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How theatre is meant to be
I saw this production when it first came to the Bridge in 2019, sat in the audience and absolutely loved it. My only regret was having chosen not to be in the pit, where everyone seemed to be having even more fun than I was. I then watched the recording with my kids, who were…
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Modern morals and motherhood
This performance felt strikingly contemporary. Whilst I thoroughly enjoyed Pygmalion at the Old Vic, its present-day relevance took a while for me to uncover. In this play, the dialogue seemed to reflect many aspects of the conversations I am having with my children right now. It cuts to the core of the rhetoric surrounding the…
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Master of puppet
I am fairly sure I just funded a very expensive drama lesson for an already accomplished actor (Arthur Darvill in this performance). What I am not so sure about, is why I did it. Maybe this makes me a philistine, but I go to the theatre to see actors deliver their trade – gripping interpretations…
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Who is the troll?
Booking the tickets, I had clocked the reference to ‘Ibsen’ – but not being an Ibsen aficionado, I had no expectations regarding the storyline. Now that I have skimmed a summary of the original plot, “inspired by Ibsen” seems a bit of a stretch. Maybe an “echo” or “impression” of Ibsen’s fictionalised attempt at exonerating…
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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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