For a show featuring a bleak story, coupled with an indie rock score, Next to Normal sounds like it would be a tough sell. However, it has shown, over the years, it’s staying power. Brian Yorkey’s 2008 family drama musical has hopped from off-Broadway, to tours, to West End runs, to...
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There is a memorable moment, from the 2012 Summer Olympic opening ceremony. Isambard Brunel (played by Kenneth Branagh), holding a book to his chest, stands in front of a crowd of industrialists, their black top hats striking against the “green and pleasant land” of rural folk. He starts his speech...
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By the end of Alice Birch’s new epic-masculinity saga, I’m left half-astonished. Romans: A Novel is a play of great ambition – something that new plays should always be striving towards. Problems arise when a play’s fascinating form does not move in time with its content. Spanning over a century of...
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In the final scene of Harold Pinter’s play No Man’s Land, the nostalgic old poet Spooner states to his elderly counterpart Hirst: “No. You are in no man’s land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever, icy and silent.” I kept thinking of...
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His most common song– ‘Come over here and listen’. He stands with Dick Rodgers for an opening night triumph. I look round for another kid. The voice searches for me. A Harlem baritone that’s on the move. His hand leans down, presses my palm and tells me to hear...
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A radical in her time and ours, Sarah Kane is one of the greatest English Playwrights of the last fifty years, who is nearly never performed on the commercial stages. It is as if her plays have been given, like the biblical story that she was brought up with, a...
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Famed literary critic and professor Edward Said once wrote that “no one today is purely one thing.” Said suggested that our collective identities are not fixed markers, but instead “no more than starting points”. He noted that the old European empires, while consolidating a mixture of cultures and identities, forced...
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The curtain has risen, and I’ve already lost my breath. The opening scene of auteur director Jamie Lloyd’s production of Evita at the London Palladium billows with smoke and passion. Hooded mourners, a disgruntled Che (Diego Andres Rodriguez), stone steps lined with floodlights, and a life-size neon EVITA sign set...
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Swirling, striking and by blunt force piercing the littlest ones. Shards. Shrapnel. Dust that rolls into dirty glooms which make plaster casts. In this cloud, people lose time. Space is meshed together, breaking against skin and bone. Children unable to move. Mothers bursting, then dusting off and with all courage,...
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“You’re not performing. We are.” says the lyrical prologue to the devised hour of delight Hold, Please. For a show made of short, concentrated scenes, I left the FAB feeling I’ve been served a full theatrical meal. Following four characters (Clemmie Mayhew, Max Green, Bea Kelly, George Jasper, Thomas Sykes)...
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Beginning with birdsong and a meet-cute, the first moments of Homebound are open and sweet, with many possibilities as to what will happen to our young, idealistic central couple, Noah and Zara. Then the war is revealed. Every day life is curfewed and communities become broken by bombs. The loose...
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Parents are reflected in their children, and society is reflected in the theatre, both can be for better or for worse. The mother is a constant character that has been in theatre since the Greeks. Euripides’ neurotic yet strong matriarch Medea, in clashes with her lover Jason, brings out potent...
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“All your followers are blind! Too much heaven on their minds.” Judas’s lyric in the opening number of Jesus Christ Superstar sums up the problem harrying its latest production. The musical, with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Tim Rice, is set to play in concert form at...
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