Who Is It That Can Tell Me Who I Am?
✮✮✮ Shakespeare's King Lear The Old Vic Theatre | London directed by Deborah Warner Glenda Jackson is King Lear! Two-time Oscar winning actress turned politician returns to the stage after 25 years to play King Lear. However, the worrying feeling is that maybe the rest wasn’t so well thought out. In a nutshell King Lear is to split his kingdom between his three daughters, the parts will be divided up based on how much they love their father. Goneril and Regan (Celia Imrie a
(Ground)Hogging the Limelight
✮✮✮✮ Tim Minchin's Groundhog Day The Old Vic | London directed by Matthew Warchus A musical based on the cult film of the 1990s, Groundhog Day? Um… Yes please. Music and lyrics by Tim Minchin? Yes please. This production was a bit of a dream come true for theatregoers before it had even begun. Great story, great creative team – yes, yes, yes. And the real thing does not disappoint. The first twenty minutes or so, depicting the initial Groundhog Day, is a tightly choreographed
Man's Alienation in the Modern World
✮✮✮ 1/2 Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape The Old Vic | London directed by Richard Jones A gold prospector in Honduras, a plant-packer in Argentina, a mule-keeper on a voyage to South Africa…and all this before the age of twenty-seven. Eugene O’Neill’s CV offers up a few hints as to his inexhaustible worldliness, and it is this breadth of unfiltered experience that established him as a literary champion of the underdog. From the Provincetown Players to his four Pulitzer Prizes,
It's Tough At The Top
✮✮ Cole Porter's High Society The Old Vic | London directed by Maria Friedman It’s tough at the top: the press are snooping through your knicker drawer, your father’s cavorting with a dancer half his age, your ex-husband’s trying to give you a yacht you don’t want and you simply can’t stomach all that champagne these days. Such are the problems of Tracy Lord as she navigates her way through her own wedding party attended by the great, the good, and the gorgeous of America’s H
Hades Hath No fury
✮✮ 1/2 Sophocles' Electra in a version by Frank McGuinness The Old Vic | London directed by Ian Rickson It’s the old luvvie’s refrain: treat new plays like classics and classics like new plays. In Electra’s case Sophocles may well have found himself sitting down to some hair-tearing sessions with his dramaturg. Classic it may be, but there are a fair few sticky moments of plotting. It’s difficult to relish a speech gushing over a chariot race’s horses, or to invest in the new
Hagiography of an All-American Saint
✮✮ David W. Lintels' Clarence Darrow The Old Vic | London directed by Thea Sharrock "I've always thought lawyers like to say more than is absolutely necessary." This show, Kevin Spacey's last at the Old Vic and first as solo performer, casts him as a garrolous attorney and folk hero of declining years, remembering a career of arguing of horse traders and social justice for thirty-odd years either side of 1900. Thoroughly argued, it's still a slender proposition to fill the ma
