Laura Wades’s return to the stage is a bright satire about marriage and nostalgic fantasy
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‘A cracking piece of writing & a thoroughly enjoyable new play’: HOME, I’M DARLING – National Theatre
Katherine Parkinson is simply spectacular as Judy, a vision in froufy frocks and pin-up hair, a woman who has entirely reinvented herself, right down to the way she holds herself.
‘A few blasts of real, exasperated truthfulness’: HOME, I’M DARLING – National Theatre ★★★
This time, in Home, I’m Darling, Laura Wade’s gift for caricature is turned on a target more interesting, and more attention is paid – though not entirely convincingly – to the characters’ real psychology.
THE CHERRY ORCHARD – Arcola
Terrific Revolution season, Mehmet Ergen has put together at the Arcola. Along with Gorki’s The Lower Depths, a howl of distress from the underbelly of society now sits Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
THE CHERRY ORCHARD – Arcola
Terrific Revolution season, Mehmet Ergen has put together at the Arcola. Along with Gorki’s The Lower Depths, a howl of distress from the underbelly of society now sits Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
THE TRIAL – Young Vic
The auditorium is a coliseum, with a tremendous conveyor belt slicing it in half, flappy black curtains at either end. K wakes with strange agents at his door. He’s arrested. But what on earth are his crimes? Shrugs and evasion are the reply. It’s a frustrating, but gripping , pencil pushers, forms, magistrates, hookers and lawyers curdling into madness. Scenery, furniture and people are flung down the wooden and Guantanamo-orange stage with fine precision. Trials “build up” K is told early on. The only time the conveyer reverses is to take him to his death.
THE TRIAL – Young Vic
If I have a prediction about The Trial at the Young Vic, it’s that every reviewer will mention the conveyor belt and three out of five of them link it to The Generation Game. The auditorium has been gutted and re-built with stacks of ‘juror’ seating in plywood encasements either side two moving rubber pavements surmounted by a massive orange-painted box with an equally massive and probably symbolic keyhole cut in it. At least you won’t recognise it as the same space in which the same director gave us Annie Get Your Gun seen through a letterbox.