I’ve just seen the trailer for La La Land (again), and now I’d like some of that at the theatre, please. Colourful, romantic, witty, blithe, with just enough melancholy to cut the sugar icing. Is that too much to ask? As previously discussed, it is if you judge by this series of posts. So I was charmed charmed charmed to find Thieves Carnival (Le Bal des voleurs, 1932) by Jean Anouilh in this … [Read more...]

  ‘Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.’ WH Auden speaks true – one of the pleasures of this little project has been sitting down with the past. Sometimes, however, it’s like sharing a meal, some dishes of which taste familiar, while others are so completely baffling you don’t know whether they’re a starter, a pudding or a peculiar kind of medicine. Such is The Town … [Read more...]

A friend points out that this hasn’t been the cheeriest of series. Few hugs and precious few puppies. This may say something about me, or my bookshelves. And prospects for joviality don’t seem much brighter with today’s choice, despite its title. Ecstasy (1979) by playwright turned (mostly) filmmaker Mike Leigh. A long night in a cramped bedsit with a heroine who is more despairing than … [Read more...]

I’ve seen a lot of Chekhov. I mean, a lot. Last year, I marvelled at Uncle Vanya at the Almeida and spent a day with the National Theatre’s Young Chekhov trilogy. I can almost sing along with the Three Sisters and Cherry Orchard, even bits of Ivanov. The characters’ disconsolate eccentricity is a wardrobe I recognise; their world on the shift feels familiar. So it’s good to remember that … [Read more...]

For most of these 12 Plays of Xmas, I can imagine how they might be staged, what tone the cast and production team might hope to achieve. But Alkestis… Alkestis is just weird. Euripides’ wrigglesome play was, according to translator Anne Carson, programmed after three tragedies in the Athenian festival of 438BC. ‘It is not a satyr play,’ she says, ‘but neither is it clearly a tragedy or a … [Read more...]

It’s pantomime season, which is as good a time as any to pay tribute to the fine British traditions of smutty humour, sexual confusion, homosexual panic and coming over a bit funny when you think about women’s legs. All of the above get a good working over in The Roaring Girl (1611), a Jacobean city comedy in which Thomases Middleton and Dekker fit a real-life gender renegade into a giddy mesh … [Read more...]

I can’t remember how I missed the Pulitzer-winning Ruined when it played in London in 2010. It was at a favourite theatre (the Almeida) and starred favourite actors (Jenny Jules, Lucian Msamati). Maybe I was busy, or distracted. Maybe I didn’t feel great urgency simply because Lynn Nottage’s 2008 play sounded too much like an adaptation of Mother Courage, taking Brecht’s dogged anti-heroine from … [Read more...]

What does reality look like on stage? I’ll tell you what it doesn’t usually look like: a play that sets the finale in ivy-covered ruins on an aristocratic estate. Or a plot of exemplary neatness in which two pairs of brothers and sisters each fall in love with their opposite (heterosexual) number and temporarily repair the rents in the Victorian class system. I chose one of TW Robertson’s … [Read more...]