Allegra. Review by Julia Pascal. This seemingly frothy play with music is a vehicle for Dame Maureen Lipman. She plays Allegra, a woman with a pathological desire to burst into song. Allegra is motivated to brighten the mood of those around her, even at the most inappropriate moments.
theatre
Romeo and Juliet. Review by Barbara Lewis. Even in times when women are cast as Shakespeare’s Lear and Prospero, it’s a bold move to do the same with Romeo – the byword for the romantic male lover. It’s the tactic of Greenwich Theatre’s artistic director James Haddrell, who has also dared to compete for audience attention with the World Cup and heatwave weather in what is billed as fresh, summer Shakespeare.
How to Make a Mess. Review by Barbara Lewis. Not the Bible, not “Winnie the Pooh” not even Harry Potter – “How to Eat” was the book the loving father of Anna (played by Natasha Karp) gave to his daughter to learn to read and as a life manual.
Shantify. Review by Barbara Lewis. For anyone who thought the modern wave of enthusiasm for fishing songs had crested with the lockdown singing postman, “Shantify”, uttered in an awed stage whisper, is here to prove them wrong.
Quartet in Autumn. Review by Barbara Lewis. Lonely, unloved women are the protagonists of Barbara Pym’s novels. The brave honesty of her subject matter led some publishers to reject her, although the poet Philip Larkin was famously among her advocates.
Choreodrome; next steps. Review by Zoe Hewitt. The Place’s Choreodrome; next steps brought two emerging dance makers, Orla Hardie and Samara Langham, to the main theatre stage with new works developed through Choreodrome, the venue’s annual residency and commissioning programme.
A Sunday of Sondheim. Review by Barbara Lewis. Max Eade, nominally the director, who tells us he is really just the organiser, says he wanted this small-scale performance in the intimate space of the Union Theatre to be imperfect; a matter of “scribbles on a page”.
Lady Susan. Review by Barbara Lewis. “Lady Susan” is either the culmination of Jane Austen’s youthful experiments with epistolary novels and the narration of society scandals or the beginning of her mature phase of subtle characterisation and the establishment of her distinctive voice, depending on your viewpoint.
Flying Ant Day. Review by Barbara Lewis. Flying ant day – when ants live, reproduce and die – together with the human moment of death are among the less discussed topics even in the voluble world of social media. Writer Joey Ellis takes on this unlikely twinning in a play that crowds a dysfunctional family around a death bed while winged ants throng the air.
Cosi fan tutte. Review by Julia Pascal. What is so shocking about this opera written by Mozart in 1790 is how contemporary it is. This co-production with New York’s Metropolitan Opera was first seen at the Coliseum in 2014.
Dance: “Tutu”. Review by Primrose MacFay. What fun! A show called “Tutu” threatens serious political attention and then turns out to be quite other, a genre-bending, gender-bending romping rampage through conventions not just of dance but of human, or – one might as well say it – sexual relations.
Macbeth. Review by Barbara Lewis. The vocation of the HandleBards touring theatre company is to share a love of Shakespeare through sheer entertainment in settings that range from the classroom to country estates on summer’s evenings. That means comic relief prevails over tragic significance even when the chosen drama is The Scottish Play.
By Stephen McGrath • added recently on London Grip, performance, plays, theatre • Tags: Barbara Lewis, performance, plays, theatre