Women bosses who bully their ambitious young rivals are one aspect of female careerism that is under-explored. Bella Barlow and A.C. Smith at least start to redress the balance with a miniature musical played out underneath Waterloo’s railway arches as part of London’s vibrant Vault festival.
plays
When Christopher Marlowe wrote Doctor Faustus at the end of the 16th century, he was already drawing on German accounts of a medieval legend with eternal and universal reach. Two centuries later, the epic struggle of good and evil was translated back into German in Goethe’s towering tragedy.
Isabel Dixon of Burn Bright Theatre has dramatised Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein two hundred years after its first publication, with two women as its protagonists, Elizabeth Frankenstein and the creature, played by Danielle Winter and Elizabeth Schenk.
Lanie Robertson’s fine one-woman play on Peggy Guggenheim is a feast for intelligent audiences wanting to celebrate Guggenheim’s extraordinary life.
The play’s full title is ‘East. Elegy for the East End and its energetic waste.’ It is a vulgar, visceral evocation of London’s East End working class, white culture. This is a wicked piece of theatre in all senses of that word.
A deft revival in the play’s centenary year is a welcome chance to shed fresh light on Barrie’s fixation with the mismatch between the human potential and idealism represented by a child and the failed adult mess all around us.
This is a brave production by Hannah Chissick as Brecht’s epic drama is meant for the large scale and, squeezing such a huge concept in to the Southwark Playhouse, takes guts.
In a post-factual world of discredited journalism and politicians who, more than ever, we do not believe, theatre with its direct emotional truth can provide a much-needed release.
In the shocker “can-it-possibly-be-true?” atmosphere of tabloid journalism, this theatrical account of Murdoch’s acquisition of a moribund Sun newspaper and his appointment of the angry Albert “Larry” Lamb to bring it back to life tells us the notorious press baron’s grandfather was a minister in the Scottish church.
It is overwhelming to enter this striking twelfth century London church which provides the delightful setting for this touring production. We are inside the Norman and Gothic architecture of English history. This is a strong visual for Shakespeare’s propaganda play which scholars acknowledge as the rewriting of Richard Plantagenet’s life to please Shakespeare’s Tudor patrons.
In a capitalist society, we’re nearly all hired hands, but the extent of the exploitation is more or less pernicious. Melvyn Bragg’s gritty, Northern, sweeping tale ultimately finds the best option for the ordinary man is to accept a pittance to work above ground rather than to toil in a futile World War I trench or in a narrow coal seam beneath the sea.
With a new version of The Cherry Orchard transposed to the time of the 1917 Russian revolution, director Phil Wilmott’s aim was to reflect “our current edgy relationship with Russia,” he tells us in his notes.
By Barbara Lewis • plays, theatre, year 2018 • Tags: Barbara Lewis, plays, theatre