UP WHERE SHE BELONGS Imelda Staunton is a marvel, from Mama Rose in Gypsy to HMQ in The Crown. There is no lady of the stage more worthy of being greeted at the top of a Grand Staircase   by an intermInable chorus of dancing waiters in velveteen  tailcoats , buttons hellishly a-gleam,  while a first-night audience of  2,280 go noisily bananas.  She’s earned it, albeit often more strikingly than in this grand old smoker of a 1960’s Jerry Herman spectacular.  Mind you, even  the arrival onstage of a fullsize locomotive in steam had previously had its own raptur ..read more

GRISLY GLEE  If there is any aspect of 21c Western culture  sorely in need of being laughed at,   it s ithe morbid fascination with police-procedural telly,,  especially true-crime and its gruesome forensics.  Murder has fascinated people ever since Jack the Ripper,  but the digital age has made it more intensely. fictionalized and memorialized, screened and podcasted-about   all the way from the wild fringes to endless BBC Sounds trails (forgetting the Corporation’s old Quaecunque motto:  look it up)      So hurrah for John Brittain, Matt ..read more

AN OVEN-READY MUSICAL, NEVER MUFFIN A MOMENT     As summer heats the merciless city,  good to know that five minutes’ south of London Bridge station is La France Profonde,  a village square below faded shutters and 1930’s posters, where men in berets play petanque and concertina, Claude le patron in his big apron greets the front row as they settle down,  and  Denise sings about her village day.   Not that the Provençal village is always happy: the old baker died and they’ve been weeks without bread,  which aggravates the usual short-tempered quarre ..read more

ON THE EVE OF THE ELECTION….       …I emerged onto the Cut in a grey afternoon blinking tears, unable to process having been made to cry by  James Corden. He’s been for me   a figure hardly more than a mild  chat-show irritant ever since he vanished from theatre after One Man Two Guvnors.   But on this  return,  under  Matthew Warchus in Joe Penhall’s tense, powerful 90 minute state-of-Britain play we sceptics are reminded that if you plug him in in to a good script and director Corden is the real thing.  He walks the walk, travels the ter ..read more

TEENAGE DREAMS, AND FAME AS NIGHTMARE Got to love the dedication of the Southwark: to mark its smaller-space production of Samantha Hurley’s New York play about a demented teenage fan, it lined the cubicles in the lavatory with posters of the sulky baby-face of Maguire, and Spiderman fanzine covers. Once you enter The square three-sided space a further explosion of Tobeyiana hits you, with fairylights. On the floor big woolly rugs, on the shelves toys playing a hand-puppet fantasy of a Mermaid King and a princess.  It’s a teenage basement den , a prison of longing and unattainable desire ..read more

A THING OF WONDER      People who saw Mnemonic  at its origin 25 years ago  still talk about it. A few say it changed them. It was a collaborative, at first wholly unscripted , creation of Simon McBurney with his  Théåtre de Complicité. This reworked version, new-cast and directed by the man himself, opens with a tribute to those first makers, and an artfully faux-improv  speech on the nature of memory and how neuropsychology now understands it not as solid embedded facts and feelings,   but as an ever evolving set of memories-of-memory:  ever ..read more

A WARTIME SPRINGTIME       It’s not the reptile but the turtledove, as in the Song of Solomon “The time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land….Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away”.  Our hero and heroine,  in John van Druten’s intimate 1943 play,  are both fond of quoting,  not pretentiously but with lonely yearning private  feeling. They are all the more likeable for it.            Philip Wilson’s careful, delicate production catches that human yearning,  and in th ..read more

AN ANGLO-INDIAN EDWARDIAN YORKSHIRE…       Good to be back for another year,   up on the high tiers in the last golden hour, waiting to watch the great trees darken against the sky.  Fitting, too, for a  heatwave production to celebrate a far smaller and more secret garden, in Francis Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 children’s classic.   Mary Lennox, cross-natured and pampered child of Imperial India. is orphaned in  a cholera epidemic and sent to the gloom of  Misselthwaite Manor.  Yorkshire moors and their people – notably  the maid’s brothe ..read more

YOUNG GENTLEMEN (AND LADIES) TO CELEBRATE      This is very good fun indeed. Who does not want an onstage dog called Crab, benignly upstaging a rarely seen Shakespeare clown? And  a riotous rendering of Mambo Italiano at a Milanese f1 party by a hirsute drag queen who, wig removed, is the stately Duke himself? Who does not warm to daft young love, betrayal, remorse, and the sort of cameo detail that has the wayward Proteus’ Mum ordering him to Milan to improve himself while  haughtily having her nails done? All that, plus  outlaws disguised as bushes, a terrible ..read more

TWO YEARS AFTER THE NEXT ELECTION..       Here, a mere meringue’s throw from Eton itself, is an imaginary Prime Minister of that ilk.  Tidier in person and with a touch more integrity than the last one, but personally almost as insouciant, as resistant to reading red-box bumf , and as prodigal with tags from Aristotle and Virgil.  It’s an unBoris.       This is  a touring play from Michael McManus, a veteran if bruised political insider, centrist-sensible himself but fascinated by the mechanisms and personalities.  I rather liked his “An Honour ..read more