Nikhil Parmar: Spirited, inspired and fundamentally hilarious
Nikhil Parmar’s acclaimed debut play Invisible returns to London’s Bush Theatre for a limited run before transferring to New York as part of the 2023 Brits Off Broadway festival. The provocative one-man show is a darkly comic tour-de-force in which an underemployed actor (and overemployed dealer) takes drastic steps to get noticed. I fire off...
Far more darkness than the eye can fathom
Take your seat – preferably, if you can, in the centre stalls, for a commanding, birds-eye panoramic view of the spectacular stage that Es Devlin has created for Sam Mendes’ National Theatre production of The Lehman Trilogy, currently at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in London. As the lights switch on, you will find yourself in an existential space-time warp:...
Ambreen Razia: Mums and daughters
Ambreen Razia’s remarkable new play Favour at the Bush Theatre, co-directed by Róisín McBrinn of Clean Break and Sophie Dillon Moniram, plots the troubled return to family life of single mum Aleena (Avita Jay) after a spell in prison. While she was away, her teenage daughter Leila (Ashna Rabheru) was in the care of her...
Survivor rage
David Hare succumbed to Covid-19 last March, as the UK government continued to dither over following the rest of Europe into lockdown. He contracted it in the confines of a cramped Soho editing room, and was soon experiencing a shortage of breath followed by complex symptoms he describes as “kicking around like I’ve swallowed a...
The Mourners’ Kaddish
Sometimes it is very hard to put words to experiences. In Adorno’s much used (and misused) own words, “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz”; the human soul and mind can conceive of no recreation of experience, no seamless relating to, or of, life through words alone, once the humanity of meaning has been so...
“Angels you will see only when you’re dead. Possibly.”
Think back to when you were very young, still capable of looking at the world with wide, wondrous eyes. When books had a breathtaking pulse and three-dimensionality about them, and every page seemed like an invitation to a mystic dance – a summons to enter a world of grand enchantment, of dark, mysterious corners and...
A complex complicity
“I’ve forgotten such a lot. Most of it, really. Certain things stick of course, although I’ve no idea why. I don’t understand how it works. I read something and then I go across the room to check what’s for dinner and completely forget what I’ve just read. I think, wait a minute, I’ve only just...
Visions and monsters
The Monstrous Child, which has just completed a very successful run at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre, is one of the first and most audacious examples of a new genre: highly evocative classical opera especially written for teenage audiences. Adapted from the YA novel of the same name by Francesca Simon with music by...
The starving father-man
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which sits so large and many-stepped on Fifth Avenue in New York, there is a section on the first floor referred to as the sculpture garden, and I must have walked past this particular sculpture1 many times with my husband, and with the children as they got older, me...
The Talleyrand of East Africa
“’Ullo, I am ze Breetish Consul.” My startled reaction revealed my prejudice. I didn’t cover it well. “You can’t be. You’re French!” “Eet is a long stohry. Shall we ’ave a drink?” We sat down. One by one the other members of the company came to join us, dressed in their evening casual best, and...
Peter Shaffer: An immortal life
Our lives, our intellectual and emotional worlds, our humanity and imagination, owe a great, indelible debt to Peter Shaffer, for revealing to us the wonder and the dark mystery of our existence, for enhancing so starkly and so gently our knowledge of ourselves, of our history and society, its ethics, aspirations, the sheer mechanics and...
An unfailing life
The disjunction between mundanity, imaginary parallel lives, present reality and past fantasy, mental fragmentation and the undeniable plenitude and promise of a ‘what if’ life create a grippingly fragile harmony, channelled by a particularly redolent choreography that always treads on the verge of a tremendous crisis. The sensual Woolf, the shrewd observer and creator, the...
