Author: Tom Wicker
Interview: Siobhan Daly
One on side of the Lion and Unicorn’s black-box theatre space, a group of actors rehearsing Titania’s first meeting with Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are enthusiastically trying out different braying laughs for the unfortunate Mechanical-cum-ass. Performing around them, the love-struck Lysander, Demetrius, Helena and Hermia cling to each other in … Continue Reading Interview: Siobhan Daly
Boy Meets Boy
It’s the oldest story in the book: boy meets boy in 1930s England, the guy he’s jilted at the altar meddles in their relationship, confusion ensues, he ends up stripping in a Parisian nightclub before being reunited with his love for a show-stopping wedding. Gene David Kirk’s production of Bill … Continue Reading Boy Meets Boy
In Extremis
Theatre, particularly historical drama, loves traces – things mentioned in passing, buried in letters or contemporary accounts. From these meagre roots stories branch out and real lives bleed into fiction as the past becomes a stage-bound phantasmagoria of ‘what-ifs’. Neil Bartlett confronts this head-on in his recreation of Oscar Wilde’s … Continue Reading In Extremis
Golgotha
The supposed site of Christ’s crucifixion, ‘Golgotha’ translates from the Bible as ‘place of the skull’. In Nirjay Mahindru’s searingly intense new play, the river Thames is also a place of skulls, haunted by the ghosts of a buried past. Young Loretta is an unwilling immigrant in nineteenth-century London, brought … Continue Reading Golgotha
A Winter’s Tale
Cult composer and lyricist Howard Goodall’s new musical based on Shakespeare’s great ‘problem’ play ‘The Winter’s Tale’ comes up against the same difficulty facing a straightforward staging. How do you reconcile the pitch darkness and bucolic light of two acts set 16 years apart, in two different countries? Thematic threads … Continue Reading A Winter’s Tale
Interview: Roger Mortimer-Smith
The trust between psychoanalyst Dr Beckmann and his client Jenny is shattered when he finds her breaking into his office in the middle of the night. What she discovers will change their lives forever, and begin a descent into memory, murder and madness from which there is no going back. … Continue Reading Interview: Roger Mortimer-Smith
Interview: Nirjay Mahindru and Iqbal Khan
Indian girl Loretta arrives in Victorian England to look after two children. She wants to earn enough money to pay for a ticket home, but fate intervenes. A century later, Loretta’s great-great-grandson Kalil leaves his East African home to start a new life in the UK. But like his ancestor, … Continue Reading Interview: Nirjay Mahindru and Iqbal Khan
Steel Pier
This production marks the European premiere of David Thompson, John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Great Depression-set musical about a dance marathon on Atlantic City’s famous Steel Pier, inspired by Horace McCoy’s 1935 novel ‘They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’ Ostensibly about the romance between mysterious stunt pilot Billy Kelly (Jay Rincon) … Continue Reading Steel Pier
Daddy Long Legs
To modern ears, there’s something creepy about a story in which a benefactor adopts a pseudonym to influence the life of a girl he becomes infatuated with, and who takes to calling him ‘Daddy’ in her letters. But this new musical – directed and adapted by John Caird from the … Continue Reading Daddy Long Legs
Interview: Sarah Pitard
While Oscar Wilde is best known for his works for adults, novels like The Picture of Dorian Gray and plays such as The Importance of Being Earnest, he also wrote numerous children’s stories during his lifetime. These fairytales, which he first composed for his two sons, have been staple bedtime … Continue Reading Interview: Sarah Pitard
The Heiress
Dan Stevens, famously of Downton Abbey, swaps one period drama for another as he makes his Broadway debut in this superb revival of Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s bleakly brilliant play – based on Henry James’s novel Washington Square – about the damage wrought by living without love. The year is 1850. … Continue Reading The Heiress
Bad Theater Fest: a million miles from Broadway
Just off New York’s Times Square, with Hurricane Sandy permitting, an intriguing new festival is entering its second and final week. It’s only minutes from Broadway, but conceptually Bad Theater Fest is a million miles away from the multimillion-dollar glow of its slick neighbours. Don’t be put off by the name. Here, ‘bad’ … Continue Reading Bad Theater Fest: a million miles from Broadway
Interview: Alison Pollard-Mansergh
The farcical antics of incompetent hotel owner Basil, his perpetually exasperated wife Sybil and eternally bewildered Spanish waiter Manuel have enshrined 1970s BBC sitcom Fawlty Towers as a comedy classic. Inspired by the TV show, Faulty Towers The Dining Experience is taking up an open-ended residency in London’s West End. From 26 October, intrepid … Continue Reading Interview: Alison Pollard-Mansergh
Interview: Mike Elliston
Mike Elliston’s new play, TRAILER/Trash, is the latest step in a long and varied career. Since winning a Fringe First at the 1983 Edinburgh Festival for his short play Bread ‘n’ Butter Guns, he has written for numerous TV productions (including a brief stint on infamous soap opera Crossroads) and been a freelance … Continue Reading Interview: Mike Elliston
Interview: Douglas Hodge
Award-winning British actor Douglas Hodge clearly has a nose for a good part. But his own nose was never going to be enough for his latest role: the lead in a Broadway revival of French playwright Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. Hodge is the latest in a long line of … Continue Reading Interview: Douglas Hodge
Cyrano de Bergerac
The poster outside American Airlines Theatre for Roundabout Theatre’s delightful new Broadway production of French dramatist Edmond Rostand’sCyrano de Bergerac teases us by keeping its most infamous feature out of sight. Douglas Hodge’s Cyrano looks out at us, a twinkle in his left eye. Much of his face is hidden in … Continue Reading Cyrano de Bergerac