Love London Love Culture rounds up the reviews for the new play The Tyler Sisters by Alexandra Wood.
‘It’s fascinating writing’: THE TYLER SISTERS – Hampstead Theatre
In The Tyler Sisters Alexandra Wood reverses expectations of storytelling and in the process fills a notable gap in charting the experience of just being a sister day-to-day and year-to-year.
‘A new kind of Shakespearean tragedy’: OTHELLOMACBETH – Lyric Hammersmith ★★★★
Director Jude Christian’s othellomacbeth, two-for-one offer on Shakespearean tragedies at the Lyric Hammersmith, sounds like a bad idea. Crammed into two and half hours, there’s too much material and too little time. And yet, somehow, they manage to pull it off.
NETWORK at the National Theatre: ‘Ivo van Hove reasserts his place as one of the premier theatremakers working, anywhere’
A satire that managed to predict just how powerful a tool populist anger can be when leveraged effectively, it is transformed into the immersive bustle of a TV studio, that of UBS Evening News where old hack Howard Beale – a transcendent performance by Bryan Cranston – has been handed his notice.
NEWS: Are you up-to-date with the full cast for Network?
This autumn the National Theatre stages the world-premiere of Network, Lee Hall’s new adaptation of the Oscar-winning film by Paddy Chayefsky.
Directed by Ivo van Hove, the cast includes Bryan Cranston as Howard Beale, Michelle Dockery as Diana Christenson and Douglas Henshall as Max Schumaker.
MY MOTHER SAID I NEVER SHOULD – St James Theatre
These women that playwright Charlotte Keatley created are passionate, feisty and reflect society’s views of women from the 1930s through the 1980s. Though there’s been inevitable progress in women’s rights, Keatley’s script shows how agonisingly slow it’s been. Excellent performances by the ensemble cast of four and a decade-spanning politically commentary make My Mother Said I Never Should a relevant, fun and poignant production that, even though written in the 1980s, still holds important messages about womanhood.
MY MOTHER SAID I NEVER SHOULD – St James Theatre
This is a return to grand form for Lipman whose natural comic timing is best deployed undercutting the more strident statements and hinting at the unvoiced disappointments of marital life. She still needs a director brave enough to tell her that Manchester isn’t in the East Riding of Yorkshire and to drag her accent from native Hull to the other end of the M62, but it’s a finely detailed performance across a swathe of the century from tutoring piano lessons as a tetchy wartime martinet to the abandon of popping off her pop socks in an eighties Oldham garden.
MY MOTHER SAID I NEVER SHOULD – St James Theatre
Spirited revival of the 1980s feminist classic is a bit too shrill, yet also quietly moving when it matters.
MY MOTHER SAID I NEVER SHOULD – St James Theatre
A story of four generations of strong women, an exploration into the meaning of family, being a mother, a child, sister and grandmother. Do we learn from the mistakes we or others make or is it a series of conscious decisions influenced by the childhood we’ve had that shape us as adults.
MY MOTHER SAID I NEVER SHOULD – St James Theatre
Paul Robinson directs with sensitivity as Simon Slater’s sound and music enhance proceedings, with the production marking an impressive debut by producers Tiny Fires. Go see this play – the acting is sensational.
MY MOTHER SAID I NEVER SHOULD – St James Theatre
Say, first of all, that Maureen Lipman was born to play Doris, the Lancashire matriarch at the heart of Charlotte Keatley’s modern classic. In this revival she never misses a beat: without overdoing it Lipman can convulse an audience with a mere word (“Polytechnic” “End Terrace” ), or silence our breathing with a wrenching, gentle monologue expressing a hidden life.
NEWS: Maureen Lipman & Katie Brayben in My Mother Said I Never Should, 18 April
National treasure Maureen Lipman (Oklahoma, Outside Edge, See How They Run) and Olivier-award winning Katie Brayben (Beautiful – The Carole King Musical, King Charles III, American Psycho) will lead the cast in Charlotte Keatley’s My Mother Said I Never Should. They will be joined by Caroline Faber (The Taming of the Shrew, The Heiress, Hangover Square) and Serena Manteghi (The Railway Children). Presented by Tiny Fires Ltd, this is the first London revival of the play in over 25 years.