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Theatre review: Sherlock Holmes – The Best Kept Secret, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds

Fri, 24 May 2013 10:50:03 GMT

The Sherlock Holmes franchise has been assiduously exploited on the written page, on stage, cinema and TV ever since A Study in Scarlet announced the arrival of the world’s greatest detective back in 1887.

Theatre review: The History Boys, Sheffield Crucible

Thu, 23 May 2013 12:19:20 GMT

When The History Boys was first performed at the National Theatre in 2004 the reverential cupping of a sixth former's genitals by an appreciative retirement-age teacher was enough to elicit ceaseless gales of laughter. Today it is more likely to form the basis of an investigation by detectives from the public protection division.

Shameless actor David Threlfall cast as Tommy Cooper

Thu, 23 May 2013 12:10:10 GMT

Shameless star David Threlfall has landed a role as the late comic Tommy Cooper - just like that.

Theatre review: 4000 Miles, The Print Room, London

Thu, 23 May 2013 10:20:17 GMT

Amy Herzog's play has travelled, well, nearly 4,000 miles: it premièred in New York in 2011 – winning its young author an Obie – while in the UK it opened at the Ustinov Studio in Bath, directed by James Dacre, earlier this year.

Theatre review: The Kite Runner, Theatre Royal, Brighton Festival

Thu, 23 May 2013 09:52:27 GMT

It was always going to be a tall order bringing Khaled Hosseini’s mega-selling 2003 novel about friendship, betrayal and exile to the stage.

Theatre review: To Kill a Mockingbird, Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, London

Thu, 23 May 2013 09:49:03 GMT

The only sin Scout Finch, the eight-year-old narrator of Harper Lee’s classic novel, has ever heard her lawyer father denounce was to kill a mockingbird; they do nothing but make music for us to enjoy.

Theatre review: Table Manners, The Basement, Brighton Festival

Tue, 21 May 2013 10:23:08 GMT

Table Manners is a triple bill inspired by that most genteel of gatherings: the dinner party. But this is no cosy, bring-a-bottle, one-pot-on-the-scrubbed-kitchen-table affair. Rather it is a “trip to the end of etiquette”, courtesy of three young groups of theatre-makers who see gathering friends for a bite to eat as the excuse for some very bad behaviour indeed.

Theatre review: The Contents of a House, Preston Manor, Brighton Festival

Tue, 21 May 2013 10:20:40 GMT

One of the main attractions of this year’s Brighton Festival is a night-time traipse around Preston Manor, a gorgeous historic house in the suburbs which was bequeathed to the city by the Stanford family in 1932.

Dance review: Sylvie Guillem, Sadler’s Wells, London

Tue, 21 May 2013 08:50:03 GMT

Some stars become famous far beyond their own fields. You don't need to be interested in running to know about Usain Bolt; you don’t need to be interested in dance to have heard of French ballerina Sylvie Guillem. In both cases, the fame comes from something beyond their undoubted skill. It’s about charisma, the personality that shines through the technique.

Theatre review: The Victorian in the Wall, Royal Court Theatre, London

Mon, 20 May 2013 10:37:30 GMT

When Dominic Cooke took over at the Royal Court, he said he wanted to stage more plays about “what it means to be middle class”. Now, as the reins of artistic director pass to Vicky Featherstone, comes possibly the most middle-class play of his era - and very funny on the topic it is too.

Dance review: The Great Gatsby at Sadler's Wells: The Roaring Twenties, by the book

Sat, 18 May 2013 19:15:00 GMT

You can't fault Northern Ballet for timing, as its new stage adaptation of The Great Gatsby drops on London the same week as Baz Luhrmann's film remake is shown in Cannes. The first night even mustered a red carpet and a posse of paparazzi at the door. But what works on stage is not what works on screen. There can be no panoramic camerawork to establish Jay Gatsby's palatial estate, no text with which to convey "the exhilarating ripple" of Daisy Buchanan's voice. What's more, the characters must identify themselves without being named. So, it's a credit to David Nixon as both director and choreographer that he not only succeeds in telling the story clearly, and pacily, but with a depth of visual detail that sends you scurrying back to F Scott Fitzgerald's prose to verify the exact descriptive phrase. And it's all there. For once, no one goes home muttering "that's not how I remember the book".

Theatre review: Public Enemy - Every good town needs its scapegoat

Sat, 18 May 2013 19:15:00 GMT

In the popular imagination, clean living and Scandinavia are firmly associated. The former goes with the latter's terrain, the snow-capped peaks, the mountain lakes. In the 1980s, Norway was memorably outraged by the acid rain blowing over from dirty, industrial Britain.

Theatre review: Mess, The Nightingale, Brighton Fringe

Thu, 16 May 2013 15:02:51 GMT

It has become the fashion to make musicals out of apparently untouchable subjects. The Ipswich murders in London Road, female genital mutilation in Book of Mormon and now, Mess, which makes a song and dance out of anorexia. “Don’t leave!” as the cast shout at the top of the show. It sounds appalling but in fact it is one of the oddest, funniest, saddest pieces of theatre I’ve seen in some time.

Theatre review: These Shining Lives, Park Theatre, London

Wed, 15 May 2013 22:00:04 GMT

The new Park Theatre in Finsbury Park, north London, is a spanking new five-star neighbourhood theatre opening with a three-star play about girls in a 1920s Chicago watch-making factory who are gradually alerted (though not by the bosses) to the dangers of radium in the illuminated dials when one of them becomes seriously ill.

Theatre review: Pastoral, Soho Theatre, London

Tue, 14 May 2013 11:10:46 GMT

Thomas Eccleshare’s first play won the 2011 Verity Bargate award, so named in honour of the Soho’s founding co-director, and it arrives in London from a season at the High Tide Festival in Halesworth, Suffolk (where I saw it), full of bleak poetry and hilarious stage action.

Theatre review: Public Enemy, Young Vic, London

Tue, 14 May 2013 08:50:38 GMT

A tale of corruption, greed and the responsibility of the press, states the Young Vic's publicity, and you can't say fairer than that. Ibsen's perennially pertinent dissection of spa town fall-out after the chief medical officer, Doctor Stockmann, undermines the tourist industry by pointing out that the water is contaminated, never fails.

Theatre review: High Tide Festival, Halesworth

Mon, 13 May 2013 12:24:48 GMT

The Suffolk town of Halesworth might look idyllic but don’t be fooled, there’s darkness lurking behind the half-timbered facades. This year’s High Tide festival of new writing tackles everything from heroin addiction to Hillsborough, bullying to black actors in “blackface”. You couldn’t accuse it of being twee, although you might wish for a bit of light relief. Small-scale doesn’t have to equal issues-driven.

Comedy review: Daniel Kitson: After The Beginning, Before The End Theatre Royal Brighton Festival

Mon, 13 May 2013 09:14:12 GMT

Daniel Kitson’s new show is a reflection on reality, memory and our sense of self. Hardly wall-to-wall giggles, you might think, but this publicity-shy, TV-shunning, Perrier Award-winning comic’s talent lies in burrowing into the human psyche and dispensing profound nuggets through tales in which, more often than not, he is the hapless protagonist. After The Beginning, Before The End is like a TED talk with added LOLs.

Theatre review: London Wall, St James Theatre, London

Mon, 13 May 2013 08:59:30 GMT

As a study in the personal trials and tribulations of life in the office, John Van Druten’s 1931 play is a little closer in style and banality to Ricky Gervais than to the advertising agency in Mad Men.

Theatre review: Passion Play - Can I speak to the real operator?

Sat, 11 May 2013 18:10:00 GMT

We used to have angels on our shoulders, according to the old morality plays. There would be a bad one whispering devilish suggestions in our left ear while a good one – on the right side – tried to pull us back from temptation. You could say they were allegorical precursors of Freud's id and superego.

Dance review: Hansel and Gretel - Something very nasty beneath the woodshed

Sat, 11 May 2013 18:10:00 GMT

The reason fairy stories have endured in the collective consciousness is not just that successive generations have been offered them as childhood fare. It's that they give a manageable shape and form to our deepest adult fears. So it should come as no surprise that Liam Scarlett, whose last ballet tackled the murky world of the painter Walter Sickert and his possible identity as Jack the Ripper, is now peering into the darkest corners of a Grimm Brothers' tale.

Theatre review: Sons Without Fathers, Arcola Theatre, London

Sat, 11 May 2013 12:44:08 GMT

Everything is weird about Chekhov’s first play, best known as Platonov, and here given a tremendous, roistering, sex-and-vodka update by Polish director Helena Kaut-Howson that suggests life in the Russian countryside today is not much more fun than it was for the serfs.

Theatre review: The Hothouse, Trafalgar Studios, London

Fri, 10 May 2013 09:01:14 GMT

Simon Russell Beale has transformed himself into a manic version of Ronnie Barker in this merciless, very funny revival of Harold Pinter’s second major stage play, one he wrote and discarded between The Birthday Party and The Caretaker, before directing it himself in 1980.

Dance review: Hansel and Gretel, Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House

Thu, 09 May 2013 08:59:26 GMT

Turning Hansel and Gretel into a ballet, Liam Scarlett is determined to be very, very dark. Updated to the 1950s, his version of the fairy tale features domestic violence, a paedophile witch and warnings that this production is not suitable for children. Despite clever design and a fine cast from The Royal Ballet, Scarlett can’t make his own story bite.

Theatre review: Passion Play, Duke of York’s, London

Wed, 08 May 2013 09:26:59 GMT

When Peter Nichols’s searing play of a modern marriage hit with a disruptive blast of sexual infidelity opened in 1981, one critic recounted a joke about Moses coming down from Sinai with the Tablets and announcing: “First the good news – I got ’em down to ten. Now the bad news – adultery's still in.”