The jagged concrete outline of the Barbican Centre, in all its brutalist glory, lends itself fittingly to my mood as I enter – it is hard not to wince, at least subconsciously, at the prospect of six hours of Shakespearean text to be performed sequentially and without interval, in a language you do not speak.…
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Gun shots. Blood smatters against a fluttering white flag. A young woman lay limp and lifeless. The execution is done. Returning their rifles to an upright position, three soldiers march toward the body. Without courtesy, the woman is hoisted to a sitting position. In a remarkable show of disrespect, one of the soldiers casually wields…
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Runs until 16th April in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse Annie Ryan’s production of The White Devil plunges the audience into a dark and twisted dystopian world of lust and revenge where justice is ‘ravished’ and no one can be trusted. The Wanamaker is the perfect location for the intimacy and gore of Webster’s revenge tragedy.…
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Georgia Brown’s debut play Daddy’s Girl was a heart-warming vignette of two people trapped in very different circumstances. Eliza (Georgia Brown) is a millennial, struggling to figure out life from the confines of her room, while her dad, Terry (Mark Wingett), ‘Britain’s Most Dangerous Armed Robber’, has been locked away in prison for years. Reconnecting…
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Runs until 10th February 2017 Anders Lustgarten’s new play, The Seven Acts of Mercy, was an overwhelmingly average performance. The storyline had all of the makings of a truly interesting script. The play begins in Naples, 1606, where Caravaggio (Patrick O’Kane) is working on his masterpiece ‘The Seven Acts of Mercy’, funded by Marchese (Edmund…
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Runs until 21st January in Stratford-upon-Avon Barbican Run 30th June – 18th August 2017 In cinemas from 11th January 2017 Among the productions designated the role of RSC family-friendly Christmas show, The Tempest must be one of the odder choices. In the past, the company have trodden safer ground, with shows like the smash hit…
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So, you’re doing The Seven Acts of Mercy, can you give me a brief synopsis? Oh god, I have to get better at this, because my friends keep asking me and I’m like ‘it’s a thing!’… Okay, so basically there’s two worlds: there’s the world of Caravaggio when he’s making the Seven Acts of Mercy,…
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Runs until 3rd December 2016 During the interval of the Old Vic’s current production of King Lear, directed by Deborah Warner and marking a significant return to the stage for two-time Academy Award winner Glenda Jackson after serving as an MP from 1992 to 2015, I had an interesting conversation with a friend also seeing…
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Runs until 17th January 2017 Robert Icke makes his National Theatre debut directing The Red Barn, a daring production of David Hare’s adaptation of Georges Simenon’s La Main. The Red Barn follows the story of the mysterious disappearance of Ray Sanders (Nigel Whitmey) in a snowstorm. Donald Dodd (Mark Strong) goes out for hours to search…
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Showing in The Barbican from 10 November to 23 December 2016 – all the information can be found here. Gregory Doran strikes again with a gloriously heart-breaking production of King Lear. Shakespeare’s tragedy about a King’s descent into madness after he divides his kingdom and gives it away to his daughters, with its multitude of overlapping…
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