Cindy Marcolina - Page 46

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.

We never go too long without learning new details of the heinous crimes committed by the Catholic Church. Just earlier this year, Pope Emeritus Joseph Ratzinger apologised for turning a blind eye to clerical pedophelia back when he was Archbishop of the dioceses of Munich and Freising. He’s not the first and won’t be the last ecclesiastical figure to admit something of the likes. It’s a widespread issue and the perpetrators keep eluding the law, with the clergy opting to punish their own with a slight slap on the hand and a different faraway parish where they can save more innocent souls. It’s not enough to diligently recite “mea culpa, mea maxima culpa” when centuries of abuse keep going without consequences. 

Being seventeen is hard enough without having to shoulder a climate emergency. At school, Zoe (Mei Henri in her first stage appearance) is a paladin of justice and Rain (Jordan Benjamin) is the new boy who just moved to the neighbourhood. While protestors gather on the east coast to rally against the big corporation East Coast Energy Solutions, the girl convinces Rain to set out on a cross-country trip to find her mother and save the world in the same breath. Crystal Skillman’s play is a dreamer’s guide to heroic activism. It’s a piece with good intent, euphoric in its stagecraft but unconvincing in its story.

The theatre formerly known as Tristan Bates, located just across the road from the Palace in the West End, has undergone a refurbishment and come out of the pandemic with a brand new name and snazzy facelift. Now called the Seven Dials Playhouse, it’s finally opened its doors again with a camp, compassionate story about hurt and acceptance that’s really a tribute to musicals at its core.

Hannah is the youngest of three siblings. There’s Joshua, Ben, and then herself. From the day she was born, she was taught to behave differently with them because Joshua is autistic. We meet Hannah (Rachel Hammond) when she is seven years old and follow her through her uncharacteristic adolescence. Armed with a looping machine and exceptional perceptiveness, Hammond delivers a sincerely bittersweet play directed by Lucy Jane Atkinson about what it feels like living with a person with autism. It’s definitely not all fun and games.

Eleanor (Meaghan Martin) is the daughter of Allison (Flora Montgomery) and Nadine (Amanda Bright). Conceived by Allison on a night-one-stand before meeting her future life partner, the gifted college girl drives back home with her boyfriend Rob to find out who her real father is. With the help of Rob’s private investigator friend, they track down the potential match and briefly destroy their family balance.

“Thirteen is young for an existential crisis”. Eileen has barely entered her teens when her older sister, Olive, dies of anorexia. It was sudden, during their family Sunday roast. Eileen had made the Yorkshire puddings, so it must be her fault. Rosie Day writes an intense rollercoaster of a play built on pitch-black humour and abrasive prose. The story of Eileen and her broken relations leads to an intelligent reflection on grief and mental health in a society where girls die trying to make themselves look smaller.