February 2, 2012
The Arts Desk’s Latest Theatre Reviews
With a crop of new plays vying for the public’s attention, the new theatre season has kicked off in earnest. The Arts Desk’s theatre reviews will be able to tell us what’s hot and what’s not.
Acclaimed actress Lisa Dillon explains how she approached the tricky character of Kate, in Shakespeare’s ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ as a special theatre feature on The Arts Desk this week. This battle-of-the-sexes play is seen be many as being heavily misogynistic, so the challenge for Dillon lay in humanising and understanding Kate’s cycle of behaviour.
Meanwhile Graham Rickson visited Leeds for ‘Big Society!’ for a rollicking piece by Boff Whalley set in 1910. A motley crew is led by comedian Phill Jupitas in a bitty but ultimately cohesive string of humorous musical numbers and running jokes. 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.
One of the theatre highlights this week according to Alexandra Coghlan is ‘The Madness of George III’ at the Apollo Theatre. Finally arriving in the West End, this epigrammatically written historical play delighted Coghlan. Rescuing the play from the risk of glib one-liners and historical reduction, David Haig takes on the role of the ailing monarch and his performance gives the play ballast.
Carole Woddis caught the latest offering from hotly tipped playwright Nick Payne, ‘Constellations’ at the Royal Court Theatre, which takes in everything from bee keeping to quantum physics. Rafe Spall and Sally Hawkins are both superb as a bee keeper and cosmologist who meet at a barbeque one day, providing something of an acting master class, jokey one minute, uneasy the next. It is a subtle and entertaining play about modern lives and relationships, abstract and chaotic rather than neat and linear.
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