The sun has got his hat on, England’s in the semi-final under a chap with a proper waistcoat, and Noel Gay’s 1937 musical is a great big, lovely, silly, dancing elephant of an all-British vintage musical.
This Idomeneo works because it is seriously well acted within a clear directorial vision: Lowe, Bottone, Pierard and Nilon deliver intense, deeply felt characters driven to actions we can comprehend by emotions we can feel.
Verdi’s little-known opera about Peruvian Incas and Spanish conquistadors, Alzira has finally received its UK premiere at Buxton International Festival.
At the end of its epic London run with the peerless Mark Rylance creating the part, I went back to decide whether – without him at its core – Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem would really last.
CRITIC AND HELLRAISER LUKE JONES WINCES AND LAUGHS … This is as violent as anything I’ve seen on the stage. And I’m including in this survey that Titus Andronicus at the Globe which saw half a GCSE class collapse … Continue reading →
For Tracy Letts’ first play, it is almost perfectly structured and paced. Each dark twist in Killer Joe is unravelled delicately, each scene is a steadily heating pressure cooker. And the dialogue! Cutting, mean-spirited and genuinely witty.
Perfect. Red at the Wyndham’s Theatre, starring Alfred Molina and Alfred Enoch, is a play of fire and poetry, laughter and rage. An imagined colloquy with its own kind of genius.
What Carrick has done in Put Out the Lights is tremendous: no Wolf-Hall aristocracies and political gaming, simply a sense of clear young voices speaking to us from a distant past, suffering and relishing seismic changes in the way a whole western world thought and believed.
