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Adapting William Hogarth’s coruscating vision of a vice-filled London is an attractive proposition. Substitute crack for gin, and his depiction of broken families and corrupt politicians could be ripped from today’s headlines. But Adam Brace and Sebastian Armesto’s interpretation for the stage of ‘The Four Stages of Cruelty’ reveals that successfully capturing the tone of […]
May 30, 2011
From August to November 2011, Giant Olive Theatre Company will be celebrating women playwrights, performers, directors and designers as part of the Gaea Theatre Festival at the Lion & Unicorn Theatre. The Festival’s dynamic and innovative programme also re-launches the Kentish Town venue as a major player on the London independent theatre scene, following its closure […]
May 26, 2011
Since its publication in 1954, Lord of the Flies has lost some of its shock value. At a time when our headlines are filled with stories about teenage gangs and knife-crime, its tale of British schoolchildren who descend into savagery comes across as prescient but unhappily commonplace. And in a post-9/11 world of hooded, humiliated prisoners and […]
May 25, 2011
On 15 September 2003, Baha Mousa, an Iraqi civilian, died while in the custody of the British army in Basra. The beatings he received were so severe that they resulted in 93 different injuries. New play Public Interest, written by Drew Ballantyne and directed by Kamaal Hussain, is inspired by the British government’s inquiry into […]
May 20, 2011
Aung San Suu Kyi, guest director of this year’s Brighton Festival, has been such a potent absent-presence in the public imagination that it’s almost jarring at the start of The Lady of Burma to find her given voice. But thanks to the beautiful concision of Richard Shannon’s writing, Owen Lewis’s careful direction and a performance of quiet […]
May 19, 2011
Monday 31 May will see the London premiere of American playwright Neil Simon’s celebrated comedy, Rumours, at the Hen and Chickens Theatre, Islington. Directed by Rob Watt, Rumours (first performed in 1984) is a heady concoction of farce and social comment that looks at the lengths to which high-profile people will go to conceal the […]
May 18, 2011
The lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are surely among the most irritating characters in theatre. Self-important and humourless, they’re a cringe-worthy reminder that love’s young dream really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Midsummer, written and directed by David Greig with music by Gordon McIntyre, borrows a name, Helena, and the solstice setting from Shakespeare’s comedy but […]
May 6, 2011
There’s an exquisite cruelty to Tennessee Williams’s work; a lacerating nostalgia for a seamy and corrupted South that pities no one. The rarely-performed Kingdom of Earth, which condenses this sneering despair into a claustrophobic three-hander, offers as little respite to the audience as the pile of earth on stage does to the characters who scrabble about […]
May 5, 2011
From this Saturday, to mark the start of the three-week Brighton Festival 2011, Brighton Town Hall will play host to The New World Order, Harold Pinter’s protest against political suppression and the cruel and silencing voice of torture. Audiences will move from one room to another, including the building’s disused Victorian police cells, experiencing at close quarters the terror […]
May 4, 2011
Between Tuesday 24 May and Saturday 4 June, Greenwich Theatre will be showcasing the work of a number of very different companies and performers as part of its inaugural Emerging Artists season. Little Soldier will be reviving their first production, Pakita (following a successful run at the Hampstead-based New End Theatre last year) and Gomito […]
May 31, 2011
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