theatre - showing at a stage near you
Bad Girls - The Musical
Not half as bad as one feared, and a lot better than one expected, this prison musical - Chicago for Essex girls and lipstick lesbians - is a feisty rip-off by Maureen Chadwick and Ann McManus, with gutsy music and lyrics by Kath Gotts, from their own television series (they also write Footballers' Wives; yes, it's only a matter of time). A lascivious officer (David Burt) claims sexual favours, a new girl on the wing (Laura Rogers) wants to make a difference, and a gangsters' moll (Sally Dexter) arrives in leathers to kickstart a riot. A martini with your manacle, miss? MC
Garrick Theatre, Charing Cross Road, WC2,
0870 8901104,
badgirlsthemusical.com
A Disappearing Number
How could you make a theatrical entertainment out of prime numbers, the partitioning of integers and the problems of zero? Simon McBurney and his Complicite company can, inspired by the friendship between G H Hardy, the Cambridge mathematician who revelled in the sheer practical uselessness of his subject, and a Brahmin visionary, Srinivasa Ramanujan, who joined him from Madras. The Edwardian narrative has a contemporary parallel in the marriage of a Hardy disciple - fervidly played by Saskia Reeves - and an Asian businessman specialising in futures markets. McBurney's beautiful, intriguing production, with music by Nitin Sawhney, is unmissable.
MC
Barbican Centre, Silk Street, EC2,
0845 120 7500,
barbican.org.uk
Awake and Sing!
The Almeida believes there's nothing like a good American Depression play to cheer you up. After chuckling along with black consciousness issues in Chicago in Big White Fog earlier this year, we can now belly-laugh in the Bronx with a Jewish family on their beam ends in Clifford Odets's 1935 comedy classic. Actually, it's a truly wonderful play - the dialogue is fast and punchy, the construction old-fashioned but perfect - and Michael Attenborough's entertaining revival restores Stockard Channing to the London stage on fine form as an overbearing matriarch quivering with malice and melancholy. Highly recommended.
MC
Almeida Theatre, N1,
020 7350 4404,
almeida.co.uk
The Enchantment
A real discovery, this, by the Swedish novelist and playwright Victoria Benedictsson, herself a role model for Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and Strindberg's Miss Julie; she killed herself when she completed the play in 1888. Her heroine, Louise Strandberg, is enmeshed in an affair with a misogynist, Rodin-like sculptor in Paris - which echoes the doomed affair Benedictsson endured with the free-loving Danish critic George Brandes. Paul Miller's production on an in-the-round stage is beautifully acted by the languorous Nancy Carroll, with Zubin Varla as the heartless lover and Niamh Cusack as a warning voice of reason. MC
National Theatre, South Bank, SE1,
020 7452 3000, nationaltheatre.org.uk
Flight Path
It is a rare pleasure to see a production that transforms raw expression into signs of talent. So it is with David Watson's play about teenagers, divided parents and the assimilation of a young man with Down's syndrome into the patchwork of these characters' lives. Options for Jonathan (Cary Crankson) and his pals include menial jobs at Heathrow, retaking A-levels or drifting into crime. But his elder, disabled brother (Scott Swadkins) wants a garden, and oaks from small acorns of aspiration do sometimes grow. Naomi Jones directs for the Bush and Out of Joint touring company.
MC
Bush Theatre, Shepherds Bush Green, W12,
020 7610 4224,
bushtheatre.co.uk
The Emperor Jones
Eugene O'Neill's ghost-ridden play about African-American history has moved from the tiny Gate Theatre to the Olivier, acquiring a spectacular new staging but still dominated by Paterson Joseph's splendid performance. As the ex-convict dictator of a Caribbean island, Joseph is foppish and wickedly funny. As a fugitive after his subjects' revolt, he sheds his gaudy dignity and becomes a figure of haunted pathos. First performed in 1920, the play, in Thea Sharrock's uncompromising production, is still alarming - as much of a challenge to easy liberalism as to racist bigotry. LH-H
National Theatre,
South Bank, SE1,
020 7452 3000,
nationaltheatre.org.uk
Joseph
This is some comeback for a show that started out as a 20-minute pop cantata and ended up as a two-hour London Palladium blockbuster. That 1991 production is adroitly replicated at the Adelphi, with television talent-contest winner Lee Mead living the West End dream, and living it convincingly. Mark Thompson's designs are a gorgeous riot of Biblical kitsch, with coloured sheep, illuminated pyramids, an Elvis Pharaoh and a singing camel. Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber created a witty pop pastiche and perennial favourite that buffs up fresh as paint. MC
Adelphi Theatre, Strand, WC2, 0870 895 5598,
josephthemusical.com
The Years Between
The Orange Tree digs up another treasure in this 1945 Daphne Du Maurier play about a Conservative MP and war hero (Mark Tandy), 'lost' in action, returning to find his wife holding down his seat in Parliament and starting a new life. Diana Wentworth (Karen Ascoe) is a perfect heroine, learning new things about herself in the struggle between sensual instinct and social duty, and the play expresses a now poignant anticipation of a brave new world. There was a film with Michael Redgrave and Valerie Hobson, but close-up actors give you goosebumps at this intimate address. MC
Orange Tree, Clarence Street, Richmond, Surrey, 020 8940 3633, orangetreetheatre.co.uk
The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents
A sophisticated dialogue- based drama whose dissolves are marked by enraptured dance sequences; a play by Swiss
author Lukas Barfuss which chronicles a spring awakening as disturbing as Wedekind's Lulu's was over a century ago; an open space slyly adorned with doll's-house-sized maquettes of the sets that might have been: the first production by The Gate Theatre's new joint artistic director Carrie Cracknell is terrific, and promises excellently well for her regime. Cath Whitefield gives a rude, funny, heartbreaking performance as the teenager with a congenital mental disability, whose taste for rough sex dismays her liberal parents. Ends September 29. LH-H
The Gate Theatre,
020 7229 0706,
gatetheatre.co.uk
The Merchant of Venice
In this engaging, intelligent production by Rebecca Gatward, Venice reaches out with a Rialto bridge and a gondola jetty into the Globe theatre's pit, where the groundlings muster. Shylock's daughter Jessica makes her escape in a bustling carnival procession of masks and torches; the casket scene, where Portia's suitors ponder the relative attractions of gold, silver and lead, is played on the apron stage while the heiress spies on them from the musicians' gallery. John McEnery's Shylock is a lean, sharp-witted and husky-voiced businessman, and Kirsty Besterman's confident Portia is both priggish and cunning without losing our sympathy. Ends October 6. MC
Shakespeare's Globe, Bankside, SE1,
020 7401 9919, shakespeares-globe.org
The Importance of Being Earnest
In one of the unlikeliest West End combinations in years, Penelope Keith, grande dame of the sitcom, gives her Lady Bracknell in a production of Wilde's masterpiece by Peter Gill, former firebrand of the Royal Court and a stickler for naturalism on stage. Gill has just directed Gaslight at the Old Vic, so we know the period setting will be meticulously observed. After a lengthy tour, the show, which previews from 22 January, should brighten up the New Year, with that fine character actress Janet Henfrey playing Miss Prism and the mixed-up lovers acted by fresh unknowns.
MC
Vaudeville Theatre,
The Strand, WC2,
0870 890 0511,
nimaxtheatres.com
Rider Spoke
And now for something completely different from 11-21 October taking place in and around the streets in the Barbican area. The interactive performance company Blast Theory invites you to take a cycle ride guided by a games console mounted on the handlebars. You can hire a bike, or take your own, then set off (starting times are every 15 minutes between 5pm and 8.45pm) to eavesdrop on other players, make a recording, or play a game "where none of the usual rules apply". You're the audience and the show, and (as far as I'm concerned) you're on your own.
MC
Barbican Centre, Silk Street, EC2, 0845 120 7500,
barbican.org.uk
The Hired Man
New Perspectives, based in the East Midlands, launches a five-month tour of Melvyn Bragg and Howard Goodall's evocative 1984 musical based on Bragg's early novel, which was itself based on the life of Bragg's grandfather. In short, a young married couple struggle to survive on the land as the First World War looms. The show has 21 musical numbers and has been reconceived by director Daniel Buckroyd as a flexible chamber production, moving on at the end of next week to village halls, schools and small theatres from Leicester to Cumbria, Huddersfield to West Sussex. Greenwich must wait till next March.
MC
Lakeside Arts Centre, University Park, Nottingham,
0115 846 7777,
newperspectives.co.uk
Reviews by Michael Coveney and Lucy Hughes-Hallett
FIRST POSTED SEPTEMBER 20, 2007
