Category Archives: Theatre

A Christmas Carol review – Nicholas Hytner delivers an ode to theatre

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Bridge theatre, London
Simon Russell Beale stars in an economical Dickens adaptation that reminds us of the richness of live theatre

What has made this Victorian tale of child poverty, stalking apparitions and pathological miserliness chime across the ages? GK Chesterton cited the defeat of humbuggery and triumph of happiness. George Orwell wrote of its myth of moral transformation and the “good rich man, handing out guineas”. More recently Jack Thorne spoke of its resonance in our era of austerity.

Nicholas Hytner’s adaptation at the Bridge theatre certainly has an economy of scale. A powerhouse three-strong cast, Simon Russell Beale, Patsy Ferran and Eben Figueiredo, play every character between them alongside song, dance and nimble, poignant puppetry. But the show seems less concerned with austerity than reminding us of the richness of live theatre and offering an imaginative escape from our pandemic-scarred realities.

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Noël Coward’s private lives: the photographs that could have landed him in jail

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A newly discovered album contains intimate, joyful glimpses of the playwright drinking, partying and holidaying with his famous friends and lovers. The result is an astonishing insight into gay life in the interwar years

In 1931, Noël Coward was the highest-earning author in the western world, celebrated for his scintillating comedies and sensational dramas of hidden love such as The Vortex, Private Lives and Easy Virtue. As well as writing hit songs, musicals, novels and short stories, he painted and, not least, performed. But perhaps the most astounding thing of all is the fact that – at a time when homosexuality was illegal and would remain so for some time – he lived an openly gay life.

It is this that makes a newly discovered photograph album so extraordinary. It shows intimate glimpses from the private life of this towering cultural figure. Apparently compiled in the 1930s by Coward’s closest female friend, Joyce Carey, the album is a remarkable insight into gay lives of the interwar years, lived in plain sight. Carey died in 1993. It is because of her long-held loyalty to the man she and other intimates only half-ironically called the Master that the album has only now come to light, due to be sold at a London sale room later this month.

Many of the shots were taken at Goldenhurst, Coward’s country retreat in Kent, an extended redbrick farmhouse he bought in 1926. Here, and at more exotic sites, we see the artist and his famous friends at play. They bask in the ancient, faded sunlight, these people whose lives were bookended by two world wars. There’s Lord Mountbatten, fishing – Coward was later to play him in the wartime film In Which We Serve. And here’s Alec Guinness, in smart sunglasses, with his seraphic smile that gave little of his personal life away.

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Craig Revel Horwood: ‘I’m a baddie in panto but on Strictly I’m just being honest’

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The Strictly Come Dancing judge reveals which contestant surprised him the most and why he’s looking forward to getting booed twice a day in Robin Hood

You’re a panto regular – what do you enjoy most about it?
I love live theatre – it’s where I started my career back home in Australia and I got into it as soon as I arrived in the UK. As much as I love my screen career, you simply can’t beat helping an audience to suspend their disbelief for a few hours and enjoy a shared experience live and in real time. While we all take it seriously and it’s hard work, panto is fun, festive and lets me show audiences what I can do when I’m not sitting behind my Strictly desk.

Panto has never fully been exported to Australia. When did you first see one?
The first ever pantomime I was in! Our producers, Qdos Entertainment, once called offering me the job of directing one of their productions, but due to filming commitments I couldn’t make it work. They called back five minutes later and asked me if I wanted to be in the panto instead and I jumped at the chance. It was a baptism of fire – wearing a dress, ridiculously high heels and getting booed twice a day. But I loved it, and I still do.

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Fine Young Cannibal Roland Gift: ‘I went back to where being pretty didn’t matter’

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He was ‘the first black punk in Hull’ and was named one of the world’s 50 most beautiful people. But the singer turned his back on pop stardom. He reveals why he’s returning with a gritty musical about a band called The Blacks

There are no film posters up in Roland Gift’s house in Holloway, London, and the platinum discs are all packed away. It’s a home that gives few clues to the remarkable life story the 59-year-old is about to recount: how the “first black punk in Hull” went on to become an international pop and movie star.

“I’ve always been afraid of getting wrapped up with fame and that glamour world,” is how he puts it today. Indeed, even when Gift’s band, Fine Young Cannibals, topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic with their 1989 second album, The Raw & the Cooked (reissued this month, along with their eponymous 1985 debut), he had an uneasy relationship with stardom.

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The Prom review – is Ryan Murphy’s musical the first film of the Biden era?

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Taste the treacle as Nicole Kidman’s Broadway liberals rebuke a rural high school – and learn a few things about themselves

Like High School Musical on some sort of absinthe/Xanax cocktail, The Prom is an outrageous work of steroidal show tune madness, directed by the dark master himself, Ryan “Glee” Murphy, who is to jazz-hands musical theatre what Nancy Meyers is to upscale romcom or Friedrich Nietzsche to classical philology.

Meryl Streep and James Corden play Dee Dee Allen and Barry Glickman, two fading Broadway stars in trouble after their latest show closes ignominiously; it is called Eleanor!, a misjudged musical version of the life of Eleanor Roosevelt with Dee Dee in the title role and Barry as Franklin D Roosevelt. Barry also has financial difficulties (“I had to declare bankruptcy after my self-produced Notes on a Scandal”). After unhelpful press notices turn their opening night party at Sardi’s into a wake, Dee Dee and Barry find themselves drowning their sorrows with chorus-line trooper Angie (Nicole Kidman) and unemployed-actor-turned-bartender Trent (played by The Book of Mormon’s Andrew Rannells). How on earth are they going to turn their careers around?

Then Angie sees a news story trending on Twitter: a gay teenager in Indiana has been prevented by her high school from bringing a girl as a date to the prom. The teen in question is Emma (a nice performance from Jo Ellen Pellman, like a young Elisabeth Moss), her secret girlfriend is Alyssa (Ariana DeBose) and it is Alyssa’s fiercely conservative mom (Kerry Washington) who is behind the ban. Our heroic foursome declare that they will sweep into hicksville with all their enlightened values and glamorous celebrity, and campaign against this homophobia, boosting their prestige in the biz. They gatecrash a tense school meeting, declaring dramatically: “We are liberals from Broadway!”

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Caught in time’s current: Margaret Atwood on grief, poetry and the past four years

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In an exclusive new poem and essay Margaret Atwood reflects on the passing of time and how to create lasting art in a rapidly changing world

Read Dearly by Margaret Atwood

I can say with a measure of certainty – having consulted my poor excuse for a journal – that my poem “Dearly” was written in the third week of August 2017, on a back street of Stratford, Ontario, Canada, with either a pencil or a rollerball (I’d have to check that) on some piece of paper that may have been anything from an old envelope to a shopping list to a notebook page; I’d have to check that as well, but I’m guessing notebook. The language is early 21st-century Canadian English, which accounts for the phrase “less of a shit”, which would never have been used in, for instance, Tennyson’s “In Memoriam AHH”; though something like it might have appeared in one of Chaucer’s more vernacular tales – “lesse of a shitte”, perhaps. This poem was then taken out of a drawer, its handwriting more or less deciphered by me, and typed as a digital document in December 2017. I know that part from the date and time identifier on the document.

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Wole Soyinka to publish first novel in almost 50 years

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Chronicles of the Happiest People on Earth will be released this year, with the 86-year-old author also planning fresh theatre work after ‘continuous writing’ in lockdown

Wole Soyinka has used his time in lockdown to write his first novel in almost 50 years.

The Nigerian playwright and poet, who became the first African to win the Nobel prize for literature in 1986, published his widely celebrated debut novel, The Interpreters, in 1965. His second and most recent novel, Season of Anomy, was released in 1973.

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The Nepalese play letting the crowd reimagine the ending – and their lives

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Familiar issues of discrimination and child marriage are being taken to the stage through interactive theatre in remote villages

High in the mountains of a remote village in western Nepal – a region once home to a fierce Maoist insurgency – a large crowd is gathering.

Women arrive with babies strapped to their fronts; children sit at the edge of the makeshift stage; local officials take up ad hoc seats. Not only is this the first time a play has been performed here – it is the first time a vehicle has ever reached the village. Whatever this travelling theatre group intends to perform, it is a spectacle not to be missed.

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‘I felt unwanted’: Zodwa Nyoni on the immigration tales behind Nine Lives

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The playwright’s monologue, staged at the Bridge theatre, reflects the anger and pain of refugees and asylum seekers

My family migrated from Zimbabwe to England in the late 90s. Most of my teens and all of my 20s were shaped by applying for residency. I spent a lot of time feeling unwanted despite giving back to communities and to the arts, representing the UK at international poetry festivals and exchanges, and contributing to the landscape of British theatre.

In 2014, I was commissioned to write a play for Leeds Playhouse and Glasgow’s Òran Mór as part of the series A Play, a Pie and a Pint. I wrote Nine Lives, a one-man show about Ishmael, a gay Zimbabwean asylum seeker who is dispersed to Leeds while he awaits the Home Office’s decision on his case.

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Madrid’s Teatro Real cancels opera after social distancing protests – video

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Audience members clapped and shouted in protest over a lack of social distancing measures in Madrid on Sunday night causing an opera to be pulled at the last minute.

A performance of Verdi’s A Masked Ball at the Teatro Real was abandoned after two failed attempts to begin. The decision was made to bring down the curtain at about 9.10pm.

One member of the audience said there were rows of more than a dozen people without any gaps between them. In a statement, theatre management said the house had been operating at just 51.5% of its total capacity

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Alex Winter: ‘I had extreme PTSD for many, many years. That will wreak havoc’

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He is starring in a new Bill & Ted movie and releasing a documentary about child actors. The film-maker discusses the abuse he experienced as a young performer, his close friendship with Keanu Reeves – and why he quit acting

By the age of 12, Alex Winter knew both the highs and horrors of life as a child actor. Three years into his career, he was sharing a Broadway stage with Yul Brynner in The King and I. “But at the same time,” he says, “I was dealing with really intense and prolonged abuse.

“There was The King and I – eight shows a week, happy face – feeling genuinely happy in that role. Great relationship with my mom and dad; great relationship with the co-workers around me; doing interviews, signing autographs, living this amazing … and then this nightmarish other existence.” He has not named his abuser, who he says is dead.

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Diana Rigg, Avengers and Game of Thrones star, dies aged 82

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Actor who played Emma Peel in hit spy series and James Bond’s only wife was diagnosed with cancer in March

The actor Diana Rigg, known for her roles on stage and in film and television – including The Avengers and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – has died at the age of 82.

Rigg, who rose to prominence in the 1960s through her starring role as Emma Peel in The Avengers alongside Patrick Macnee, enjoyed a long and varied career, playing Lady Olenna Tyrell in HBO’s smash hit Game of Thrones, a show she admitted in 2019 that she had never watched. She also played Countess Teresa di Vicenzo, or Tracy Bond, James Bond’s first and only wife to date, in the 1969 film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

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Ruth Mackenzie: the British change-maker sacked by Paris’s artistic elite

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Despite fulfilling her brief to bring diversity to the Châtelet Theatre, the veteran director was brusquely dismissed. So what went wrong?

When the British arts supremo Ruth Mackenzie was named artistic director of Paris’s Châtelet theatre she thought everyone knew what they were getting.

Her pitch for the job, approved by the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, after a gruelling four interview panels, was to reinvent the historic Paris venue – known as “Broadway sur Seine” after the previous director’s penchant for American musicals – as a more diverse and inclusive people’s theatre.

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Australian theatres nervously reopen with mandatory masks and temperature checks

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Sydney Theatre Company, Belvoir and Adelaide’s STCSA are among the main stages pushing ahead. No one expects a profit – and many will take a loss

Sydney Theatre Company has announced it is ready to open the doors of the Roslyn Packer theatre and present its first show since March.

Wonnangatta, a new drama written by the award-winning Melbourne playwright Angus Cerini and featuring the actors Hugo Weaving and Wayne Blair, will play from 21 September to 31 October in a socially distanced production for audiences numbering no more than 147 (the Roslyn Packer can usually seat 880 patrons).

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‘I’ve had men rub their genitals against me’: female comedians on extreme sexism in standup

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For years, sexual predators have infested the live comedy scene. But female comedians are demanding action. Is this British standup’s #MeToo moment?

‘If this was a normal office where, on your first day, someone higher up than you goes: ‘Here’s a list of guys in the office who might rape you,’ you would go straight to HR. But there’s no HR – there’s nowhere we can go to say this is happening,” says Laura Duddy, who started out in standup comedy last year.

“For new comics, it’s normal that a more established comic will give them a list of open-mic gigs to try,” says Ellie Calnan, who began standup 18 months ago. “Whereas for women, it’s: ‘Here’s the people and gigs to avoid.’”

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Nick Cordero: Broadway star dies aged 41 of coronavirus complications

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Tony-nominated actor spent more than 90 days in hospital and had his right leg amputated

The Tony award-nominated Broadway actor Nick Cordero, who starred in hit musicals including Waitress, A Bronx Tale and Bullets Over Broadway, has died in Los Angeles from severe medical complications after contracting coronavirus. He was 41.

Cordero died on Sunday at Cedars-Sinai hospital after spending more than 90 days in the hospital, according to his wife, Amanda Kloots. “God has another angel in heaven now,” she posted on Instagram. “Nick was such a bright light. He was everyone’s friend, loved to listen, help and especially talk. He was an incredible actor and musician. He loved his family and loved being a father and husband.”

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Ian Holm, star of Lord of the Rings, Alien and Chariots of Fire, dies aged 88

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The versatile actor went from the RSC and Harold Pinter to international movie stardom with roles as the hobbit Bilbo Baggins and an android in Alien

Ian Holm, the versatile actor who played everything from androids to hobbits via Harold Pinter and King Lear, has died in London aged 88, his agent confirmed to the Guardian.

“It is with great sadness that the actor Sir Ian Holm CBE passed away this morning at the age of 88,” they said. “He died peacefully in hospital, with his family and carer,” adding that his illness was Parkinson’s related. “Charming, kind and ferociously talented, we will miss him hugely.”

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Larry Kramer, groundbreaking author and Aids activist, dies aged 84

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  • Kramer founded pioneering Gay Men’s Health Crisis group
  • Playwright and author died Wednesday morning in Manhattan

The groundbreaking American writer and tireless activist for gay rights and a national effort to tackle the HIV/Aids crisis, Larry Kramer, has died in New York.

Related: Coronavirus US live: cases still increasing in two dozen states amid push to reopen

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