The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

Did Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli have any idea what they were starting when they innocently dreamed up Miles Morales in 2011? Their intention was to create a positive role model for children of colour in a Marvel Universe dominated by Middle-Aged Men In Lycra (except these particular MAMILs didn’t spend weekends hauling their skintight-clad paunches along country lanes on unnecessarily expensive bikes: they had epic battles with other, more evil, MAMILs instead). What Bendis and Pichelli set in motion was a universe-bending series of unfortunate events that would forever change the status and significance of everyone’s favourite wall-crawler. He would never be your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man again. He would be your amicably-unpredictable, dimension-and-universe-spanning Spider-Man instead. The reason for this was that Miles Morales didn’t fit into the Marvel Universe that already existed. So to accommodate him – to make his existence explicable – the whole thing had to...

As You Like It is traditionally a play about young love. Of the four couples who get married in it, three were smitten the moment they first laid eyes on each other. And Phebe’s Marlowe-inspired exclamation, ‘Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?’ captures not just the joy of love, but the thrill of experiencing it for the first time, eyes locked across a sweaty disco floor. It’s all the more surprising, and remarkable, therefore, that the RSC’s latest iteration turns that principle on its head, and doesn’t just succeed, but reveals new tones, shades of meaning, expanses of joy and corners of poignancy in the process. This As You Like It is performed by a troupe of gracefully aging thespians (supported by a gaggle of young helpers in minor roles). But if that were all it was then the point of the production would be disappointingly limited. It would effectively just be saying, ‘Old actors can play young roles too, you know’, to which the answer would be, ‘Yes, we know.’ Ian ...

If ever there was a show of two halves, this was it. At the interval I was toying with the idea of sneaking out (and that wasn’t just because the people sitting next to me had spent the first ten minutes consuming an entire takeaway meal). By the end I was dabbing away tears and cheering as each actor took a bow. How did this miraculous conversion take place? What was so wrong, and what so right? It was only too clear that a huge amount of work had gone into this production. The set is an impressive Art Deco creation, there’s singing, dancing, and a bold twist on the original book. But in the first half it just doesn’t come together. The deliberate anachronism of using modern songs to populate the aural landscape of 1922 wears its Luhrmann heavily on its sleeve, and the clash of flappers and 70s crooning, for me, simply jarred. The dancing seemed superfluous and exposed: this wasn’t a musical, so why did it briefly behave as though it was one? Half the audience politely clapped like yo...

This is the second time I’ve seen Patrick Marber’s adaptation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler . The first was in its original London run at the National Theatre in 2016, when it came across as a disappointingly stillborn affair. This was due less to Marber’s script and more to the deliberately pedestrian pace and design of the performance. Prophetically, the Guardian review at the time ended, ‘It is a version that will have a life beyond this production’. How right they were. Lydia Free and Coco Cottam’s sparkling interpretation at The Pilch keeps the ironically clean white set of Ivo van Hove’s original. But it diverges by having all the characters behave like three-dimensional beings rather than strangely muted ciphers. As a result, this feels like a truly updated Hedda Gabler : one in which the social coercion, motiveless malignity, sexual suggestiveness and urge for freedom through destruction feel recognisably unnerving and contemporary. Hedda herself is a fascinating character. Her barel...

Like Midnight Express , The Polar Express , and even the Orient Express (the Agatha Christie one I mean) The Blue Dragon is both a train and a metaphor*. And like all trains, it knows exactly where it’s going, even if its passengers haven’t a clue. Oisin Byrne has crafted an incredibly assured piece of theatrical unreality, tight as a nut at just fifty minutes, and bursting with humour, self-referentiality, unexpected twists and turns, and – in the end – an overwhelming plume of emotional release, like an old locomotive letting off steam when it finally reaches its destination. On the mysterious journey – the secrets of which it would be spoilerish to reveal – characters go round in circles, contradict each other and themselves, and repeat each other’s words without knowing why. The mini-plots cross over and under each other in an intricate pattern of theatrical architecture. If this was Hitchcock it would be called Strange On a Train. It’s like a Max Escher woodcut of impossible st...