A Royal Delight
The Madness of King George III
by Alan Bennett
Teddington Theatre Club at the Hampton Hill Theatre until 11th March
Review by Viola Selby
Opulence abounds as we enter the magnificent court of King George III.
Stepping into the theatre, the audience is instantly transported back in time to the Eighteenth Century with a stunning set design, including a royal balcony and marble staircase showing off the reality and splendour of the period. This is then exemplified by the wonderful wigs, marvellous makeup and absolutely stunning over-the-top costumes, greatly highlighting the importance of appearance, all of this thanks to the creative genius of set designer Junis Olmscheid and her team and the wardrobe lead Lesley Alexander and the wardrobe team. The use of fanfare and of Handel’s music by Jacob Taylor, adds even more, creating a royal delight for the senses.
Read more…King Charles’ Coronation, The Opera
Il Viaggio a Reims
by Gioachino Rossini, libretto by Luigi Balocchi
English Touring Opera at the Hackney Empire until 4th March, then on tour until 29th May
Review by Mark Aspen
With the anticipation building towards this spring’s coronation of King Charles, it is quite a coup to put on an opera about (and commissioned for) the coronation of King Charles. English Touring Opera’s perambulations around the country take it to Cheltenham on 6th May, Coronation Day. And what a glorious and exuberant way for the fortunate townspeople of this genteel spa to celebrate such an historic occasion.
However, the opera in question, Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims is not about May 2023 and the coronation of our own King Charles III, but about the coronation of the restored French monarch, King Charles X in May 1825. But let’s not allow a mere 198 years spoil a good opening to a review.
Read more…Financial Affairs
Someone of Significance
by Amalia Kontesi
Network Theatre Company at Network Theatre, Waterloo until 5th March
Review by Denis Valentine
Someone of Significance is based around two characters Rosie (Funlola Olufunwa) and Brad (Simon Bass), investment bankers who tread and cross the line between work colleagues and illicit lovers. The play looks to cover much more than just an affair between two people as their dynamic ideas on class, gender and how a person’s life, career and identity can be guided by outside elements and responsibilities is explored.
From the first scene the play attempts to show concepts on relationships, both in the personal and occupational spheres, plus surrounding issues such as class and gender, all intersperse into the proceedings. The play is written in a way that explores these aspects in each and every scene with varying degrees of success.
Read more…Travelling Hopefully
The Journey to Venice
by Bjørg Vik, translated by Janet Garton
Anarchy Division at the Finborough Theatre, Earl’s Court until 25th March
Review by Patrick Shorrock
How to negotiate the challenges of living longer – failing health and memory, financial pressures, loneliness and isolation – has very much become a theme du jour, most prominently in Florian Zeller’s play The Father, which was filmed in 2020 with Anthony Hopkins. Bjørg Vik’s play – fluently translated by Janet Garton – may be rather earlier (it received its premiere in 1992) but still feels very up to date.
Rollicking in the Rowlocks
Fisherman’s Friends – The Musical
by Amanda Whittington, music arranged by Fisherman’s Friends
Royo at Richmond Theatre, then on tour until 20th May
Review by Mark Aspen
If your lunchtime stroll took you along the chilly riverside at Richmond at the very end of February you may have had the heart-warming experience of chancing across a lively crew of Cornish fishermen vigorously singing sea shanties. You can’t keep an old salt away from water and boats (and seagulls) it seems.
True Cornish types have a love of home, but also a love of the wild outdoors, on a moor or out at sea. It is a strange soulful mix of agoraphobia and claustrophobia, perhaps exemplified by tin mines and fishing ports, both now alas in decline.
Read more…Darkness Brought to Light
Oklahoma!
by Richard Rodgers, Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II
The Bard Summerscape at Wyndham’s Theatre until 2nd September
Review by Mark Aspen
All the best known and brightest numbers from Oklahoma! come right at the beginning. But, in Daniel Fish’s fresh new take on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first musical, they are not as their devotees would know these numbers. Here is a version of Oklahoma! that examines the darker sides of this much-loved musical.
Bright and dark are quite an appropriate adjectives, as the inventive lighting design features as much as does the energetic music, brilliant singing, and incisive acting.
Read more…Compressed Tension
Hedda Gabler
by Harriet Madeley, after Henrik Ibsen
A Girl Called Stephen at the Reading Rep Theatre, Reading until 11th March
Review by Sam Martin
Written by Harriet Madeley and directed by Annie Kershaw, this contemporary adaptation of a classic Ibsen play highlights Hedda’s claustrophobia in her brand-new marriage and explores the tensions between old passions and current duties. Kershaw’s direction draws on the pressures of conformity and casts the feeling of societal entrapment in a fresh light as the protagonist grapples with the traditions and ideals of her upbringing against her desire to embrace her past relationship with Isla. This refreshing variation brings a well renowned story into the modern era.
Read more…Pixie Perfect
The Light Burns Blue
by Silva Semerciyan
The Questors Youth Theatre at the Judi Dench Playhouse, Ealing until 4th March
Review by Andrew Lawston
“Photography is truth. And cinema is truth twenty-four times a second.” So said Jean-Luc Godard in his 1960 film Le Petit Soldat. But in 1917 a group of English girls demonstrated that Godard was working from a faulty premise, in a story which captured the imagination of a nation buckling under the burden of the First World War, and even succeeded in duping the father of modern detective fiction, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The Light Burns Blue tells the story of some of the personalities involved in the “Cottingley Fairies” photographs, performed with gusto by Questors Youth Theatre. The floor of Alex Marker and Katarzyna Kryńska’s deceptively simple set is covered with giant photo frames, and an empty frame forms a proscenium arch through which further frames can be seen. This simple effect gives the set a false sense of depth through forced perspective, and sets up the idea of photographic trickery from the outset.
Read more…Coming and Conquering
Giulio Cesare
by George Frederick Handel, libretto by Nicola Haym
English Touring Opera at the Hackney Empire until 25th February, then on nation tour until 25th May
Review by Patrick Shorrock
This staging of one of Handel’s finest operas was a musical triumph for English Touring Opera in partnership with The Old Street Band. Lovers of Handel’s operas should definitely seek it out. It depicts how Julius Caesar’s plans to subjugate Egypt – where Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy are fighting over which one of them should take the throne – are violently disrupted by erotic attraction between Cleopatra and Caesar, even if there is a feeling that the political outcome was inevitable anyway and the disruption is only temporary. That erotic disruption is brought to life in a range of some of the most musically intense arias Handel ever wrote, which are superbly delivered here.
Read more…Child of the Raj
A Doll’s House
by Tanika Gupta after Henrik Ibsen
The Questors Theatre at Questors Studio, Ealing until 4th March
Review by Brent Muirhouse
Tamika Gupta’s reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House, set in 1879 Calcutta, India, is a thought-provoking and engaging production that successfully reinterprets the classic text for a contemporary audience. Calcutta (today Kolkata) was the capital of British India at the height of empire, and British presence in the region was significant and deeply ingrained in the city’s social, economic and political structures. As Indian nationalist resistance and anti-colonial sentiment gained momentum around the time of the play’s setting, the play retains the central themes and motifs of Ibsen’s original but introduces a new political context that creates a powerful dilemma of identity for the central character, Niru (Nora in Ibsen’s original script).
Read more…
Mark Aspen 