http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/?service=Rss http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/the-habit-of-art-lyttelton-national-theatre-london-1822255.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/the-habit-of-art-lyttelton-national-theatre-london-1822255.html ]]> <p> For many years, Alan Bennett was accustomed to stand on the threshold of the closet, pointing a Hush Puppy first one way, then another. But with the advent of love in the shape of Rupert (World of Interiors) Thomas, the partner who offered him vital support during his fight with cancer in the mid-1990s, Bennett has been prepared latterly to nail his colours to the fence. </p> Reviews Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:51 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/akram-khan-sadlers-wells-london-1822281.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/akram-khan-sadlers-wells-london-1822281.html ]]> <p>Even recovering from injury, Akram Khan is a virtuoso dancer. His arms open in a fluid ripple, a dazzling pattern of curves and angles as he unbends at shoulder, elbow, wrist and fingers. He's both sinuous and geometrically precise. Gnosis starts with a display of the Indian classical form Kathak, and ends with an amazing fragment in contemporary style. Twisting in the spotlight, Khan becomes a glowing, trembling blur.</p> Reviews Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/ghosts-octagon-theatre-bolton-1821718.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/ghosts-octagon-theatre-bolton-1821718.html ]]> <p>For his second production at Bolton Octagon, David Thacker has returned to Ghosts, Ibsen's scathing commentary on 19th-century morality. His earlier production, in the 1980s, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Tom Wilkinson, won an Olivier. This latest revival – sometimes fascinatingly watchable yet also frustratingly mediocre – is unlikely to win it many new admirers, far less awards.</p> Reviews Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/mixed-up-north-wiltons-music-hall-london-1821234.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/mixed-up-north-wiltons-music-hall-london-1821234.html ]]> <p> Lamda, arguably the most enlightened and inclusive of all London's drama schools, has a highly creative component in its third-year acting course. </p> Reviews Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:11 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/fabulous-beast-dance-theatre-coliseum-londonbrbirmingham-royal-ballet-sadlers-wells-london-1820745.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/fabulous-beast-dance-theatre-coliseum-londonbrbirmingham-royal-ballet-sadlers-wells-london-1820745.html <p> No one ever put it more succinctly than Leonard Bernstein who, faced with conducting Stravinsky's juggernaut masterpiece, The Rite of Spring, said: "It's got the best dissonances anyone ever thought up." A half-century later, its brutalism undimmed, the work's polyrhythms remain a challenge to conductors and orchestras. To choreographers, though, the test is imaginative. Of the many danced Rites I have seen, few remain vivid in memory: Kenneth MacMillan's teeming vision of tribal sacrifice in a scorched desert of red earth, Pina Bausch's post-apocalyptic gender face-off, and Michael Clark's, but possibly only because of the Hitler moustaches. </p> Reviews Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:00:36 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/mixed-up-north-wiltons-music-hall-londonbrthe-kreutzer-sonata-gate-notting-hill-london-1820741.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/mixed-up-north-wiltons-music-hall-londonbrthe-kreutzer-sonata-gate-notting-hill-london-1820741.html <p> Uniting communities – healing wounds, harnessing the energy reclaimed from violence – is something the performing arts do well. In classical music, it's almost obligatory. Think of the artistic and political triumphs of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and its Palestinian and Israeli players, or the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, its disadvantaged members liberated by Rachmaninov and the rumba. What better outlet, then, for rowdy, angry or terrified kids than a play – licence to be someone else, or your often unacceptable self? </p> Reviews Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:00:22 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/the-kreutzer-sonata-gate-theatre-london-1818832.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/the-kreutzer-sonata-gate-theatre-london-1818832.html ]]> <p>The motion of a train loosens the tongue, confides Pozdnyshev, our companion in a railway carriage for the 85 minutes of this extraordinarily compelling stage adaptation of Tolstoy's great, warped novella The Kreutzer Sonata. In Natalie Abrahami's pitch-perfect production at the tiny Gate Theatre, this figure is a kind of bourgeois Russian Ancient Mariner, compelled to re-tell the story of how he murdered his arguably adulterous wife. She may have been playing more than piano with a newly arrived violinist, who had been a childhood friend of Pozdnyshev. Emphasising the subjective nature of the protagonist's testimony, this couple are seen here fitfully illuminated behind a scrim either making music or love in candle-lit flashes that are like the lingering neuralgic throb of an obsession that has survived Pozdnyshev's acquittal for homicide.</p> Reviews Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/architecting-the-pit-barbican-london-1818103.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/architecting-the-pit-barbican-london-1818103.html ]]> <p>I correctly reckoned that I was going to love Architecting from the second I saw the name of the US troupe that has devised this piece (developed under the aegis of the National Theatre of Scotland). They call themselves the Theatre of the Emerging American Moment (TEAM). It was the word "emerging" that made me fall for them. We are constantly told that theatre is the medium of the present tense, but this company refines that notion with terrific insight and flair. They know that the present never really arrives and that all we can do is travel hopefully within our consciousness, which is a constantly shifting mix of retrospection, hopes for – and anxieties and fantasies about – the future and a kind of squinting look at the liminal overlap between the two. What emerges in this marvellous (sometimes messy, but always stimulating) collaborative show underlines how sharply TEAM understand that theatre is like a magnified version of the eye of the needle through which this complex weave of consciousness is threaded. And they demonstrate this wisdom in the wit, verve and pained insight with which they bring past, present and future in a glorious mélange of jumble and judicious ordering onto the stage at the same time.</p> Reviews Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/first-night-staff-benda-bilili-barbican-london-1818330.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/first-night-staff-benda-bilili-barbican-london-1818330.html <p>When the stars of the most anticipated African tour of the year spin wheelchairs, dance on their legs' stumps and pluck instruments created from abandoned debris, they are embodying their nation's contradictions. </p> Reviews Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/uncle-vanya-old-vic-bristol-1817677.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/uncle-vanya-old-vic-bristol-1817677.html <p>The best news is that the Bristol Old Vic is up and running. The artistic director, Tom Morris, will announce his plans on Friday and the stage of the great Georgian theatre has been extended beyond the proscenium, making more sense of the exquisite architecture.</p> Reviews Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/royal-ballet-triple-bill-mark-morris-dance-group-royal-opera-housesadlers-wells-london-1817180.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/royal-ballet-triple-bill-mark-morris-dance-group-royal-opera-housesadlers-wells-london-1817180.html <p> The Royal Ballet's latest triple bill keeps falling short of its ambitions. </p> Reviews Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:33 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/seize-the-day-tricycle-theatre-londonbrcategory-b-tricycle-theatre-london-1816766.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/seize-the-day-tricycle-theatre-londonbrcategory-b-tricycle-theatre-london-1816766.html <p>Obama is in the White House, why not a black mayor of London in City Hall, argues Kwame Kwei-Armah in Seize the Day. And it is the squeaky clean, council-estate raised, insurance broker turned personable television presenter Jeremy Charles who is hand-picked by the head of an equalities commission to run for office, having broken up a street fight on camera. </p> Reviews Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/rambert-triple-bill-sadlers-wells-londonbrroyal-ballet-triple-bill-royal-opera-house-london-1816768.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/rambert-triple-bill-sadlers-wells-londonbrroyal-ballet-triple-bill-royal-opera-house-london-1816768.html ]]> <p>Somewhere in Kansas lives a housewife who spends her life hunting down recipes that use only three ingredients. Twelve cookbooks are the result. The task of a ballet director is not dissimilar, in the search for the triple bill that ticks all the boxes – something piquant, something nourishing and something comforting in one sitting. Both Rambert and the Royal Ballet unveiled mixed programmes in London last week, and both showed – are we surprised? – how hard it is to strike the perfect balance.</p> Reviews Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/spring-storm-royal--derngate-theatre-northampton-1814768.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/spring-storm-royal--derngate-theatre-northampton-1814768.html ]]> <p>It's a troubling April down on the Delta, where the river is rising, and the blood too. "The crape myrtle's been out a week," says the genteel Mrs. Critchfeld. "I always start to wear white when the crape myrtle's out." Her daughter, however, worries she may never wear get to wear white and toss a bouquet. One of Tennessee Williams's high-strung beauties who are half spinster, half sexpot, Heavenly Critchfield is sleeping with the virile, shiftless Dick but tempted by the rich, repressed Arthur (a nice reversal of the traditional dilemma). The quartet of restive youth is completed by the librarian Hertha Neilson, "the most sensitive and intelligent person in Port Arthur, Mississippi", where teenagers she catches necking in the stacks laugh at her and call her an old maid.</p> Reviews Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/michael-clark-company-barbican-london-1814136.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/michael-clark-company-barbican-london-1814136.html ]]> <p>Rock music is good for Michael Clark. His latest work, Come, Been and Gone, shown as part of bite and Dance Umbrella, returns to the music of his teens: Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, David Bowie. Even the programme is designed to look like a 7-inch record sleeve. With this soundtrack, Clark and his company gleam with purpose. It's the best thing he's done in years. </p> Reviews Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/seize-the-day-tricycle-theatre-london-1814137.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/seize-the-day-tricycle-theatre-london-1814137.html ]]> <p>If I were the Labour MP and former Culture Minister David Lammy, I'd be disappointed not to be namechecked in Kwame Kwei-Armah's entertaining new play about the real possibility of a new black mayor for London. </p> Reviews Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/if-there-is-i-havent-found-it-yet-bush-theatre-london-1814139.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/if-there-is-i-havent-found-it-yet-bush-theatre-london-1814139.html <p>David Hare published a very penetrating article recently in which he characterised the Noughties as the decade of Looking Away, technologically, politically and morally. By a somewhat delicious irony, I found myself reading this on a train late at night while being steadily eyeballed by the young man opposite, who was giving his girlfriend the most thorough of snogs. They had moved on to heavy petting by the time we hit Didcot, his glances to check on me now fitful.</p> Reviews Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/mrs-klein-almeida-theatre-london-1813067.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/mrs-klein-almeida-theatre-london-1813067.html <p> You think you've got a difficult mother! Melanie Klein's daughter didn't stand a chance, from the moment she put her head out. Klein gave the girl a name that was a diminutive of her own, then psychoanalysed and wrote about Melitta for her brilliant theories in child development. </p> Reviews Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/pains-of-youth-nt-cottesloe-londonbrif-there-is-i-havent-found-it-yet-bush-londonbrmrs-klein-almeida-london-1812611.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/pains-of-youth-nt-cottesloe-londonbrif-there-is-i-havent-found-it-yet-bush-londonbrmrs-klein-almeida-london-1812611.html <p>Everyone should shoot themselves at 17. So says the wild child Desiree in Pains of Youth. Penned in the 1920s and now revived by director Katie Mitchell – in period costume – this is Ferdinand Bruckner's morbid depiction of screwed-up Viennese students in Freud's era. It might well strike a chord with today's suicidal teenagers and twentysomethings, but little comfort is offered.</p> Reviews Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/mark-morris-dance-group-sadlers-wells-londonbrthe-sleeping-beauty-royal-opera-house-london-1812612.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/mark-morris-dance-group-sadlers-wells-londonbrthe-sleeping-beauty-royal-opera-house-london-1812612.html <p>For those convinced that contemporary dance is a mystery designed to keep them out, the work of the American Mark Morris offers a riposte. "I make it up; you watch it", is the beginning and end of his philosophy, though he might have added " ... and listen, too": in a world where good, live music seems to matter less and less, his dance shows are also a very smart concert ticket.</p> Reviews Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/pains-of-youth-national-theatre-london-1811073.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/pains-of-youth-national-theatre-london-1811073.html <p>Camus thought that, in philosophy, suicide is "the only problem". It may not be the sole preoccupation of the six bored, sexually entangled medical students in the 1920s Vienna of Ferdinand Bruckner's brilliantly odd 1923 play Pains of Youth. But it is seen as one of only two alternatives open to the young in a post-First World War Austria of widespread social disillusion and personal instability. The play receives a very rare revival now in a Cottesloe production by Katie Mitchell that will, I suspect, divide critics in the manner that is traditional with this controversial director's work. I thought the play blackly exhilarating in its ruthless (often mordantly amusing) anatomy of anomie. I thought the strategic take-it-or-leave-it stealth production (as usual with Mitchell, one might have chanced upon a tribe that is so mesmerically intent on its own practices that it has not noticed the "concealed" observer) arrestingly pivoted at that point where the different leylines of painful tragicomedy exruciatingly cross.</p> Reviews Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/raoul-barbican-london-1811075.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/raoul-barbican-london-1811075.html <p>Doubtless the people who applauded James Thiérrée loud and long would award him more stars than I. But would these be given out of delight or duty? For though the audience laughed as Thiérrée mimed his way through 75 winsome minutes, the laughs were scattered and never so full-bodied as to make the clapping a logical outcome</p> Reviews Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/the-sleeping-beauty-royal-opera-house-london-1810372.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/the-sleeping-beauty-royal-opera-house-london-1810372.html ]]> <p>The Royal Ballet's Sleeping Beauty is almost a fairy tale. Following two costly and unfortunate versions, artistic director Monica Mason returned to the company's iconic 1946 production. It's handsomely traditional, with fantasy designs and a decent text. Good, but not as good as it could be. There are plenty of virtues here, but the production is just a step away from being magical. </p> Reviews Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/terror-2009-theatre-of-horror-and-grand-guignol-southwark-playhouse-london-1810373.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/terror-2009-theatre-of-horror-and-grand-guignol-southwark-playhouse-london-1810373.html <p>Macabre things are going on in Southwark Playhouse's Stygian underground space in the run-up to Hallowe'en. With its auditorium the temperature of a cold-storage warehouse, exposed brickwork and suggestively gloomy lighting, the venue provides a setting of dank dread.</p> Reviews Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/bedroom-farcemiss-julie-rose-theatre-kingston-1809849.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/bedroom-farcemiss-julie-rose-theatre-kingston-1809849.html <p>The Rose Theatre's "Behind Closed Doors" season pairs August Strindberg's 1888 tragedy Miss Julie with Alan Ayckbourn's Bedroom Farce. Why? As a theme, "Behind Closed Doors" is flimsy: "Plays Set in a Room" or "Plays About Humans" would have done just as nicely. </p> Reviews Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/not-the-messiah-hes-a-very-naughty-boy-royal-albert-hall-london-1809854.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/not-the-messiah-hes-a-very-naughty-boy-royal-albert-hall-london-1809854.html <p>And now for something completely different? Well, yes and no; swings and roundabouts, square pegs and round holes, know what I mean, nudge, nudge. Eric Idle and composer John Du Prez have already conquered Broadway and the West End with their stage musical version of Spamalot. But on Friday – to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first Monty Python broadcast – they presented a one-off performance of a piece that is just a smidgen more megalomaniac.</p> Reviews Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/twelfth-night-courtyard-theatre-stratforduponavon-1809350.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/twelfth-night-courtyard-theatre-stratforduponavon-1809350.html <p> The setting for Gregory Doran's new RSC Twelfth Night is Eastern Mediterranean, Regency-style – all hookahs, Persian rugs, whirling dances and bushy-bearded Greek Orthodox priests. </p> Reviews Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:01 +0000 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/the-spanish-tragedy-arcola-londonbrannie-get-your-gun-young-vic-londonbrtwelfth-night-courtyard-stratforduponavon-1808816.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/the-spanish-tragedy-arcola-londonbrannie-get-your-gun-young-vic-londonbrtwelfth-night-courtyard-stratforduponavon-1808816.html <p>Is there a word in our language for gouging out your own tongue? Linguectomy, perhaps? But that's too clinical for Dominic Rowan's ferocious self-mutilation, playing the grief-maddened father, Hieronimo, in Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy.</p> Reviews Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:00:01 +0100 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/morphoses-the-wheeldon-company-sadlers-wells-londonbrshobana-jeyasingh-dance-company-queen-elizabeth-hall-londonbrjames-thirre-barbican-theatre-london-1808817.html http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/morphoses-the-wheeldon-company-sadlers-wells-londonbrshobana-jeyasingh-dance-company-queen-elizabeth-hall-londonbrjames-thirre-barbican-theatre-london-1808817.html <p>They say "tomayto"; we say "tomahto". They respond positively to smooth PR; our hackles rise at the same sales talk. They like to believe ballet dancers live the life of a Ralph Lauren photoshoot; we're reassured to see ours at work in holey tights. </p> Reviews Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:00:01 +0100