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A Raisin in the Sun. Oxford Playhouse

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This review was written for The Reviews Hub, and appears on their website . Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 family drama A Raisin in the Sun was the first play by a Black woman to run on Broadway. Now 65 years old, do its themes still feel current, or is that raisin looking a bit wrinkled? This is a play about Black freedom and aspirations, thwarted by a system mired in racism. Tinuke Craig’s production for Headlong spends a while hunting for relevance, but when it finds it, the drama snaps into focus, the issues feel both present and prescient, and the passion and anger fuelling this seminal piece of Americana roar with pain. But it’s never a tract. Hansberry’s characters are three-dimensional, believable, flawed, and as full of repressed yearning as any scene from Chekhov. Walter Lee (played with burning energy by Solomon Israel), gullible and chauvinist, is as much the author of his own tragedy as his oppressors are. Each member of the family, and their circle of friends, represents a di
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"The School for Scandal". Royal Shakespeare Theatre

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Typical, isn’t it? You wait twenty years for a School For Scandal , then two come along at once. Last month’s production at the Oxford Playhouse flattered to deceive. With its garish colours, 1950s styling and gossip-mag-themed programme, it promised a satirical updating of Sheridan’s original. But it failed to deliver, by simply playing all the wrong notes when it came to the performance itself. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s approach also seeks out contemporary relevance for Sheridan’s comedy of bad manners. You might almost say it’s desperate to underline, with the boldest, pinkest pen it can find, the societal links between 1777 and 2024. Huge chunks of new text have been created and inserted into the play, rhyming monologues in which characters draw attention to our own obsession with social media, reality TV and culture wars. When the gossip journalist Snake (Tadeo Martinez) raises an eyebrow and tells us all to go and check our ‘digital devices’ during the interval, it should,
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Kyoto. Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

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How do you turn something as apparently dry and dusty as a meeting of international bureaucrats nearly thirty years ago, at which a significant amount of time was devoted to impassioned debate over the placing of commas and square brackets, into quite possibly the most riveting piece of theatre of the year? Somehow, playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, of the ground-breaking Good Chance theatre company, aided by directors Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, along with a laser-focused cast, have done it. Kyoto (even the title, sounding like it heralds a nostalgic travelogue of Old Japan, belies the electrifying urgency of what’s to come) tells the story of the diplomatic shenanigans that built up to that historic COP3 meeting, the Kyoto Agreement on Climate Change of 1997. The first half takes us through the years from the late 80s, when the issue of the planet’s health started to take hold of scientists and governments around the world. The second half focuses exclusively on the se
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"The Merry Wives of Windsor". Royal Shakespeare Theatre

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Are we in a new era of Falstaffs? In a recent interview in The Times , Ian McKellen said that he’d never ‘got’ Falstaff in the past. The standard, jovial ‘fat-man Toby-jug’ had never struck him as particularly funny or adorable. I felt the same. The Elizabethans’ fondness for this down-at-heel Father Christmas always seemed like something I’d have to accept, rather than experience for myself. But then McKellen realised that Falstaff is in fact thoroughly objectionable: a liar, a hypocrite, a glutton, a drunk, an emotional manipulator and a thief. It was a revelation. Once he stopped worrying about trying to make the audience love him, and instead embraced the character’s dark side, Falstaff came to life – and, paradoxically, also became more appealing. John Hodgkinson, in Blanche McIntyre’s hysterically funny and inspired production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, has clearly come to the same conclusion. His Falstaff is never jovial. He cuts a sinister shape. Rather than being a Bunt
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"Moby Dick". Oxford Playhouse

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This review appeared originally on The Reviews Hub . For a swashbuckling tale of bloodthirsty adventure on the high seas, there is something muted, almost cerebral, about this production. Forget the classic image of Captain Ahab’s lifeless corpse, festooned in his own ropes and lashed to the flanks of his nemesis. In Simple8’s production, Moby-Dick is but a whale of the mind, proceeding from Ahab’s vengeance-oppressed brain. Moments of intense violence are hinted at, but replaced by blackouts. Pain, exhaustion and suffering are expressed not through sweat, toil and action, but through the lyrics of an almost constant soundtrack of old sea-shanties, gently bewailing the losses and privations of a life at sea. Instead of howling winds and creaking boards, there’s a lone violin making scratchy sounds. Muted is fine. But is it effective? Partly. Herman Melville’s massive fish tale – the book is about the size of a baby whale itself – has never lost its power to thrill. Like Mary Shelley’s
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Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets. New Theatre

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If Pink Floyd is an important cultural phenomenon of the late 20 th Century – and it is – then all of their music matters. Not just the big hits like Wish You Were Here , Another Brick in the Wall and Comfortably Numb . This is the band that made its name with music so experimental and spaced-out that the BBC got them to play live in the studio while Apollo 11 set its controls for the heart of the Moon. But over the decades, in concert, they have confined themselves to the post- Dark Side era. (That, and taking each other to court of course.) Lazy. Greedy. There may never have been a band that so completely erased Chapter One of its own story. But the world is full of Floyd fans who cherish those early tracks just as much as the stadium standards. And for years they’ve been forced to watch the Greatest Hits over and over again... …Until drummer Nick Mason decided he’d had enough. Mason, the mild-mannered Derek Smalls of the group, wanted to dig out the psychedelic odysseys that the
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"The School for Scandal". Oxford Playhouse

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When Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s masterpiece, The School for Scandal , opened at Drury Lane Theatre in 1777, the sound of the audience laughing was so loud that passers-by in the street thought the building was falling over. William Hazlitt adored it, declaring, ‘Besides the wit and ingenuity of this play, there is a genial spirit of frankness and generosity about it, that relieves the heart as well as clears the lungs.’ Even as recently as 1995 one reviewer wrote that it is ‘such a superbly crafted laugh machine, and so timeless in delivering delectable comeuppance to a viper’s nest of idle-rich gossipmongers, that you’d practically have to club it to death to stifle its amazing pleasures’. Tilted Wig’s touring production doesn’t club Sheridan to death, but neither does it breathe much life into this most joyous of satires. On the plus side, passers-by on Beaumont Street can wend their way home safe in the knowledge that the Oxford Playhouse isn’t about to fall over. On the minus side
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