Alexander Cohen - Page 4

Critics raved about its initial run at the Almedia last year. Can it make the leap from intimate space to grand West End playhouse?

So why is Daniel Fish’s Elektra such a droning dud?

​​​​​​​It’s difficult to imagine anyone watching Oedipus without having prior knowledge of the story’s brutal twist - especially the case given that a rival production of the same play has just closed in the West End to critical acclaim.

At its worst Inside No.9 Stage/Fright plays out like a greatest hits album. Familiar rhythms rewired into a thank you for the fans, who no doubt will vibrate with delight at some of the references to old episodes. Not much of a criticism when the endlessly inventive original is so salute worthily brilliant.

Shifting identities and hierarchies interweave like a spider’s web in Cymbeline. A pinch of added complication can’t hurt?

A case of never being more than the sum of its parts, even if those parts have promise in themselves.

It’s a mistake to dismiss Claus Guth’s production of Janacek’s Jenůfa as symbolically overwrought and interminably grey. Look closer and you’ll discover a duality to each beguiling appearance.

French dramatist Jean Genet is a rarity on British stages, and I can see why. There are more popular writers that do what he does, only better. Genet’s 1947 The Maids is never stark enough to match the claustrophobic brutality of Beckett, nor darkly comic enough to out menace Pinter.

As achingly monotone as it is aggressively monochrome.

Don’t be fooled. It’s midwinter and a rotund man with a big white beard is centre stage. But this is no schmultz-fest panto. It’s Simon Russell Beale as A.E Housman in Blanche Mcintyre’s sober new production of Tom Stoppard’s portrait of the artist as an old man, The Invention Of Love.

We love watching a rich family crumble on stage. From Oedipus and his mother to Chekhov’s families fractured by existential angst, to Ibsen’s split by socio-politics paradigm shifts. The Hubbards, the family of former plantation owners in Lilian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, could be the spiritual successor of them all

One for the Brecht completionists

“This ain’t NWA, it’s NW6.” The preshow warm up rapper unironically proclaims down a booming mic. What a line.

If, like me, you shrug bah humbug to Panto season and its saccharine cavalcade of festive frivolous fluff then you would do well to seek refuge at the Globe and its intelligently calibrated Winter offering of All's Well That Ends Well.

​​​​​​​Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. That’s the hypothesis of Harry Fehr’s new iteration of The Elixir Of Love, a self-reflexive swipe on 1970s sitcoms drunk on the saccharine sentimentalism of second world war triumphalism. Pip pip. Tally ho.

There’s a whiff of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem about Richard Bean’s Reykjavík. Come and raise a melancholic glass to the old world of superstition, mythic tales of magic and monsters, fated to be swallowed by the bloodless age of bureaucracy. It’s like spending an evening with that old man in the pub the light of whose eyes fades as he recounts tales of yonder realising that things ain’t what they used to be.

Zinnie Harris’s 2019 incarnation of The Duchess of Malfi, matter-of-factly titled The Duchess (of Malfi), desperately yearns to conjure the sexy metatheatrical cunning of Van Hove, Mitchell, Ostermeier. It stumbles toe-curlingly at every hurdle.

There’s a ghost of a good show lingering beneath the surface but it never materialises.

Tobias Kratzer’s production pulls the rug from underneath you writes BWW's critic.

A must for Shakespeare completionists. Read our critic's take.