Holly O'Mahony — Theater Critic

The play breathlessly unpicks its knotty moral conundrum, packaged in a style that grates. Pike’s Jess Parks is narrator as well as main character, and she describes her situation (high-flying career woman diminished to a doormat at home) and the events that befall her family (18-year-old son Harry gets accused of something life-shatteringly terrible) with so much exposition that it never scorches as it might.

Some of the slapstick is a bit tedious, with oversized costumes causing a few too many pratfalls... But it all gets neatly tied into both layers of the play. I doubt Mischief are as desperate as their Cornley characters for a good review, but bravo to them anyway.

Transporting such a roaming, highly technical story to the stage is ambitious. And in Dunster’s production, there’s some friction between making it theatrical, with a largely bare stage leaving detailed world-building to the audience’s imagination, and a desire to impress with spectacle, flames and mid-air fights. There are no attempts to hide the harnesses that send the story’s heroine, Katniss (Mia Carragher, in a physically demanding stage debut) soaring, or to make the crane arm that she climbs look like a tree. These moments can seem like watching a behind-the-scenes video showcasing green-screen technology.

Between them, this Shakespearean tragedy is in good hands, and if it’s not a revelatory production, it’s certainly a slick one, with each interaction fine-tuned and deftly choreographed – especially the violence. There are dagger fights that play out like tumbling dances, and as Harewood’s Othello headbutts or breaks a neck, Jon Nicholls’ sound effects to amplify these moments are chilling. By contrast, recorded compositions by the great PJ Harvey are unrolled in fleeting snippets and seem underused. Some moments are also slightly too seamless: Jones’s Iago kills off Tom Byrne’s Roderigo in a blur of flailing limbs and out-of-eyeshot plunging daggers that’s easy to miss.

We already know The Weir is a masterpiece, of course. After several extensions to its inaugural run for the Royal Court’s smaller space (temporarily housed at the Ambassadors Theatre at the time), it transferred to the West End and ran for two years. But this production, almost 30 years on, is quite perfect. And if its three-month run doesn’t extend, it’ll surely be because the stage can’t hold Gleeson hostage from the screen for any longer.

It’s a serious subject matter, but scorching one-liners, usually delivered by a deadpan Lowden but sometimes a quick-to-bite Freeman, ensure the play remains surprisingly funny at every turn. And the pair bring compelling opposing energies, with Freeman’s initially upbeat, delicately curious James a delicious contrast to Holden’s blunt, unfiltered Luka. Whether tender or troubling, chemistry always bubbles between them as they ping-pong through Ireland’s terse script.

Mischief’s work is inspired by Michael Frayn’s masterpiece Noises Off and the rising farcical stakes of the first act bear a resemblance. But although this comedy is neatly plotted – with all balls thrown in the air eventually retrieved – there’s more going round in circles than cleverly building towards a comedic crescendo. How well you get on with it will depend on your humour, but loyal fans of the company won’t be disappointed. It’s pure escapism: it doesn’t make you think and you’ll see the jokes coming before they land. If that’s what you need, then this gaggle of spies and their luckless path-crossers will keep you entertained.

Though this interpretation succeeds in becoming a story for the present, it struggles tonally. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the glut of incest narratives to land on the London stage in the past six months – see also The Other Place and double whammy of Oedipuses – it’s that when the guilty parties get down to it, audiences will gasp then snigger, loudly. Oz and Reggie’s (Patricia Allison) icky intimacy is also met with laughs. And though it gets there eventually, the chemistry between Smurfit’s Helena and Rhashan Stone’s level-headed Andersen (a lawyer not a pastor here) takes a while to warm up.

Amy Jephta’s play A Good House is a worthy exploration of prejudice and privilege. There’s even a state-of-the-nation essence to its depiction of characters who complain how race, class or wealth is holding them back, while being unable to acknowledge which corner of this triangle offers them advantages. But while spiky exchanges thinly veiled as neighbourliness air these uncomfortable truths, it feels unfocused, as if unsure whether it wants to be a play about racism or capitalism. And while both ‘isms’ are addressed, it doesn’t peer under the bonnet of either of them thoroughly enough.

Everyone is miserable in this house, where children become pawns in their parents’ gross games to keep wealth in the family, and women are told a frown never got them anywhere. Duff’s Regina and Worthington-Cox’s Alexandra share a painful final scene, yet there’s no real sense of redemption, which makes this a hard watch. Their performances, though, are tip-top.

Many will know the plot from the 2008 film starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, but Compton freshens it up by transposing the story from North America to the UK. Set in an early-to-mid 1900s Cornish fishing village, it’s atmospheric, with fishing nets and buoys hanging above a wooden, dock-like stage. Darren Clark’s folksy score is studded with Clark and Compton’s sea shanty-style songs, and there’s a determinedly upbeat essence to the music that prevents the bittersweet story from ever dwelling in its darkness.

John Wilkes Booth, the roguish actor who shot dead US President Abraham Lincoln at a theatre in 1865, is the subject of Simple8’s latest play. Thorough research from writers Sebastian Armesto and Dudley Hinton colours in the life of the Confederate sympathiser, whose persona is often reduced to the firing of his gun. But this two-hour production, directed by Armesto, is sometimes guilty of oversaturating the story, embellishing Booth’s life with more details than are necessary. And though there is a playfulness and resourcefulness to the company’s storytelling, its chronology makes it hard to follow.

Mohammed nails both the humour and the sorrow. He takes the script at a lick, for the most part, but when one anecdote takes a particularly dark turn, he falls silent and walks for several paces against the slowly rotating stage, giving the revelation a moment to fully resonate. Tomorrow night’s actor will respond differently, as will whoever who picks up the envelope after them, and the actors who bravely sign up to future revivals in years to come. It’s a cleverly timeless piece, echoing authoritarian oppression the world over.

The show’s deft brilliance is in the lyrics of its songs. Eight Dates, about the brutal ghostings and last-minute cancellations rife in online dating, bottles the phenomenon superbly, while Meet Market, with its takedown of dating profile clichés (likely to be lost on anyone who’s never swiped to find romantic connection), and C U Never, with its tap-dancing chorus and clever incorporation of texting sound effects into the score, are further highlights.

Rachel O’Riordan’s production skilfully balances this serious messaging with humour. Bentall is brilliant at multi-roleing between the potty-mouthed Meg Long (a character deserving of a reappearance), the bumbling Reverend Johnson, and timid-until-sexually-awakened Mary. And Nick Fletcher's Robert Sideway, a pickpocket who fancies himself a thesp, is entertainingly flamboyant.

Hello, Dolly! review“Victorious turn from Imelda Staunton” REVIEWS JUL 19, 2024 BY HOLLY O'MAHONY THE LONDON PALLADIUM Imelda Staunton in Hello, Dolly! at The London Palladium. Photo: Manuel Harlan Imelda Staunton in Hello, Dolly! at The London Palladium. Photo: Manuel Harlan “Hello, Imelda!” Staunton is spectacular as widowed matchmaker Dolly Levi in Dominic Cooke’s long-awaited revival Facebook Twitter LinkedIn bookmark_border Sparkling with joie de vivre and running on a boisterous charm that prevents this safe but loveable production becoming overly sentimental, Dominic Cooke’s revival of Michael Stewart (book) and Jerry Herman’s (music and lyrics) 1964 musical about a widowed matchmaker who returns to New York City on a second wind marks the first time the show has been seen in London since Timothy Sheader’s polished 2009 production at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. But “look at the old girl now, fellas”, because Cooke’s take is a far grander affair that stylistically leans into the story’s dawn-of-the-20th-century setting and is driven by a victorious turn from musical theatre heavyweight Imelda Staunton as Dolly Levi. The story follows its professional meddler from the small town of Yonkers, where she’s been on a mission to find a suitable wife for the miserly half-a-millionaire Horace Vandergelder (a socially awkward and tetchy Andy Nyman), to New York City. Continues... RELATED TO THIS REVIEWHello, Dolly! praised for majority female orchestra Hello, Dolly! praised for majority female orchestra How Hello, Dolly! set the template for leading ladies in musical theatre How Hello, Dolly! set the template for leading ladies in musical theatre But the show is essentially built around its second act title number, and a rosy-cheeked, mischievously likeable Staunton saves her best for it: gliding like royalty down the gilded staircase (made iconic by the Barbra Streisand-starring film) of the Harmonia Gardens restaurant and affectionately ‘wow wow wow-ing’ to waiters in velvet jackets as they coo “Hello, Dolly” back at her. If it’s a visual replica of the movie’s sequence, it’s also a spectacular scene in which Rae Smith’s set and costumes, Bill Deamer’s choreography and the performances all dazzle.

Seven high-octane performers pour humour and vivacity into the show. Barbé and Hinds are a strong double act with yin-yang energy and impressive vocal ranges. Barbé’s nervy sweetness offsets Hinds’ dry humour and together they have this vehicle running like a well-oiled machine. Elliot Broadfoot is always watchable, flip-flopping between playing Kathy’s doting mother Vanessa and morgue worker Justin. And Elliotte Williams-N’Dure is very good as the downbeat, exasperated Detective Inspector Sue Shaw.