Category: Theatre

This review first appeared on the Sheengate publishing website. The production, by Headlong Theatre, was at Richmond Theatre from  3-7 November 2015.

The Glass Menagerie at Richmond Theatre is an impressive and moving production of Tennessee William’s “memory play”, with strong performances from the entire cast.

According to Tom Wingfield, one of the protagonists, the play is “truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion”, a memory of events that happened several years before, when he was living at home with his overbearing mother Amanda and his disabled and painfully shy sister Laura.

The staging is one room, set back on the stage to emphasise its distance from both the audience and the present. As Tom says in his introduction, as a memory play it is “dimly lighted… not realistic” and we see a stage stripped of nearly all furniture and props, with no windows and no homely touches. The actors are barefoot and, although the play is set in 1937, their hair and costumes belong to no particular period, as if to show that that such details are unimportant and distracting, and that it is only the interaction of the characters that is significant. Continue reading “The Glass Menagerie – Headlong Theatre”

[Northern Broadsides production, Rose Theatre Kingston, 19-23 May 2015]

Shakespeare’s King Lear is one of his most powerful tragedies, with fathers estranged from the children who truly love them and betrayed by those who merely pretended to. At the end of the play the dead outnumber the living and what redemption has been achieved has been painfully and fatally bought.

Northern Broadsides’ production at Kingston’s Rose is plain and unadorned, staged by the director Jonathan Miller as if in a Jacobean court theatre with no scenery, subdued lighting, the minimum of props and with the cast wearing 17^th century dress. Continue reading “King Lear – Northern Broadsides”

[Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond. 15 April – 16 May 2015]

Myra Bolton leads a hugely complicated life. Her house is littered with books, pamphlets and newspapers, as well as friends, lovers, ex-lovers, would-be lovers, and the lovers of ex-lovers. They all discuss politics “with the passionate intensity others reserve for sex”. She moves from protest march to committee meeting to yet another campaign.

Back into this chaos comes her 22 year old son Tony, returning from two years of National Service. The army gave him the order and stability his life had never had and now all he wants is to be back in his old room in the house that was the only constant part of his childhood. Continue reading “Each His Own Wilderness – Doris Lessing”