REVIEW: The Way Of The World, Donmar Warehouse ✭✭✭
The Donmar Warehouse production of The Way Of The World looks fabulous, with Anna Fleishle’s design and Ilona Karas and her costume team being the stars of the show.
Geoffrey Streatfield
REVIEW: Cell Mates, Hampstead Theatre ✭✭✭
Cell Mates. Hampstead Theatre. 12 December 2017 3 Stars Book Now Cell Mates has become a curio over time mainly to the troubles surrounding its West End production in 1995. Star Stephen Fry walked out of the production suffering from a breakdown, and the tabloid frenzy that surrounded it overshadowed the play itself. Thankfully Fry made a comeback in more ways than one, and Edward Hall’s new production aims to reclaim the play itself, and there is much to admire in Simon Gray’s writing, even if the play now looks dated. Based on fact, it’s the story of spy, double agent, and some would say traitor George Blake, who, four years into a 42 year prison sentence for leaking some of the West’s most sensitive intelligence secretes to the Russians, hatched a plot to escape from Wormwood Scrubs. He enlisted Irishman Sean Bourke to break him out, and, following the … Read more
REVIEW: The Beaux’ Stratagem, Olivier Theatre ✭✭✭
Of all the cast, it is the gifted Susannah Fielding who comes closest to the right style of acting. She really is a tremendous performer, winning in her winsome style, with a voice as agile as her facial features and just as expressive. She keeps her Mrs Sullen to the naturalistic style Godwin has chosen, but you can feel, just below her gorgeous exterior, that within lies the right style, the right character, the right attitude, desperately wanting to break out of the confines of naturalism and take shape in proper Restoration Comedy mode.
REVIEW: My Night With Reg, Apollo Theatre ✭✭✭✭
Some of the performances are deliberately bigger, determinedly more overtly comic, less confrontational than they were at the Donmar. This lessens the dramatic sense of the play in unsatisfactory ways, while ostensibly appealing, presumably, to the expected middle class audiences in the West End. Some of the acting remains first-rate and the inherent power of the writing, while diminished, is far from lost. Lewis Reeves, Richard Cant and Matt Bardock are even better than they were at the Donmar
