The Comedy of Errors. Review by Barbara Lewis. This is the HandleBards’ uplifting summer tour, which after 935 miles of pedalling, brought the cycling players to a picnicking audience in the grounds of Horace Walpole’s Gothic revival mansion at Strawberry Hill, west London.
playwrights
Pirandello In Context. Review by Alan Price. Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) is best known for his 1921 stage play Six Characters in Search of an Author. It was a landmark play that changed theatre.
May Be at Sadler’s Wells. Review by Julia Pascal. I walk into a Paris bookshop and ask if they can offer me play texts by contemporary French authors. The assistant directs me to a shelf of plays by Samuel Beckett. To the French, Samuel Beckett is one of theirs. He wrote in French. He lived most of his life in France. But was he Irish? Anglo-Irish? French?
As You Like It. Review by Barbara Lewis. The line “ripeness is all” from Shakespeare’s tragedy of old age Lear could easily be the motto of the RSC’s latest joyful version of one of his most youthful comedies of love.
Pussycat in Memory of Darkness. Review by Barbara Lewis. Kristin Milward’s performance of Pussycat in Memory of Darkness in Kyiv in December was the first visiting foreign production in the capital since the Russian invasion began in February last year.
Love’s Labour’s Lost. Review by Barbara Lewis. In our angst-ridden age, the thirst for the tonic of musical theatre seems almost unquenchable. In a production that acknowledges so vividly the follies of the supposedly scholarly elite, the rustics dazzle.
My Fair Lady. English National Opera. Review by Julia Pascal. My Fair Lady, the musical version of George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play Pygmalion is staged at the English National Opera this summer.
Oleanna, by David Mamet. Arts Theatre. Review by Graham Buchan. David Mamet has had a substantial forty-year plus career writing plays and films which drill into the deeper recesses of the American psyche with unrelenting precision.
A paradox at the heart of Beckett is that he uses art to explore the meaninglessness of human lives, when many would say the prime purpose of art is to find meaning.
I go to Russian theatre for the performances of actors whose skills are extraordinary. Theatre of Nations’ double bill did not disappoint.
The idea of this drama came from an interview with a Kurdish soldier who had fled to England seeking asylum.
Truth to Power Café. Review by Barbara Lewis. Jeremy Goldstein is celebrating the 20th anniversary of his company London Artists Projects, whose missions include taking his “Truth to Power Café” across the world.
By Barbara Lewis • performance, playwrights, theatre, year 2024 • Tags: Barbara Lewis, performance, playwrights, theatre