Kate Maltby writes about the intersection of culture, politics and history. She is a theatre critic for The Times and is conducting academic research on the intellectual life of Elizabeth I.
Kate Maltby’s essay on artists’ responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11th will appear here in two halves. This is the first. There’s a moment in Rupert Goold’s latest production, Decade, in which a gaunt widow (Charlotte Randle) stares up and into the empty space just left of where the North Tower used to
As our television screens luxuriate again with images of Downton Abbey, one of its cast members is starring in an altogether grittier production in the heart of West London. Last time we saw Kevin Doyle, he was pleading a lung condition to escape being sent to the Battle of the Somme. Here he starts off
The Tempest is back in town, and with a star like Ralph Fiennes in the lead, it’s unlikely that Trevor Nunn’s new production will need much help from the critics to get bums on seats. But although Fiennes brings a moving dignity to Shakespeare’s tale of a usurped duke plotting a magical revenge, he’s not
Despite the early 1930s chintz curtains, there is something morbidly contemporary about Somerset Maugham’s drawing room melodrama, For Services Rendered, recently produced at the Union Theatre. Or as the affluent older generation noted, ‘The nation can’t afford itself the luxury of keeping an army of officers it has no use for… Times are difficult… Today’s
It’s a slightly surreal time to be a theatre-goer in London. Two of the most exciting productions running at the moment both trace descents into the more disconcerting reaches of human fantasy. But, while Richard Jones’s production of The Government Inspector at the Young Vic turns Gogol’s political satire into the blithest of comic capers,
The Spectator hosted a debate at the Royal Geographic Society yesterday evening with a rather meaty motion: “Secularism is a greater threat to Christianity than Islam”. We have two reviews of the occasion. The first, by Kate Maltby, is below. Lloyd Evans’ can be found here. Last night’s Spectator debate on the motion “Secularism is
The text that codified the old legend of the learned man who sells his soul to the devil, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is one of the most influential plays in English history. It’s also one of the worst, from the point of view of the director. Scenes of intense religious struggle are intercut with the
Something is rotten in the state of Württemberg. Well, not quite Württemberg, because the young Frederich Schiller didn’t quite dare to express directly his criticisms of his first patron, Karl Eugen, Duke of Württemberg. Instead, he set this searing attack on whoring, machinating despots in an unnamed, ‘fictional’ German principality. The result is a drama
Theatre, like all the best addictions, is a habit for life. Theatre, like all the best addictions, is a habit for life. The sad facts of class and social immobility mean that that you’re far more likely to become a regular theatregoer as an adult if you were taken to the theatre often as a child,
Like most Shakespeare comedies, Much Ado About Nothing is often performed as a garden party fantasy of Merrie England – so it’s a treat to see two major productions both committed to restoring the Mediterranean flavour of this hot-blooded piece, which Shakespeare actually set not in Stratford, but Sicily. At the Globe, Jeremy Herrin strews the stage
Deborah Warner’s latest production tries so hard to be outrageous, one almost wants to fake shock out of pity. When The School for Scandal first opened in 1777, it was lauded for its witty dissection of a shallow society obsessed with rumour and status, what William Hazlitt called ‘the habitual depravity of human nature’. Layer on a
There’s a moment in Moonlight, Harold Pinter’s last full-length play, when Andy, a petty patriarch on a drab deathbed, accuses his wife of monopolising the love of his estranged sons. ‘They always loved their loving mother’, he rails, Lear-like. ‘They helped her with the washing-up!’ Uttered with poisonous invective here by David Bradley, it’s a
No one can accurately imagine Hell. In Terminus, a magical paean to the art of storytelling, playwright Mark O’Rowe wisely does not try. No one can accurately imagine Hell. In Terminus, a magical paean to the art of storytelling, playwright Mark O’Rowe wisely does not try. The one soul in his universe who does manage
Rarely has a production of The Tempest been as bleak, powerful and urgent as this. The drama is often billed as Shakespeare’s last play, a retiree’s lyrical contemplation of the need for redemption and reconciliation in the later ages of man. The more we learn about Shakespeare’s later career as a collaborator with John Fletcher,
Neil LaBute is hard to like but easy to admire. So goes conventional wisdom on the subject of one of America’s most verbally violent playwrights. It’s a shame, therefore, that in this new tale of Hansel and Gretel grown up and gone wrong, there’s still plenty to discomfort but little to impress. Fortunately, Hollywood stars
We theatre hacks are running out of superlatives to describe the current flowering of Terrence Rattigan revivals around the centenary of the writer’s birth. Notorious in his own day for his ability to dissect the morality of the midcentury Establishment, Rattigan follows in the grand tradition of Wilde and Coward in crafting witty, sexually ambiguous
A new opera has breezed through London’s Barbican Centre. It’s a tale of arduous quests, initiation and male friendship, lyrical in its romantic sweetness, and vaguely reminiscent of the later Mozart. But Mozart’s The Magic Flute it most certainly is not. It is always courageous to take on the opera purists, but it is not
It sometimes feels as if there has never been as much despair over the state of our education system as there is today. Despite the capacity of the Royal Wedding to awaken our heaviest-breathing collective fantasies of a return to serfdom, as we all excitedly queue up to shake the hand and curtsey to a
Few living artists compare to Robert LePage when it comes to balancing sparkling, sizzling, soul-boggling technical virtuosity with profound emotional punch. The actor-director’s productions are usually heartbreaking multi-media installations that play with the isolation at the heart of human life. As Ian Shuttleworth put it back in 1991, ‘see Robert LePage and die’. LePage hasn’t
Scramble the last RAF jets, re-commission Concorde, or do whatever else it takes you to get down at supersonic speed to the box office of West London’s Finborough Theatre.Today, the tiny theatre announced that two more matinees have been added to the blink-and-you’ll-miss it run of Emlyn William’s forgotten 1950s gem, Accolade. The production started