Category: Hampstead Theatre
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Film critic Mark Kermode has a five laugh rule for comedies. If he doesn't laugh five times at a film comedy it isn't funny. It's an interesting rule because on the one hand I think I laughed five times at Simon Paisley Day's new comedy at the Hampstead Theatre but on the other I found…
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Antony Sher as Professor Sigmund Freud in Hysteria. Photo by Tristram Kenton Hysteria has a lot of potential on paper: Two big, very different and interesting personalities from history meet. On one side you have penis-envy psychologist Sigmund Freud (Antony Sher) and on the other avant garde, surrealist painter Salvadore Dali (Adrian Schiller). …
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Each year I see Propeller I get a little more smitten with them. I mean what isn't to love about an all male Shakespeare company that almost guarantees at least one appearance of a pair of bare buttocks? Smut aside they have an irrevant, fresh approach to Shakespeare that I love often stuffed with joyous…
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When the set is the thing you remember most about a play then you know that something hasn't quite worked. Longing at the Hampstead Theatre does have an amazing set – a wooden summer house sits on real grass and is surrounded by trees. There is a soundtrack of birdsong and the outdoors and combined…
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Loved Di and Viv and Rose when I saw it first time around at the Hampstead Theatre's smaller downstairs space in 2011. Then the trio of the title was made up of Tamzin Outhwaite, Nicola Walker and Claudie Blakley. Outhwaite reprises her role as Di and is joined by Anna Maxwell Martin as Rose and…
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It was a Jubilee Year, an Olympic year but while all eyes were on the Queen and the lycra wearing athletes I was quietly breaking my annual record with 109 theatre trips. So which were the gold medal winners which took home the booby prizes? Well it's been a good year for the National Theatre…
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The Hampstead Theatre has rolled out a bumper cast for its latest production, a Howard Brenton play about the days between King Charles I's imprisonment, his trial and then execution. I'm not sure whether the 30 or so actors and extras were really warranted – I'm wondering who might have been roped in for walk…
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With a stage draped in rich, chocolate-coloured velvet there were two thoughts in my head, well three actually. Firstly, how sumptuous; secondly, someone is bound to trip or slip (Rupert Everett did) and, thirdly, where does one go about getting a piece of velvet that colour and of that size (not that I want some,…
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Such a trio of potential delights lined up for this coming week that it could be the best week of the year, so far. First of all I'm stupidly excited about The Judas Kiss tomorrow night at the Hampstead Theatre. It stars Rupert Everett who is someone I never thought I'd get a chance to…
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It's definitely one of Shakespeare's problem plays, The Winter's Tale. It feels like the theatrical equivalent of a cut and shut, the first half being a serious car, a family BMW say and the second half a hippies drug-fuelled, loved up VW camper van. In what is quite a long set up and tonally very…