about a hire car. Next Moscow, 1931 (or 1937 — the surtitles are illegible), where Nikolai, now a top soldier, asks Isaac, now a
Nine Night refers to a Jamaican custom that obliges bereaved families to party non-stop for more than a week following the death of a parent. When Gloria expires her relatives arrive from all parts of London and the Caribbean to indulge in a boozy blow-out. Gloria’s daughter Lorraine tussles with her businessman brother, Robert, who
Ella Hickson’s last play at the Almeida was a sketch show about oil. Her new effort uses the same episodic format ornamented with ‘meta-textual experimentation’ (i.e. plotless confusion). The central character is a brilliant young female writer who finds that all male theatre directors are boorish cynical greedy philistine racist sex pests. In Sketch One
‘Hunt the Flop’, the Royal Court’s bizarre quest for dud plays, has found a candidate for this year’s overall prize. Instructions for Correct Assembly by Thomas Eccleshare is a family satire set in the near future. Plot: suburban parents replace their missing son with a computerised cyborg which malfunctions. That’s it. Were this a pitch
Quiz by James Graham looks at the failed attempt in 2001 to swindle a million quid from an ITV game show. Jackpot winner Major Charles Ingram was thought to have been helped by strategic coughs emanating from Tecwen Whittock, a fellow contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Graham, best known for his gripping
David Haig’s play Pressure looks at the Scottish meteorologist, James Stagg, who advised Eisenhower about the weather in the week before D-Day. The play works by detaching us from our foreknowledge of events. We’re aware that the landings went off smoothly on 6 June in fine conditions. However, D-Day was originally scheduled for 5 June,
Ruthless! The Musical is a camp extravaganza about ambitious actors stranded in small-town America. Sylvia St Croix, a pushy agent, visits a super-talented 10-year-old, Tina, and persuades her to audition for Pippi Longstocking in a school play. Tina’s mother fears that stardom may spoil her little girl but Tina is finished with childhood. ‘Time to
The Plough and the Stars by Sean O’Casey looks at the Irish nationalist movement during the events of Easter 1916. The setting is a Dublin tenement where the residents exchange gossip and insults and sometimes punches. What begins as an elevated soap opera develops into a tragedy of vast and harrowing proportions. Sean Holmes’s production
Summer and Smoke by Tennessee Williams dates from the late 1940s. He hadn’t quite reached the peaks of sentimental delicacy he found in his golden period but he was getting there. As a lesser-known curiosity, the script deserves a production that explains itself openly and plainly. Rebecca Frecknall has directed a beautiful and sometimes bizarre-looking
The Best Man by Gore Vidal is set during a fictional American election in 1960. Two gifted candidates seek their party’s nomination. Secretary Russell is a chilly but experienced political hack whose marriage is a sham. Senator Cantwell, a more attractive character, is an impulsive charmer married to a blonde bombshell who adores him. The
Fanny & Alexander opens like a Chekhov comedy and turns into an Ibsen tragedy. Ingmar Bergman’s movie script, adapted by Stephen Beresford, has been directed for the stage by Max Webster. The children, Fanny and Alexander, belong to the famous Ekdahl acting dynasty who live in Bohemian chaos. Their home is full of jokes and
Frozen starts with a shrink having a panic attack. She hyperventilates into her hand-bag and then gets drunk on an aeroplane where she yells out, ‘We’re all going to die.’ She’s a bit loopy, clearly, which is how lazy playwrights make psychologists interesting. The shrink’s task is to examine Ralph, a serial murderer of children,
The Donmar’s new show, The York Realist, dates from 2001. The programme notes tell us that the playwright, Peter Gill, ‘is one of the most important and influential writers and directors of the past 30 years’. Who wrote that? Not Peter Gill, I hope. The play, directed by Robert Hastie, follows a gay affair between
It’s considered the great masterpiece of 20th-century American drama. Oh, come off it. Long Day’s Journey into Night is a waffle-festival that descends into a torture session. Who would choose to spend time with the Tyrone family? Dad is a skinflint millionaire. Mum is a wittering smack addict. They’ve produced two layabout sons. One is
Nicholas Hytner’s new show is a modern-dress Julius Caesar, heavily cut and played in the round. It runs for two hours, no interval. The action opens with the audience grouped around a central stage where a ramshackle rock gig descends into a riot. The play unfolds like an illegal rave at a warehouse. It’s bold,
The NT’s new production, John, is by a youngish American playwright, Annie Baker. We Brits tend to assume that ‘john’ is American for ‘toilet’ so perhaps lavatorial treats are in store. The setting is a provincial hotel run by a blithering old dear whose only guests are two grumbling yuppies with marriage problems. The plot
The Birthday Party is among Pinter’s earliest and strangest works. It deconstructs the conventions of a repertory thriller but doesn’t bother to reassemble them. The setting is a derelict seaside town on the south coast. Petey, a thick deckchair attendant, runs a guest-house with his ageing wife, Meg. She’s a zero-IQ cook whose signature dish
A pattern emerges. A hot American playwright, dripping with prestigious awards, is honoured in London with a transfer of their best-known work. And it turns out to be all right. Not bad. Nothing special. The latest wunderkind to wow London is Amy Herzog (five plays performed, six awards received), whose marital bust-up drama Belleville is
The Twilight Zone, an American TV show from the early 1960s, reinvented the ghost story for the age of space exploration. Director Richard Jones has collaborated with Anne Washburn to turn several TV episodes into a single play. Eight episodes in all. Way too many. The structure is designed to bamboozle us from the start.
It’s all about the rhythm. Hamilton is a musical that tells the story of America’s foundation through the medium of rap. It sounds crazy but it works because the show’s arsenal of effects is simply overwhelming. The lyrics drive the narrative, the rap gives energy to the lyrics, and the dancers double the effect by
A new play at the Bush with a catchy political title. Parliament Square introduces us to Kat, a young Scots mum, who abandons her baby girl and her devoted husband and commutes to London to kill herself. She doesn’t want to die but shrill voices in her head are urging her to turn her body
Maximum Victoriana at the Old Vic for Matthew Warchus’s A Christmas Carol. Even before we reach our seats we’re accosted by bonneted wenches handing out mince pies. Merchants in top hats roam the aisles proffering satsumas, which they call, with accurate Victorian incorrectness, ‘oranges’. The guts of the theatre have been ripped out for this
Everybody’s Talking About Jamie opened at the Sheffield Crucible in February for a standard three-week run. The show is based on a BBC documentary, Jamie: Drag Queen at 16, about a working-class lad who attended his school prom in a scarlet frock. Director Jonathan Butterell saw the potential to create a replica Billy Elliot and
The inexplicable popularity of Ivo Van Hove continues. The director’s latest visit to the fairies involves an updated version of Network, a creaky and over-rated news satire from 1976. Van Hove appears to be unconstrained by thrift or self-discipline and he fills the Lyttelton stage with expensive clobber. It’s like a hangar full of half-tested
