Waiting For Godot Let me preface this by saying I had only ever seen Beckett performed once before, and it was when I was living in Korea. It was a Chinese production. Played like traditional Chinese theatre. With surtitles in Korean and English. I left halfway through, by rationalising that the second half is […]
This was my second outing to the National Theatre in about a month, and by far my favourite of the two. Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy The Hard Problem for the reasons outlined in my recent blog post, but Man and Superman took me so much by surprise that I found myself applauding […]
I liked this play. I felt that at times it was slightly like a soap opera, but in a good way: lots of action, interesting characters and a bit of conflict. There were a few critics who didn’t seem to enjoy it, or at least didn’t think it was Tom Stoppard’s best work, but to […]
Antigone I wanted to like this production, I really did. I generally like the innovation of the theatre the Barbican put on, as well as the fact that they stage foreign language productions, challenging plays, and other bold choices. I’ve seen Juliette Binoche before, and she always seems reasonably good. This version of Antigone, […]
Mad but brilliant. Beats you over the head with a theme but does it in style. Uses technology to satirise our addiction to technology. References German literature, Jewish folklore, Expressionist cinema of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari vein and The Daily Mail. 1927: my new favourite theatre company. I go to a lot of theatre, […]
Unlike the Late Turner exhibition which I reviewed recently, the National Gallery didn’t create this exhibition on late works by Rembrandt from a position of reeducation or reinterpretation. The works on display are firmly within the Dutch Golden Age and have always been respected as masterful works (and quite a high number of them as […]
I think I was a little dazzled while seeing this play, not by the big name draws in their Broadway debuts, or by the direction, but, not having seen any of Tom Stoppard’s plays previously, by his way with words. While I still have nothing to compare it to, this revival of The Real Thing […]
“I can see they’re acting, but I’m not sure why.” This was the initial reaction to Ballyturk of one of my theatregoing companions, but it essentially sums up most of the reviews I’ve read of Enda Walsh’s play recently staged at the National, having debuted at the Galway International Arts Festival earlier this year. I […]
Ok, I almost need to draw you a diagram for this one. You know Shakespeare, right? Macbeth, with the witches etc? Well Verdi wrote an opera of it in 1847. And then it was staged by a South African company at the Barbican. But they staged it as if they were a group of Congolese […]
There is always a danger in reviving a play about youth in which the setting plays such an important role that it will lose its relevance, but this does not seem to have happened at all to Kenneth Lonergan’s play, which premiered in 1996. Granted, its 1982 setting was already over a decade old when […]
