REVIEW: When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other, National Theatre ✭✭
Paul T Davies reviews When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other now playing at the National Theatre London.
Paul T Davies reviews When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other now playing at the National Theatre London.
The staging of Anat omy Of A Suicide is ambitious but pays off although its intensity may leave you feeling shattered.
The Cat In The Hat, the acclaimed stage of Dr Seuss’s famous children’s character will return to the Pleasance Theatre, Islington this Christmas for a limited season from 6 December 2016 to 2 January 2017. From the moment his tall, red-and-white-striped hat appears around the door, Sally and her brother know that the cat in the hat is the funniest, most mischievous cat they have ever met. With the trickiest of tricks and craziest of ideas, he turns a rainy afternoon into an amazing adventure. But what will mum find when she gets home? Based on the much-loved book by Dr Seuss that has captivated generations of readers, The Cat in the Hat is a lively and engaging first theatre experience for young children aged 3+. Originally produced by the National Theatre in 2009, this stage adaptation was presented at the Pleasance Theatre in 2014 and had two sell-out runs … Read more
Billed and promoted as “a play exploring the future of life on earth and climate change”, 2071 may be many things, but a play it is not. Nothing theatrical happens. There is no engagement between stage and audience.
Set firmly in the present, this version lacks languid notions about the past, does not spend too much time on the intricacies of character and prefers shock and blatant slapstick to more gentle ways of making points. There is little sense of old versus new Russia, little sense of the changing of traditions and times and less complexity about everything. But it is radiantly bleak, full of brittle, awful people leading duplicitous and untruthful lives. In that way, it is a compelling re-imagining of Chekhov’s masterpiece.