Stage review: The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time, Gielgud Theatre

The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time
Gielgud Theatre
★★★★✩

The torment of living in a world that is threatening, jagged and strange is given full expression in this inventive and intelligent adaptation of Mark Haddon's award-winning book.

Stage review: Shakespeare In Love, Noel Coward Theatre

Shakespeare In Love
Noel Coward Theatre
★★★★★

The genius conceit of Shakespeare In Love - plunging the young Bard into the sort of fictional, farcical world that he might have concocted - is endlessly delicious.

Stage review: Neville's Island, Duke Of York's Theatre

Neville's Island
Duke Of York's Theatre
★★★✩✩

Rain pours down on a verdant inlet and the perfume of pines fills the auditorium. Stormy camps, reluctant kindling and a fragile grasp on fortitude.

Stage review: Great Britain, Haymarket

Great Britain
Theatre Royal Haymarket
★★★✩✩

All the ills, woes and scandals of Britain's tabloid press are distilled, mixed with bile and chucked at the audience of the Haymarket with infectious glee in Richard Bean's state-of-the-nation farce.

Stage review: Bakersfield Mist, Duchess Theatre

WHAT'S ON

Bakersfield Mist
Duchess Theatre WC2
★★★✩✩

Maude is the bourbon-swilling, plaid-wearing, tub-thumping ex-bartender surrounded by gaudy knick-knacks and urgent ashtrays.

Stage review: Incognito, Bush Theatre

Incognito
Bush Theatre
★★★★✩

The image repeats itself throughout Nick Payne's engrossing new play: a ribbon of starlings flocking together, flashes of silver on the wing, creating apparent order from a frenzy of dots.

Stage review: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Barbican

ENTERTAINMENT

A Midsummer Night's Dream
Barbican
★★★★✩

For such a fantastical production as this collaboration of Bristol Old Vic and Handspring Puppet Company, director Tom Morris still finds moments to be very literal.

Stage review: Strangers On A Train, Gielgud Theatre

STAGE
Strangers On A Train
Gielgud Theatre
★★★✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
A stylish and slick take on Hitchcock's classic has plenty of tension, but is occasionally stymied by its own aesthetic ambition

Stage review: The Commitments, Palace Theatre

STAGE
The Commitments
Palace Theatre
★★★★✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Roddy Doyle has re-created his tale of Dublin soul band as a full-on gig with banter.

Stage review: The Secret Agent, Young Vic

STAGE
The Secret Agent
Maria at Young Vic
★★✩✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Theatre O take the prescient themes of Joseph Conrad's classic and present them with intriguing, if disjointed, visual flair.

Stage review: Private Lives, Gielgud Theatre

STAGE
Private Lives
Gielgud Theatre
★★★★✩

REVIEW
This crowd-pleasing production of Noel Coward's Private Lives is lightning in a bottle.

Stage review: Fences, Duchess Theatre

STAGE
Fences
Duchess Theatre
★★★★✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Lenny Henry full occupies the role of Troy Maxson, the embittered garbage man and patriarch robbed of his shot at the baseball big time.

Stage review: Sweet Bird Of Youth, Old Vic

STAGE
Sweet Bird Of Youth
Old Vic
★★★✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Kim Cattrall shows her star quality in a flawed but rumbustious adaptation of Tennessee Williams' study of love, loss and hope.

Stage review: Chimerica, Almeida Theatre

STAGE
Chimerica
Almeida Theatre
★★★★★

IN A NUTSHELL
This rousing and cinematic play aims to tell the story of two sparring countries with a snapshot of two driven men.

REVIEW
This is how plays should be. The politics and the personal. The big themes and the little lives. Geopolitics and KFC.

Playwright Lucy Kirkwood magnificently wrangles the economic struggle of the two superpowers and creates a mesmerising kaleidoscope of cultural confusion.

The script is rich with meaty discourse and witty, cynical sideswipes so its three-hour length whips by.

The title is coined from economist Niall Ferguson's conflation of the China and America but also, neatly, suggests "chimera" - a single organism composed of two different populations. Although there is an irony there (never the twain shall meet) that is the underlying subtext.

But the story starts simply. The story starts with a single image - a man defies the tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

In this fiction, the photograph was taken by US photo-journalist Joe Schofield (a compelling Stephen Campbell Moore) who is haunted by its potency.

When he returns to a transformed, choking Beijing, in 2012, midlife crisis is upon him as is the realisation that nothing he has ever done matches those 30 seconds in Tank Man's life.

It begins a destructive, blinkered quest to track down the iconic figure and make some sense of his own fractured existence. (After his 1989 masterpiece, this is the "difficult second album" according to pal Mel who signs up for the task but falters in the face of corporate and political opposition).

Meanwhile, in smoggy Beijing, Zhang Lin (Benedict Wong - brilliant) is haunted by that same day in 1989, the day that stole his wife, and his festering sadness turns to anger and then action and then rebellion.

Encapsulating the New York brownstones, strip joints, pap lines, lawyer's pads and smoggy high-rises this is necessarily cinematic in scope and attack. All this is aided by Lyndsey Turner's dynamic direction and the use of a vast, rotating Rubik's Cube of a set that introduces flashbacks, cut-aways and vignettes as well as hosting the main action.

The political never forgets the personal and the fractious relationship between driven Schofield and self-possessed consumer researcher Tessa (a scene-stealing Tessa Kendrick) grounds the sprawling, flinty drama.

Others deserving of a mention are Sean Gilder as cynical hack Mel Stanwyck and Trevor Cooper as weary editor Frank but there are no weak links.

The play ends with a telegraphed twist but, by then the urgency of the cast to tell this important story has enlightened and invigorated us sufficiently so that the cathartic climax becomes necessary rather than irksome.

Until July 6, almeidatheatre.co.uk

Stage review: Peter And Alice, Noel Coward Theatre

STAGE
Peter And Alice
Noel Coward Theatre
★★★✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw illuminate a mournful encounter between the real-life Alice In Wonderland and Peter Pan.

REVIEW
When Christopher Oram's dusty bookshop backdrop rises to reveal a world of childhood imagery - Cheshire cats, pirate ships, Red Queens, moonscapes - then the magic behind the book covers is undammed and floods the stage.

If an encounter between the (real-life) Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan never happened, it would be invented for a conceit such as this.

That their paths did cross - in 1932 when she was 80 and he 35 - gives an added thrill to a theatrical prospect that only marginally overshadows the anticipation of on-stage encounter between the irredeemably majestic Judi Dench and charmingly gauche Ben Whishaw.

The two twirl around their childhoods like strands of DNA, linked by their early fate and fame. The sinuous, poetic prose from John Logan only enhances their flights of inquiry.

Peter is the more stubbornly forensic of the two, and the most damaged, but the haughty Alice seems to fall further. Their interplay, inevitably, is mesmeric.

But this is a melancholy, self-involved piece without much light to illuminate the shadows. The lurch from the joys and whimsies of childhood to the brutal, bill-paying function of adulthood would be a yowling rip in the best of circumstances.

But neither Alice Liddell Hargreaves and Peter Llewellyn Davies saw the best of circumstances.

Their lives were scythed by the first world war, which took family members and, in Peter's case, his sanity.

And beyond that horror, there were everyday disappointments. Their attempts to retrieve their golden summers and weigh their fame-in-amber childhoods against those of their siblings is a lesson in self-flagellation. Why go there when the answers, or the lack of them, will amount to the same each time?

But playwright John Logan and director Michael Grandage prod and push them there time and again, torturing his protagonists as they dissect the foibles and ambitions of their patrons - the stuttering Charles Dodgson (Nicholas Farrell) and the needy JM Barrie (Derek Riddell).

In this overwritten merry-go-round of remembrances, there is some relief. Peter Pan (Olly Alexander) bounces like a puppy and Alice (Ruby Bentall) is bold and fresh. Both find the adults' nostalgic indulgence boring and long for sword fights and romance, a sentiment shared by the audience whose patience is tested even in this 90 minute work.

Although lyrical and moving - and acted with delicacy and grace - there is a sense that a blast of fresh air through the bookshop would heal old wounds with much less pain than the tortuously slow pulling of the plaster.

Until June 1. Go to delfontmackintosh.co.uk

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.

Stage review: The Judas Kiss, Duke of York's

STAGE
The Judas Kiss
Duke of York's
★★★★★

IN A NUTSHELL
Rupert Everett is on blistering form in David Hare's witty and perceptive examination of the woes of Oscar Wilde.

REVIEW
For most of this absorbing masterwork, Rupert Everett's Oscar Wilde is seated. Or, more likely, slumped, deflated, a sack of clothes beneath a blubbery face.

He was not an old man during the course of the play's events - pre-arrest, post-jail - but he has an old man's physique, gait and prospects.

Should he take a deep breath and bellow away the gloom all would be well, it seems. But he sips just enough oxygen (and brandy) to fuel his brain and his quips and nothing more.

This gauche and tottering clown is in deliberate contrast to his fiendish and fierce young lover, Alfred Douglas, who is the very essence of youth - energetic, arrogant, petulant, cruel, passionate and, usually, plotting.

How much Bosie knows of himself - that his precocious power plays are merely childish goads to his family - is difficult to tell. But perhaps it is his vitality in conflict that leaves jaded Wilde enraptured, against all advice.

That advice comes from staunch friend Robert Ross (Cal MacAninch) who believes Wilde must distance himself from the young man to restore his fortunes.

Instead, says David Hare through an enthralling and clever script, it is for the preservation of his credo, for art and beauty, that Wilde chooses to float, impotently, towards ignominy.

For beauty encapsulated by Bosie, of course. And, for art, also, because he recognises that he is caught up in a narrative and his story demands a fittingly tragic end.

Everett is simply enormous as Wilde. Physically, yes, but psychologically too.

Forget the idle bon mots that trip from both actor and acted, this Wilde is infuriating, rigorous and mournful (but never sentimental). Everett marries the stoic curmudgeon to the rich prancing wit and hides all behind a haunted mask.

Freddie Fox finds enough in Bosie to make his patter convincing, to himself at least.

He exudes great presence and expends great energy to appear sincere and it is not inconceivable that this preening sulk would entrance the outsider Wilde.

The staging in Neil Armfield's production is ungainly and the nudity distracting but we are left, thankfully, with the retina scar of Everett's epic stillness - capturing a man broken but never quite defeated.

Until April 6, go to judaskiss.co.uk.

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.

Stage review: You Can Still Make A Killing

STAGE
You Can Still Make A Killing
Southwark Playhouse
★★★✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
Nicholas Pierpan's morality tale watches the Masters of the Universe struggle to move on with their feet of clay following the Lehman Bros collapse.

REVIEW
Remember the man who walked out of Lehman Brothers bearing a box and a shell-shocked expression? This is his story. Sort of.

This is the story of all of them - what happened following those end-of-days in 2008: who won, who lost and the price they paid, in terms of kudos, yoga mats, lattes and souls.

Writer Nicholas Pierpan puts a human face to the Masters of the Universe, takes them home and makes them sheepishly explain their actions to their peevish wives.

He rips away the Gieves and Hawkes carapace and prods away at the raw nerves beneath seeing what stuff these men are made of, stripped of their expense accounts and their vacuous locker room brinkmanship.

Edward and Jack are old friends. Fidgety Jack (Ben Lee) was busy being a surgeon but was lured to the hothouses of Canary Wharf by posturing, pompous Edward, a chip-on-his-shoulder Croydon boy.

But the survival of the fittest demands swift acrobatic moral re-positioning.

So while Jack flourishes in his hard-bitten hedge fund, ousted Edward (Tim Delap) spitballs with prospects in Starbucks, sells the dream house and finally, at wit's end, joins the FRA (the fictitious FSA) where he plots his revenge against the System.

Their wives ride the same rollercoaster. Shrill Fen (Kellie Bright) abandons dreams of a third child and moves out to Acton, which might as well be Soweto until it becomes Nirvana; while sinuous Linda (Marianne Oldham) sucks up to the yummy mummies she hates. All want to conform, all want to be different.

Their fortunes change in ways that would reveal too much. (It is soapy fare, to be honest, with bombshells and declamations that don't ring true but move the plot along.)

All are despicable and honourable; all are false and honest. In short, they're human, simply reacting, shifting, settling and justifying.

Director Matthew Dunster fills the wide stage with lacquered desks and swivel chairs that become offices and coffee shops and schools while a uniformly robust cast offers plenty of treats and talent. (William Mannering as FRA foot soldier Chris nearly steals the show armed only with a bag of nuts.)

When the story of how art responded to the financial meltdown comes to be written, this smart play may only make a footnote but it does attempt a more ambitious reach than some of the more simplistic dialectic tracts.

Future versions will be shorter. Two hours 40 minutes doesn't suggest the fast-snap of a City on heat.

Instead it is a muffin-topped morality tale intent on capturing what happens when a combatant quits the trenches and is forced into no-man's-land.

- Until November 3, southwarkplayhouse.co.uk

Stage review: A Chorus Of Disapproval

STAGE
A Chorus Of Disapproval
Harold Pinter Theatre
★★★✩✩

IN A NUTSHELL
More tautness and and vigour is needed, but this Trevor Nunn production is still a clever study of provincial lifes, loves and obsessions.

REVIEW
If Rob Brydon were to bring his immense but particular talents to a dramatic role in the West End then the part of put-upon am-dram director Dafydd Ap Llewellyn would be the velvet slippers of his dreams.

The hangdog Welshman of TV fame plays the hangdog Welshman of Alan Ayckbourn's clever-clever suburban farce with brio and eagerness.

Dressed in baggy cords, droopy cardigan and dismayed jowls, Brydon is outstanding in what is, generally, an underpowered version of the revival by the normally meticulous Trevor Nunn.

The scene is set - the light operatic society under the jackboot of the Welsh dragon - is bringing to life The Beggar's Opera, which, amid its tarts and rogues, is centred on a love triangle.

In the twee provincial society, straight from a Mike Leigh 1980s playbook, one love triangle is already in place and another is about to emerge with the arrival of Nigel Harman, who goes from flat-haired dweeb to cock of the walk as he hoovers up the desperate housewives.

The stage is crammed with stereotypes - emotional teens, vampish mares, dodgy dealers - but the set pieces are frequently lost in the fussiness of conveyor belt stage management.

Sometimes - such as in the pub scene - it's difficult to hear (the man behind me repeated the punchlines to his partner) which doesn't play to the strengths of a charming but pallid Ashley Jensen, who, in Extras, did nuanced pragmatism beautifully.

Essentially this is as silly as Noises Off but here the frivolity appears laboured and freighted with needless significance.

A missed opportunity for a starry cast straining at the comic leash.

Until January 5, agttickets.com