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Not every story needs a moral
Of the 22 plays I saw last year, Player Kings and Oedipus were at the very top of the list. You can imagine how excited I was to not only see the first Robert Icke original, but at the same time to go to the Royal Court where I had never been before. With every…
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The punch that takes your breath away
Recently I have been losing hope that any good play will ever be written again and grown increasingly tired of weak modernisations of brilliant classics. Thank goodness for Robert Icke on the remake front and for James Graham on the front of the originals. I had previously seen his Best of Enemies at the Noel…
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Un-elektrifying
This production has one redeeming feature – it is short. And so I will keep my review short too. The sheer randomness of what is happening on stage is staggering. It feels as if a troupe of A-level drama students could not agree on a practitioner, so each one chose their own favourite and threw…
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The marvelous Mr Shakespeare
I imagine this is what it must have felt like to see Much Ado About Nothing around the turn of the century (when the first Quarto edition of the play was published in 1600, it is said to have been ‘acted publicly several times). Laughter and mirth filling the air. This production captures exactly that:…
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More Cormoran(t) than Seagull
Where The Three Sisters feels like a novel to me, The Seagull reads like a lyrical poem, its unspoken words and unacted actions carrying more weight than the dialogue itself. When it premiered in St. Petersburg in 1896, Chekhov slipped out during the second act—apparently, the performance was so dire it lost all the meaning…
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Chekhov’s buttercup
Anton Chekhov wrote The Three Sisters in 1900, just before the revolutionary turmoil and societal changes of the early 20th century. It premiered on January 31, 1901, at the Moscow Art Theatre, founded by Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. It feels more like a novel than a play, with years passing between acts, and no…
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Political swamp
A bit of level setting before I begin: I did not study British history; I did not read or see Richard II before; and I have not watched Succession. Those I went with told me that the underpinning stringy score reminded them very much of the show. I cannot comment one way or the other,…
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Laboured Cacophony
It is only early March, but I am fairly sure I have found a contender for worst play of the year already. We almost left at the interval as some of the audience had; the reason we did not is that we the play was unknown to us and wanted to learn what happens. Turns…
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A different view
What I like about theatre, is that you can take exactly the same script, not change a single word – but just through the emphasis the actors place, or the relative strength of their acting, the meaning gets altered. Similarly, I find that whatever is playing on my mind amplifies certain aspects and dampens others,…
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Darn it, I’ve been sleeping with my mum
This is an OK performance and it is highly likely that had I not seen the Wyndham production late last year, my assessment of it would be less harsh. But this rendition pales in comparison and as much as I had been looking forward to seeing Malik and Varma on stage, I cannot pretend that…
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