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…Consuming Passions
La Traviata : Preview
Instant Opera at Normansfield Theatre, Teddington, 6th to 8th October
Preview: Opera critic Thomas Forsythe discusses the forthcoming production of Verdi’s La Traviata with Instant Opera’s Artistic Director, Nicholas George
TF: Hello Nick. It is good to meet up with you again. Thank you for the opportunity once more to chat with you about Instant Opera’s latest production. This season, it is La Traviata Giuseppe Verdi’s perennial blockbuster. Yet, after the première in 1853, Verdi wrote “La traviata last night was a failure, “Was the fault mine … ?” He could not have been more overwhelmingly wrong as, year after year, La Traviata breaks records as the world’s most frequently performed opera. What is it, do you see, that gives this work its enduring appeal?
Read more…High Flyers
Swan Awards, 2022-23
Arts Richmond at the Landmark Arts Centre, Teddington
Eat your heart out, Oscars, for the Swans have come to roost again.
The Swan Awards for excellence in local theatre were first conferred in September 1986 for the best of non-commercial theatre in Richmond upon Thames during the 1985-86 season. A grand dinner dance was held in the Richmond Hill Hotel to announce the winners, who were each presented with a wooden Swan crafted by sculptor Lesley Beaumont. The event has taken place every year since.
Read more…Essential Operatic Viewing
The Mikado
Music by Arthur Sullivan, libretto by W.S Gilbert, adapted by John Savournin
Charles Court Opera at the Arcola Theatre until 23rd September
Review by Patrick Shorrock
This is the simply the best Mikado that I have seen. It even surpasses the famous Jonathan Miller ENO version at the Coliseum. G&S is a delicate plant that is easily killed if the performers betray the slightest awareness that they are funny or think that they can get away with bad singing. Sullivan’s music deserves – and rewards – the very best a singer can give, and gets it here in an excellent production that ensures that both the comedy and the music make the maximum possible impact. The Madrigal, in particular, is utterly captivating: dead in tune and beautifully sung.
Read more…Bath Etiquette
Persuasion
by Dawn Bush, adapted from the novel by Jane Austen
DOT Productions, Theatre at the Tabard, Chiswick until 7th October
Review by Claire Alexander
Persuasion is Jane Austen’s final (complete) novel and Austen experts (of which I am not) often say that Anne is one of her most mature, and reflective heroines.
Read more…Moor and More
Brontë, the Opera
by Lisa Logan, libretto based on the play by Polly Teale
Keynote Opera at the Arcola Theatre, part of the Grimeborn Festival, until 16th September
Review by Mark Aspen
Forget the windswept moors, the Yorkshire accents, the lumpen servants carrying lanthorns in the dark, for the Brontë sisters in Lisa Logan’s new opera inhabit another wild darkness, a Freudian world of their own psyches. The foreboding heathland is condensed into their father’s parsonage, where they are confined by the mores of the early Nineteenth Century.
It is perhaps therefore pertinent that the world première of Brontë, the Opera should take place in the Arcola Theatre, whose snug acting space emulates the claustrophobic ambience of Haworth rectory.
Charlotte, Emily and Anne are trapped with their own longings, for freedom, for love, for independence; trapped by social standing, by religious convention and by perceived propriety as women. Their inner escape is manifest via the twins of fantasy and poetry, forms of self-expression that were to blossom into some of the English language’s finest literature.
Read more…
Mark Aspen 