Interventions and Inventive Reinventions
Cinderella
by Gioachino Rossini, libretto by Jacopo Ferretti, translated by Christopher Cowell
English Touring Opera at the Hackney Empire until 7th October, then on tour until 15th November
Review by Mark Aspen
Cinderella is a story that keeps reinventing itself. Well, it has been around quite a while. It may have started with the ancient Greeks, found its way into a thousand folk tales and, via Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, to the familiar panto story. So Cinderella is quite a venerable lady, but never old. English Touring Opera’s reinvention of Rossini’s La Cenerentola, his reinvention of the Cinderella story is, well … inventive.
Read more…Operatic Fairy Dust
Iolanthe
by Arthur Sullivan libretto by W.S. Gilbert
English National Opera at the London Coliseum, until 25th October
Review by Patrick Shorrock
After its superb and searing Peter Grimes, ENO have put on this hugely enjoyable revival of their 2018 production of Iolanthe. Despite their cruel treatment at the hands of the Arts Council – is it malice, incompetence, or sheer arrogance? – ENO are on a roll, when it comes to the quality of their performances.
It gets the right light musical touch – Chris Hopkins doesn’t drive the score too hard and lets it breathe in a relaxed way. The orchestra plays beautifully and the singers don’t force their voices and have beautifully clear diction. We tend to take these things for granted but they matter.
Cal Mc Crystal has refreshed his production and it shows. Having Captain Shaw (actor Clive Mantle) introduce the show helpfully makes sense of the Fairies’ references to him in Act Two. Mantle comes across as very much at home at the Coliseum, despite all his TV and film work, and makes some suitably sharp (but not exactly unpredictable) witticisms. The production still contains lots of gags – possibly too many – including a pantomime cow, sheep (Strephon is meant to be a shepherd after all) unicorns, at least one horse, and a flamingo. And these fairies really do fly.
Read more…Unsettling Intensity
Shooting Hedda Gabler
by Nina Segal, after Henrik Ibsen
Rose Original and The Norwegian Ibsen Company at The Rose Theatre, Kingston until 21st October
Review by Brent Muirhouse
Entering the warmth of The Rose Theatre, in Nina Segal’s modern day reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s classic as Shooting Hedda Gabler, we are instantly transported to a scene as visually striking as it is emotionally haunting and cold. The play’s title, indicative of its multilayered nature, is a double meaning referring to the tragic fate of some in Ibsen’s original, and that the present setting is on set at a film studio, where an adaptation of the play is being made into a motion picture, featuring a former child acting star and an intense self-described auteur director.
Read more…Flies on Love Island
Sheila’s Island
by Tim Firth
The Questors at the Judi Dench Playhouse, Ealing until 14th October
Review by Polly Davies
Sheila’s Island is an interesting choice for the Questors autumn offering. Based on the earlier Neville’s island, also running alongside at Questors, the author Tim Firth has more recently recast the play to redress the gender balance by substituting female characters for the original’s middle aged men. As before, the play shows four middle managers, now all female, coping with a team building exercise gone wrong. Some overthinking by the keen team leader has caused a trip to the Lake District from their company base in Salford to turn from a gentle stroll through the countryside into a scary shipwreck on a deserted island in the middle of Derwentwater.
Read more…Apocalypse Neville
Neville’s Island
by Tim Firth
The Questors at the Judi Dench Playhouse, Ealing until 14th October
Review by Andrew Lawston
Four middle-class, middle-aged middle managers wash up on a tiny island in the Lake District, cut off from the mainland by fog, icy waters, and pike who, we are assured, are up to four feet long, and 30% jaw.
If the premise of Tim Firth’s 1992 play Neville’s Island sounds a little like a grown-up Lord of the Flies, a point which even the characters acknowledge from time to time, the crucial difference is that this is a comedy. While it opens in highly dramatic fashion, as Neville and Gordon splash through the shallows to wash up on the shore, Gordon’s sarcastic recriminations quickly get the audience laughing along.
Read more…It’s a Steal
They Don’t Pay? We Won’t Pay!
by Dario Fo, adapted by Deborah McAndrew
Teddington Theatre Club at Hampton Hill Theatre until 7th October
Review by Gill Martin
“Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay” could be the slogan for shoplifters hit by the current cost of living crisis. Or equally for desperate housewives driven into food bank poverty. Yet the title of this play by Dario Fo was penned way back in the mid-1970s as a political farce, a cutting consumer backlash against high prices in his Italian homeland.
This fast-paced new version of Nobel Prize winning playwright Dario Fo’s Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay, deftly adapted by Deborah McAndrew, is up to the moment with its sharp focus on Anthea (Jenna Powell), a menopausal woman on the edge, out of work and up to her eyes in arrears. A political farce, crazy plot, out of control imaginings… how will things unravel for poor Anthea and her kind?
Read more…Earthy Elegance
The Coronation of Poppea
by Claudio Monteverdi, libretto by Giovanni Francesco Busenello, translated by Helen Eastman
English Touring Opera at the Hackney Empire until 30th September, then on tour until 14th November
Review by Mark Aspen
Here’s a new idea: build an opera house where the public can pay to go, instead of in some nobleman’s palace. Why not get Claudio Monteverdi, he’s been around for quite a while, to write a new idea in opera, itself another new idea? It is Venice 1642, and seventy-five year old Monteverdi comes up with L’incoronazione di Poppea. It is not about characters from the Bible or Greek myths, or a gentle pastoral idyll, but a gritty real story, based in the court of the Roman Emperor, Nero. Monteverdi had written stage works before, but this was among the first that we would recognise as within the genre of opera as we know it today.
Yet this opera still feels new, even after getting on for four centuries later, astoundingly modern in its approach and refreshing in its honesty. English Touring Opera’s earthy but elegant new production, in English translation as The Coronation of Poppea, is even more so.
Uniquely Unique
Imposter 22
by Molly Davies
Access All Areas at the Royal Court Theatre until 14th October
Review by Harry Zimmerman
For me, one of life’s little irritants is the apparent inability of many people to correctly understand and use the word “unique”. A unique event is formally defined as “…being the only one of its kind, unlike anything else”. Whenever I hear the phrase “almost unique”, or “nearly unique”, I cringe, and the spirit of my old English teacher appears next to me stressing that something either is, or isn’t, unique.
Last night, the performance of Imposter 22 for me was unique, in the sense that it was the first time that I had seen a production predominantly comprised of a learning disabled and autistic cast of actors.
Read more…Out for Six
WriteFest 2023
17th Annual WriteFest
Progress Company at Progress Theatre, Reading until 30th September
Review by Nick Swyft
The 17th WriteFest event at Progress comprises six plays by Reading writers. Local writing groups are welcome to contribute, but if you see yourself as a playwright there is nothing to stop you either.
Read more…Hounds of Love
The Hound of the Baskervilles
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, adapted by John Nicholson and Steve Canny
Putney Theatre Company at the Putney Arts Theatre until 30th September
Review by Andrew Lawston
Dartmoor, lanterns flashing in the night, a man apparently walking on tiptoes to his death, “an enormous hound”, escaped convicts, the Grimpen Mire. The plot of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1902 Sherlock Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, has become archetypal, and endless adaptations on stage and screen have taken various liberties with the original text.
It’s something of a surprise then that Putney Theatre Company’s new production of Steve Canny and John Nicholson’s parody of the tale is, plotwise at least, a relatively faithful adaptation.
Read more…
Mark Aspen 