February 3, 2012
Critics At The Arts Desk - Latest Theatre Reviews
Vying for the attention of the public are a crop of new plays, which have kicked off the new theatre season in earnest. The Arts Desk’s theatre reviews will be able to tell us what’s hot and what’s not.
On The Arts Desk this week is a special theatre feature by acclaimed actress Lisa Dillon, who explains how she approached the tricky character of Kate, in Shakespeare’s ‘The Taming of the Shrew’. The challenge for Dillon lay in humanising and understanding Kate’s cycle of behaviour, given that many read this battle-of-the-sexes play as heavily misogynistic.
Leeds was home to ‘Big Society!’, visited by Graham Rickson, for a rollicking piece by Boff Whalley set in 1910. In a bitty but ultimately cohesive string of humorous musical numbers and running jokes, comedian Phill Jupitus leads a motley crew. There is fine musical support from onstage band Chumbawamba, plenty of pertinent jokes at the Coalition’s expense and even a neat dramatic resolution of sorts.
According to Alexandra Coghlan, one of the theatre highlights this week is ‘The Madness of George III’ at the Apollo Theatre. Coghlan was delighted that this epigrammatically written historical play has finally arrived in the West End. The performance of David Haig gives the play ballast as he takes on the role of the ailing monarch, rescuing it from the risk of glib one-liners and historical reduction.
Taking in everything from bee keeping to quantum physics, Carole Woddis caught the latest offering from hotly tipped playwright Nick Payne, ‘Constellations’ at the Royal Court Theatre. Providing something of an acting master class, jokey one minute, uneasy the next, Rafe Spall and Sally Hawkins are both superb as a bee keeper and cosmologist who met one day at a barbecue. Abstract and chaotic rather than neat and linear, it’s a subtle and entertaining play about modern lives and relationships.
Filed under Dance Camps by Barb