This new adaptation by Matthew Thomas Walker (who also directs) of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian masterpiece written 84 years in the past and set 524 years in the future is big and bold for a company only on its third project. The script is a little bloated, full of draggy exposition that could certainly be shown […]
It’s a grind to attend three hours of theatre. But grinds aren’t always bad. Sometimes, the alienation that accompanies “why I am watching this?” can induce some valuable critical distance. There are good questions to be raised about Suzan-Lori Parks’ Father Comes Home from the Wars. In the process of watching it: “why three parts?”, […]
Filament Incubator is presenting 8 plays in 8 months, creating opportunities for young playwrights to get their work on its feet and in front of an audience. The ambition of that is remarkable and, no matter the merit of any particular production in said slate, it’s an overall extremely impressive feat. It therefore pains me […]
A lot of Royal Court’s Upstairs programming is too dry for its own good. Not this. Nathaniel Martello-White’s Torn wears complexity on its sleeve. Angel arranges a circle of seats and then her family into a room, like an AA meeting, and wants to tackle the wrongs in her life. We don’t know […]
Stringberg’s 1901 work A Dream Play is historically important: its lack of structure, condensing of characters to social roles and narrative current that winds along by way of thin associations between people and places mean it was a herald of dramatic surrealism and expressionism. A dream-like tapestry that eschewed the trappings of realism that Ibsen […]
A few years ago, Bletchley Park became a minor academic obsession of mine. After discovering the code-breaking history of this British installation, I read everything about Bletchley that I could get my hands on, from books about the history of Bletchley and its hard-working inhabitants to Alan Turing’s biography and his paper on computable numbers. […]
All My Sons This Arthur Miller drama feels a-typical for the company that’s made its name on Shakespeare and its money on musicals. Though modern drama isn’t Stratford’s usual racket, Martha Henry’s smartly cast and emotionally wrought production might be the best thing at the festival this year (well, maybe second to Breath of Kings: […]
Second World War stories always seem to be crowd-pleasing, bringing in elements of tragedy, violence, treason and, in this case, …