204 stories by "Carole Woddis"
In Hassan Abdulrazzak's Love, Bombs & Apples, Asif Khan became a mesmerising shape-changer, adopting different Muslim and Jewish personas as varied as pugilistic to down-trodden. Taking…
This was a huge undertaking for somewhere like the Arcola. Big cast plays don't often surface so it's a coup for the ever enterprising Mehmet Ergen to not only do one of the most famous Shak…
Interesting that two new plays in recent weeks have referred back to Nazi Germany and indirectly to the Holocaust. Whereas Cordelia O'Neill's fine No Place for a Woman (Theatre503) looks at …
Whatever you may think about Bertolt Brecht's more doctrinaire views, here's a play in Joe Wright's visually spectacular, star-gazing production that says exactly what needs to be said for a…
Really, the kindest thing to do about Yaël Farber's Salomé is quietly to draw a veil over it. There is bad theatre and then there is very bad acting. Sadly, Farber's Salomé falls into t…
Already sold out before it had even opened and announced to be transferring to the West End in June, the combination of Jez Butterworth (Jerusalem, Mojo amongst others) and director Sam Mend…
Subtitled `a play with music and movement', Elliott Rennie's deep noted cello is the thrilling underscore to Cordelia O'Neill's mesmerising but enigmatic Holocaust-fringed two hander. As if …
Well, to start at the end, I can't remember a more personally `engaged' ending than Simon Evans manufactures for the climax of Brecht's 1940s political satire on the rise of Hitler in an Ame…
There can be so many ways to get young children interested in ballet. The oldest and sometimes the most archaic of dance art forms, it still has an allure and glitter that rubs off on the yo…
Walking back from the Bush the other evening, I glanced back at the Green and remembered the years when the one-room Bush hovered above a far from welcoming pub, up some uncomfortable and cr…
An existentialist who writes in the film noir/crime thriller genre, a compulsive writer for whom language and its derivations are a vital, never ceasing line of enquiry as a construct that g…
Ivo van Hove is simply everywhere at present, the wunderkind of international theatre and opera. It's understandable why he is so much in demand. He has a way of envisioning that is either t…
There's something refreshingly anarchic about Simon Stephens. In his very long preface to the printed text of Nuclear War, Stephens talks at length about the process of writing this play and…
You lose some, you win some: two former libraries now turned into arts centres-cum-community spaces-cum theatres plus Bunker's Theatre takeover of an underground car park in Southwark Street…
Cardboard Citizens are a remarkable success story, especially dealing as they do with those at the sharp end of society, the ones who have fallen through the cracks. For 25 years, Adrian Jac…
Surrealism never quite dies. It goes quiet for a while before popping up in times of absurd turmoil and stress to poke fun at and point a delicate, macabre or shocking finger at our absurd a…
Soutra Gilmour's stunning Taj Mahal parapet wall stretches into the far distance creating a Stygian gloom with a channelled, divided stage floor that, it's true, caught one unfortunate spect…
As Brecht also observed tellingly at the end of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, 1941, shortly being revived at the Donmar, things come round again. Just when you think humans may have lear…
Women and modern warfare. Women have fought to be treated as equals on the front line. A question of equality. The corollary to that is, they are open to being just as badly injured.
That it resonates with our own current hysterias about `fake news', what is true and untrue, and the threat immigrants appear to pose here, in Europe and in the USA, goes without saying. The…
Even if you're not a musical aficionado, Michael Blakemore's production and the way the young cast headed by Sharon D Clarke get hold of and deliver Cy Coleman's music with Ira Gasman's lyri…
The really interesting question arising from Simon McBurney's latest multi-media bonanza is why Robert Evans? The amount of money and artistry lavished on this admittedly important but by no…
Taken a little time to get here but Kieran Hurley's 2016 Edinburgh Fringe hit (part of their Made in Scotland showcase 2016) absolutely nails the zeitgeist of our times. With his nervy, urge…
A man falls to the ground, seriously injured. As he falls, ghosts of the past and his life swim before him. This is the start of Lizzie Nunnery's extraordinary impressionistic sound picture …
It's fashionable these days to rubbish acting and actors and lump them altogether, disparagingly, as `luvvies'. But really we'd be lost without them.
