Cindy Marcolina - Page 19

Joe Stilgoe’s new album is an ode to theatre itself. After an overture worthy of the most exquisite Golden Age musical, the jazz wizard goes into a warm, rich love letter to show business. Read our BWW critic's review.

She charmed Daniel Craig’s pants off in Spectre, was rather bored in the Matrix, and accompanied Christ to the cross in The Passion Of The Christ. A sex symbol in the 90s and noughties, now she is Maria Callas in her one-night-only West End debut. An icon plays an icon, both with colossal reputations they can’t shake.

“Leave it vague leave it dark” says Samuel Beckett’s character Pim in How It Is. Now, after two years of delay and Zoom rehearsals, Irish theatre company Gare St Lazare bring Part 2 to the Coronet Theatre accompanied by the Irish Gamelan Orchestra. 

Young people all over the country are fighting an enduring battle against circumstances they aren’t equipped to change. Created following a meticulous research into the dedication of youth workers in Leeds and London, The Sh*t highlights the efforts of all those who dedicate their lives to keep others off the streets and out of the grave.

The world is isolating. While everyone is panic-buying loo roll, students have gone back to their accommodations with the promise of an uninterrupted education. Overnight, a fence goes up right outside a flat that’s more like a microcosmos.

Stop the press! The most renowned victims of the romanticisation of violence have taken up residence in London. The Arts theatre - former home of the worldwide hit Six - is now housing the West End debut of Bonnie and Clyde.

And then there were three. The last Mike Bartlett-penned show has opened in London. Scandaltown joins Marianne Elliott’s revival of Cock and the Trumpian drama The 47th spearheaded by Bertie Carvel under Ruper Goold. Directed by Rachel O’Riordan, this one’s a cheeky, boisterous contemporary comedy of manners. Read our critic's review.

When a group of friends from university get together after years of being apart, their reunion swiftly descends into a dinner from hell. They’ve grown up, some quicker than others, and now all have real jobs and responsibilities.

“For heaven’s sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings” Richard II famously says. The first part in Shakespeare’s Henriad follows a king who’s quite poetic, vain, and adores adulation.

One for the money, two for the show. The second play written by Mike Bartlett has now opened in London. With a revival of Cock running at the Ambassadors and Scandaltown opening in Hammersmith next week, the playwright is quite the rarity, one of the very few to’ve had multiple productions on at the same time in the capital.

Richard Myers has helped thousands of people achieve their dream of becoming parents. The IVF pioneer is now receiving a lifetime achievement award, and his own family have gathered around him to celebrate their patriarch.

In a world where the metaverse is starting to take over our everyday lives from professional meetings to social gatherings, it’s only fair that theatre and dance also get an update. While “hanging out” online isn’t a new thing, with forums and social platforms having existed now since the early 2000s, the notion is still quite foreign when performing arts are concerned.

On a summer day in 2014, Hadley Fraser pulled a Taylor Swift and dropped his first EP Just Let Go out of the blue. Now, eight years later, it feels like a treat to receive a new album (announced in a timely fashion this time) from the thespian, who's joined by Will Butterworth on piano this time.

The concept of a submarine has long fascinated writers across media. Jules Verne captivated his readers through Captain Nemo’s Nautilus and, more recently, Suranne Jones was trapped in one for a murder investigation on the BBC.

“The memories are imprinted in my mind like ink that spreads”. This is Mark’s story. New at school, his Year-10 classmates ignore him and the highlight of his day is going back home to play with his dog Barney. Then, he meets Darren. A lads’ lad and part of the local bully group, he chooses Mark as his target-slash-buddy. Mark, starved of friendship and constantly seeking approval, cautiously follows him through petty thievery and other malarkey until he realises his feelings for the boy.

Just a few days after it was announced that Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance was found in near-perfect conditions off the coast of Antarctica after it sank in 1915, a play about another tragic, marginally more famous shipwreck opens at the Park Theatre.

Let’s rewind to 2016. The fires of Brexit are being stoked left and right and the discourse is rife everywhere, the news swarm with opinions and facts. Theresa May is about to go from Home Secretary to Prime Minister. Kenneth Clarke is being interviewed by Sky and he’s passing judgement on the candidates for the job. He smirks through his opinion of May and ends it with “Theresa’s a bloody difficult woman, but you and I [Michael Rifkind, whom he was talking to] worked for Margaret Thatcher”. This is the anecdote that titles Tim Walker’s new play about the sparring between May and Gina Miller, who took the government to court over their authority to trigger Article 50 without any approval from Parliament after the Brexit referendum.

The theatre gods work in mysterious ways. Right when Putin is wreaking havoc in Ukraine, threatening to start a nuclear world war, a show set in a fallout shelter opens at Theatre Royal Stratford East. Dennis Kelly’s After The End is a play about power and displays scenes of spine-chilling violence - which is the main reason why the writer hasn’t let many people touch it since it debuted in Edinburgh in 2005. With Lyndsey Turner at the helm, the project is a jarring, visceral tale of manipulation, control, and toxic masculinity.

The Norwegian Ibsen Company return to London with Ibsen’s swansong. After bringing us a mesmerising The Lady From The Sea in 2019, When We Dead Awaken fits well in the emotional panorama of the world with the regretful and melancholic atmosphere of its story. At a time when we might have lost hope in the future, the dramatist’s last play is bittersweet and nostalgic, profound and captivating. Unfortunately, it’s also exceptionally anticlimactic in this instance.

We’ve been saying it for decades, robots are going to take over the world. While it’s obvious now that there are many jobs that can be undertaken by more efficient metal arms and the lot, for a while we latched on to the reassurance that there are some things that they simply cannot do - being empathetic or feeling, for instance. While working robots have the tendency to be removed from looking like the human figure, it’s more and more common to see humanoid machines in human roles. They’re carers and sexual partners, customer service assistants and hotel receptionists.