STAGEDrawing The Line
Hampstead Theatre
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Howard Brenton's compelling take on the partition of India is sweeping epic given pin-sharp focus with precision and wit.
Showing posts with label hampstead theatre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hampstead theatre. Show all posts
Wednesday, 11 December 2013
Stage review: Drawing The Line, Hampstead Theatre
STAGEDrawing The Line
Hampstead Theatre
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Howard Brenton's compelling take on the partition of India is sweeping epic given pin-sharp focus with precision and wit.
Tuesday, 4 June 2013
Stage review: Race, Hampstead Theatre
STAGERace
Hampstead Theatre
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
David Mamet's muscular prose commands the stage in a world-weary no-holds-barred dissection of race in America.
Friday, 1 February 2013
Stage review: Di And Viv And Rose, Hampstead
STAGE
Di And Viv And Rose
Hampstead Theatre
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Great performances and goodwill paper over any cracks in Amelia Bullmore's lively ode to female friendship.
REVIEW
Viewed from sufficient distance, the planet is featureless. The crevices and eddies of the surface are invisible and inexplicable to an alien.
And such it is with men viewing female friendships. We are clueless outsiders, blindly marking subtleties we cannot fathom. We are still bitching about A when A has been forgiven. We're busy praising B's steadfastness as B heads to cold exile.
Female friendship has a high drag coefficient, swift and slick, while men's sensibilities on the matter are more like a portly buffalo in a headwind.
Di And Viv And Rose does not illuminate the underpinning of such friendships but does present the reason they are worth fighting for. Mutual memories make meaning.
We follow the bustling threesome from an '80s uni house share through the grubby doings of everyday life for the next 27 years - all set to a cracking soundtrack.
Separations, sadness, sex, no sex and men attempt to slice and dice the triumvirate but their bond is not lightly broken.
Writer Amelia Bullmore pulls predictable plot levers to test their loyalties and the soapy traumas come too thick and fast but it's all done with such generous spirit and at such speed that cackling, crying and cluelessness roll into a single bubble of glee.
The cast are a joy. Anna Maxwell Martin is utterly beguiling as the gently promiscuous Rose but there are engaging performances from Tamzin Outhwaite as lesbian Di and Gina McKee as feminist-lite Viv.
There is little here that will linger and it's certainly not without flaws but, like Space Dust and Love Cats, it's all delightfully poppy.
Until Feb 23. Go to hampsteadtheatre.com.
Di And Viv And Rose
Hampstead Theatre
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Great performances and goodwill paper over any cracks in Amelia Bullmore's lively ode to female friendship.
REVIEW
Viewed from sufficient distance, the planet is featureless. The crevices and eddies of the surface are invisible and inexplicable to an alien.
And such it is with men viewing female friendships. We are clueless outsiders, blindly marking subtleties we cannot fathom. We are still bitching about A when A has been forgiven. We're busy praising B's steadfastness as B heads to cold exile.
Female friendship has a high drag coefficient, swift and slick, while men's sensibilities on the matter are more like a portly buffalo in a headwind.
Di And Viv And Rose does not illuminate the underpinning of such friendships but does present the reason they are worth fighting for. Mutual memories make meaning.
We follow the bustling threesome from an '80s uni house share through the grubby doings of everyday life for the next 27 years - all set to a cracking soundtrack.
Separations, sadness, sex, no sex and men attempt to slice and dice the triumvirate but their bond is not lightly broken.
Writer Amelia Bullmore pulls predictable plot levers to test their loyalties and the soapy traumas come too thick and fast but it's all done with such generous spirit and at such speed that cackling, crying and cluelessness roll into a single bubble of glee.
The cast are a joy. Anna Maxwell Martin is utterly beguiling as the gently promiscuous Rose but there are engaging performances from Tamzin Outhwaite as lesbian Di and Gina McKee as feminist-lite Viv.
There is little here that will linger and it's certainly not without flaws but, like Space Dust and Love Cats, it's all delightfully poppy.
Until Feb 23. Go to hampsteadtheatre.com.
Saturday, 10 November 2012
Stage review: 55 Days, Hampstead Theatre
STAGE
55 Days
Hampstead Theatre
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Two charismatic actors reveal the compelling contrasts of two celebrated historic figures in Howard Brenton's nuggety Civil War clash.
REVIEW
Hampstead Theatre has been reconfigured. The seats are placed on either side of the stage which creates some awkwardness (backs to the audience, darling) but promotes the idea of division; a Parliament of opposites.
Which is the theme of Howard Brenton's marvellous new play set at the tail-end of the English Civil War when battle fatigue could have tipped the country back into the kind of tyranny it had spent years trying to escape.
The 55 days of the title is the time (1648-49) between the rampant Army purging parliament of latent royalists and the moment when this most bloody chapter of English history was brought to a close with an axe.
"We are not just trying a tyrant, we are inventing a country," declares Oliver Cromwell.
And the sticky business of nation-building - of compromise and idealism - is the theme that excites the playwright.
The Roundheads are winning the war but likely to lose the peace as, yet again, brother is set against brother over the meaning of victory and the interpretation of God's will.
Amid the chaos, however, two characters (then as now) take centre stage and both are embodied by actors equal to the challenge.
King Charles I is prissy and self-righteous, the only one dressed in historical garb - with the familiar lace and flounces - and with a lilt of Scottish to his precise voice as he calls upon his position as heaven's sacred anointed to scare the bejesus out of his God-fearing opponents.
Mark Gatiss is clever in the court scenes and intriguing in isolation with the poignancy driven solely by his predicament and never from his glassy heart.
Douglas Henshall as Oliver Cromwell is the charismatic and flawed pivot of the piece.
Cromwell had no official leadership position but provided the moral heft and Henshall shows us the dithering and the decisiveness in a mesmerising and nuanced performance.
What Brenton calls the "obligation" scene - the fictional meeting of the two men - is as nourishing and accomplished as the long build-up demands with Cromwell urging Charles to see sense and "come to terms" and the king preparing serenely and doggedly for martyrdom.
The scene is topped by the trial where the brightest legal minds make law on the hoof to counter the king's mix of canny insight, blind intransigence and unexpected populism.
Director Howard Davies stages all this amid flanks of filing cabinets, with tiny ties and tinny typewriters conjuring the thin gruel of post-war squabbling.
Simon Kunz, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Daniel Flynn and Gerald Kyd provide solid support in a rewarding work; a reminder that the institutions we take for granted were carved, with blood and blister, from stubborn stone.
Until Nov 24. Go to hampsteadtheatre.com.
55 Days
Hampstead Theatre
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Two charismatic actors reveal the compelling contrasts of two celebrated historic figures in Howard Brenton's nuggety Civil War clash.
REVIEW
Hampstead Theatre has been reconfigured. The seats are placed on either side of the stage which creates some awkwardness (backs to the audience, darling) but promotes the idea of division; a Parliament of opposites.
Which is the theme of Howard Brenton's marvellous new play set at the tail-end of the English Civil War when battle fatigue could have tipped the country back into the kind of tyranny it had spent years trying to escape.
The 55 days of the title is the time (1648-49) between the rampant Army purging parliament of latent royalists and the moment when this most bloody chapter of English history was brought to a close with an axe.
"We are not just trying a tyrant, we are inventing a country," declares Oliver Cromwell.
And the sticky business of nation-building - of compromise and idealism - is the theme that excites the playwright.
The Roundheads are winning the war but likely to lose the peace as, yet again, brother is set against brother over the meaning of victory and the interpretation of God's will.
Amid the chaos, however, two characters (then as now) take centre stage and both are embodied by actors equal to the challenge.
King Charles I is prissy and self-righteous, the only one dressed in historical garb - with the familiar lace and flounces - and with a lilt of Scottish to his precise voice as he calls upon his position as heaven's sacred anointed to scare the bejesus out of his God-fearing opponents.
Mark Gatiss is clever in the court scenes and intriguing in isolation with the poignancy driven solely by his predicament and never from his glassy heart.
Douglas Henshall as Oliver Cromwell is the charismatic and flawed pivot of the piece.
Cromwell had no official leadership position but provided the moral heft and Henshall shows us the dithering and the decisiveness in a mesmerising and nuanced performance.
What Brenton calls the "obligation" scene - the fictional meeting of the two men - is as nourishing and accomplished as the long build-up demands with Cromwell urging Charles to see sense and "come to terms" and the king preparing serenely and doggedly for martyrdom.
The scene is topped by the trial where the brightest legal minds make law on the hoof to counter the king's mix of canny insight, blind intransigence and unexpected populism.
Director Howard Davies stages all this amid flanks of filing cabinets, with tiny ties and tinny typewriters conjuring the thin gruel of post-war squabbling.
Simon Kunz, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Daniel Flynn and Gerald Kyd provide solid support in a rewarding work; a reminder that the institutions we take for granted were carved, with blood and blister, from stubborn stone.
Until Nov 24. Go to hampsteadtheatre.com.
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