REVIEW: Summer and Smoke, Almeida Theatre ✭✭✭✭

Summer and Smoke at Almeida Theatre

Summer and Smoke Almeida Theatre Four stars Book Now Despite the poetic beauty of Tennessee Williams’s writing, at the height of his success, his dramas were rooted in reality, whether a St Louis apartment or a plantation home in the Deep South. His rarely produced 1948 play Summer and Smoke is set in the small, gossip-ridden Mississippi town of Glorious Hill which, according to the writer’s detailed notes, was to be clearly represented on stage, from American Gothic architecture to a public park presided over by the statue of an angel. But modern directors have been inspired by the fluid, dream-like qualities of Williams’s plays, especially his later work, to take a more abstract approach, which reaches sublime heights under director Rebecca Frecknall and designer Tom Scutt in a stunning new production at the Almeida. Nine upright pianos, each topped by a metronome, line the back of the otherwise stripped-back … Read more

Autumn Donmar Warehouse Season Announced

Michelle Dockery to star in Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the Donmar Warehouse

Donmar Warehouse Artistic Director Josie Rourke today announced the theatre’s Autumn season of three plays which includes Abi Morgan’s Splendour directed by Associate Director Robert Hastie, the UK Premiere of Christopher Shinn’s Teddy Ferrara directed by Dominic Cooke and the thirty-year revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Christopher Hampton directed by Rourke herself. Artistic Director Josie Rourke said: One of the things that most excites me about this season is the strong leading roles for women. It is a thrill to announce a season of work that features, in plays by living writers, women of the calibre and power of Zawe Ashton, Sinéad Cusack, Michelle Dockery, Michelle Fairley, Genevive O’Reilly and Janet McTeer, who returns to the Donmar and the London stage. This, combined with the transfer of Phyllida Lloyd’s second instalment in her trilogy of all-female Shakespeares to New York shows a programme of work in deep conversation with … Read more