REVIEW: Uncle Vanya, Hampstead Theatre ✭✭
Sophie Adnitt reviews Terry Johnson’s new production of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya now playing at Hampstead Theatre.
Alan Cox
REVIEW: City Stories, St James Studio ✭✭✭✭✭
This therefore is work at a sophisticated creative level, where everything depends in a very pure, basic sense on the players themselves. There is no scenery, only a few hints at costume – a hat or a coat here and there – and some chairs where needed. It’s worth stressing too that the St James Studio, with the stage shunted off to one side to accommodate a bar, is not the easiest place to reel an audience in collectively. There are too many awkward angles and levels to play to, and the stage space available is tiny. Great credit then to all the players and to James Phillips for his direction, quite apart from his luminous yet precisely calibrated writing.
REVIEW: Kingmaker, Above The Arts, ✭✭✭✭
Most immediately Kingmaker recognizes the extent to which the rewards in politics go to those whose priorities remain resolutely fixed on the rules of the game and not to those who pursue resolutions to personal, messy, unpredictable human objectives outside or secondary to those rules. This is not the old argument that politics is about succeeding rather than about implementing policy, but rather the narrower point that politicians will ultimately stick with and support each other because they are comfortable in the knowledge that they understand and speak the same language.
