A timely and shaded production that breathes much-needed life into the faces of primary school history posters. Based on Friedrich Schiller’s text from 1800, Mary Stuart- both adapted and directed by Robert Icke- is unexpectedly riveting. Following the story of Mary Queen of Scots and her cousin, Elizabeth I, it recounts Mary’s final days in prison […]
Am I the only person who actually enjoys clichés once in a while? I mean, not every production is the most inventive but is that really the worst thing? When your job title is “critic” it can be difficult to just…. enjoy. Old Red Lion Theatre’s production of Benighted reminded me that sometimes a cliché […]
Patricide is not a subject many people wish to tackle, especially not in the confines of the theatre. Thebes Land tells the story of a man, who calls himself T, writing a play about a patricide named Martin. The show encompasses both the interviews between Martin and T and the rehearsals leading up to the […]
Rural Illinois in 1979. A flagging old man wastes away on a couch watching sports on his tiny TV and sneaking swigs of whiskey when alone. This is Dodge (Ed Harris), the moribund, impotent pillar of the play. His wife Halie (Amy Madigan) calls out from above. She can’t get over her all-American son Ansel’s […]
Putting Voltaire on stage is a difficult task: it is easy to think of the philosopher’s work as too sophisticated for musical adaptation. Bernstein and Wheeler’s version of Candide attempts to make the timeless story more approachable—almost too much so. While it follows the original storyline very well, it sometimes fails to have the same […]
The first half, and probably two-thirds, of The Sewing Group is excruciatingly oblique. It opens on two women, clad in black mantles, sitting on bare wooden stools in a bare wooden room and sewing. These people are, according to the script, A (Jane Hazelgrove) and B (Sarah Niles). They sew and continue to, but before […]
Recounting the short but significant life of Charles Hamilton Sorley, a Scottish poet of World War One, It is Easy to Be Dead is a sombre take on the brutality of war. Told through a collection of letters and poetry, the play follows Sorley from his time at Cambridge to his studies in Germany before […]
There will be few unfamiliar with J.B. Priestley’s most famous piece, An Inspector Calls, and in this latest version director Stephen Daldry extracts the richness of the text to produce a gripping and intense romp and, while it has its ostentatious moments, is a respectfully solid revival of a play that continues to entertain seventy […]