In Simon Stone’s modernization of Medea, the avenging wife is the former research physician Anna (Rose Byrne), who has recently been released from a mental institution after poisoning her husband, Lucas (Bobby Cannavale). Lucas is also a research physician—one who has relied on his wife’s intellect for his professional success—and so Anna snaps when she […]
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Ellen Lauren is a terrific Dionysus. Lanky, agile, and puckish, she even quips with the audience in a way that feels unforced: “Wanna touch an actor?” she asks moments into The Bacchae, making a beeline for the front row. “I know you do.” I’m not sure he did. But Lauren seemed like she would be delighted with […]
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It’s a little strange and a little beautiful to see John Cale performing with a full orchestra to a seated, opera-house audience. Dressed in an all-black suit brought into relief by a shock of white hair, Cale nods along with the band as he works his way through The Velvet Underground & Nico, which was released […]
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I thought I had seen my zaniest Richard III in Mark Rylance, and before that in Kevin Spacey. But compared to Lars Eidinger, these performances feel like those of mildly rambunctious children. Mr. Eidinger abandons all pretense that Richard is an adult—or even a human being—and before the night is over, he has sat naked […]
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Four older women chat idly in a garden as the afternoon wanes. Sally (Deborah Findlay) discusses her fear of cats. Vi (June Watson) is grateful to still receive phone calls form her children. They reflect on their past lives, which include middle-class jobs and, in one case, mariticide. A conversation about punchlines in jokes touches on national boundaries and […]
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Written during an enviable period in his mid-twenties that would yield four major productions in two years, Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane transplants the playwright’s mixed feelings about the bucolic Ireland he would visit on holidays while growing up in London into a space of domestic menace.
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There are, admittedly, a few good moments in Declan Donnellan’s Winter’s Tale. The opening scene is done well, with Leontes (Orlando James) manically handling both his best friend, Polixenes (Edward Sayer), and his wife, Hermione (Natalie Radmall-Quirke), roughhousing the one and ostentatiously kissing the other, leaving us with a sense that this king is giddy and unstable. […]
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The puppets are gorgeous but the meaning hazy in Memory Rings, a silent, eighty-minute production by the Phantom Limb Company that is centered around the California Methuselah tree, which at over 4800 years old was once thought to be the oldest on the planet.
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The Oscar Wilde (Rupert Everett) of David Hare’s The Judas Kiss is deliberately written against type. The stage directions describe him as “solid, tall and fleshy” and “not at all the pansy of legend.” The signature wit is slightly dulled, though when it surfaces it does so with acidity; here his satire is meant to […]
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