According to a well-known anecdote, Dorothy Hammerstein once overheard someone praising Jerome Kern for writing ‘Ol’ Man River’, the famous song from the 1927 musical Show Boat . Kern had composed the music, while her husband, Oscar, had written the lyrics. Mrs Hammerstein reportedly intervened, saying, “Jerome Kern wrote ‘dum, dum, dum-dum’. My husband wrote ‘Ol’ Man River’.” From the Heart celebrates the art of the lyricist, and Don Black is pre-eminent in his field. His writing ranges from witty to wistful, combining incisive satire with emotional insight. His lyrics capture the mood of a melody, giving voice to our feelings and shifting the emotional register in an instant. Although Black has worked with some of the finest composers, this is unmistakably the lyricist’s evening. Evoking the atmosphere of one of New York City’s wonderful after-hours cabaret clubs, the programme features familiar hits such as ‘To Sir with Love’, ‘Tell Me on a Sunday’ and ‘Born Free’, alongside the Bo...

Fairy tales are woven into every culture and childhood, offering both cautionary lessons and dreams of what might be possible. Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods brings together many of the old favourites, including Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk and Rapunzel , weaving their stories around a Baker and his Wife who, having been cursed by a Witch, are unable to conceive a child. Their plight can be alleviated only if they complete a quest to bring the Witch a milky-white cow, some golden slippers, a red cape and some corn-yellow hair. To find them, they must venture into the woods, where the other characters are also pursuing their wishes and are equally lost. Through the dangers and confusions encountered in the woods, Sondheim explores the consequences of our choices, the responsibilities we have towards others, particularly children, and the difficulty of realising that we must move beyond the false binary of dependence or independence to interdependence. W...

In 1896, Puccini adapted Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème into his opera La Bohème , telling the story of a group of young artists living in poverty in nineteenth-century Paris, where they faced hardship, illness and tuberculosis. Almost a century later, Jonathan Larson adapted the same material to the lives of marginalised young people in New York City, where poverty was compounded by drug addiction and AIDS. Tragically, Larson never saw Rent become a hit. He died aged 35 on the morning of its first preview in January 1996, but the show went on to transfer to Broadway, where it ran for 12 years and more than 5,000 performances, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and four Tony Awards. It transferred to London in 1998 and was embraced worldwide as a portrait of a generation at the turn of the millennium. This latest production brilliantly captures the anger, angst and affection that bind this group of young people together. It does not explicitly draw parallels with the con...

Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck , written in 1836-37 and published posthumously in 1879, is acknowledged to be a series of fragments rather than a fully developed work. The challenge for any adaptor is to transform this political parable into a coherent and moving drama with psychologically complex characters. Woyzeck is the embodiment of the proletariat, exploited by those above him and subjected to a cruel scientific experiment. Given today’s political climate, with the power of oligarchs no longer concealed and the increasingly unsettling presence of AI, there would seem to be plenty here for an adaptor to explore. Unfortunately, this production fails to rise to the occasion. The characters remain largely one-dimensional and the story veers towards melodrama rather than tragedy. The decision to introduce Gaelic music and to create an almost céilí-like atmosphere is particularly unsuccessful. Some of the ballads are suitably plaintive, but their melancholy never deepens our understanding of ...

In a 1946 interview with the American journalist Jerome Seckler, Henri Matisse said, “I think that art must not be a disagreeable thing. There is enough unhappiness in life to turn one towards the joy.” The quotation might equally well describe Renoir’s attitude to painting. He stands out from his contemporaries in his celebration of humanity and his joyous embrace of modern life. The son of a tailor and a dressmaker, he came from a working-class background, yet his paintings rarely dwell on social questions. Instead, they embrace the world with an exuberance that is fundamental to his art. This exhibition, covering the first twenty years of Renoir’s working life, brings that joie de vivre into focus. Across six galleries, it traces his delight in the simple pleasures of good food, convivial company, romance and love through the themes of "The Bohemian Years", " Fêtes Galantes ", "Streets of Paris", "Beyond the City", "Family" and ...

Ham is a Fringe show that is a take-off on Hamlet , but here the central issue is Hamlet’s decision to be vegan while his mother, Gertrude, continues to enjoy her sausages. This situation is explained to us by the show’s co-creators, Mary Higgins, apparently a real-life vegan who plays Hamlet, and Ell Potter, seemingly a real-life carnivore who plays Gertrude. The production is structured around the five acts of Hamlet , taking dialogue from Shakespeare and re-contextualising it around the new premise. The two cast members manage to draw considerable humour from this exercise, but by the time we reach the play-within-a-play, there may simply be too many levels of reality for the audience to process. We have Mary and Ell as characters putting on a version of Hamlet that now contains another play, and matters become even more mind-boggling when that play, with its bizarre sexual domination premise, turns into an audience participation exercise. It all begins to feel rather awkward and ...

The premise is wonderfully simple. When four guests descend on the Bliss family for a quiet weekend in the country, things turn out to be considerably less than blissful. Judith, who has retired from the theatre, is finding the pleasures of rustic life no substitute for the satisfactions of the stage. She has invited down a young man who can provide the adulation she once enjoyed in her career. At the same time, her novelist husband David has asked a young woman to join them, hoping she might provide him with a model for the flapper in his latest novel. Add to this ménage their children’s invitations to two apparently unsuitable suitors and you have the makings of one of Noël Coward’s most successful farces. The hapless guests find themselves trapped in a family whose artistic members constantly turn their reality into a performance, with all the histrionics and artifice that entails. Coward is satirising not only the conventions of the theatre, with its exaggeration and falsification ...

The alcohol-fuelled mind games that take place in Edward Albee’s masterpiece can be read on many levels. There is a definite biographical link to Albee’s adoptive mother and father, as well as a political parable with the names George and Martha being shared by the parents of the American experiment. In fact, the failure of both marriages to produce children may foreshadow the current erosion of the ideals espoused by the nation’s founders. The most common reading, however, concerns the corrosive power of illusion and the devastating pain of truth. All George and Martha’s games weaponise both, exposing the darkness of the human condition while suggesting that a cruel, desperate need for love is its only antidote. While it is difficult not to compare this production with the film version, in which all four principal actors were nominated for Academy Awards, the current cast holds its own in such illustrious company. Josh Dylan is suitably cocksure as Nick, the ambitious biology professo...

In 1849, Thomas Carlyle dismissed political economy as the “dismal science”. James Graham’s new play about John Maynard Keynes would seem to prove him spectacularly wrong. Part biography, part intellectual sparring match, it examines one of the twentieth century’s most influential economists and, in doing so, reveals a man as full of apparent contradictions as the economic theories that made him famous. A member of the Bloomsbury group, Keynes moved among writers, artists and intellectuals such as Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry and Lytton Strachey. However, he seemed slightly out of place in this unconventional milieu, as he also worked at the Treasury and frequented the meeting rooms of Westminster. Bohemian and bureaucrat in equal proportions. His private life was no less contradictory: while methodically recording his same-sex encounters with the obsessiveness of a stamp collector, he later married the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, an unlikely union that proved remarkab...

Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan had an extraordinary life. Descended from the ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, born in Moscow and raised in Paris, she fled to Britain with her family in 1940 after the fall of France. She joined the WAAF before being recruited by the Special Operations Executive and, in June 1943, was sent to occupied France by Lysander aircraft as a wireless operator. The life expectancy for wireless operators working in occupied France was said to be just six weeks, yet Khan continued operating in Paris for several months after the rest of her network had been rounded up. This is a life full of drama, but the challenge for any biographical play is to shape that material into a story with a clear point and a strong arc of development. The facts may all be fascinating, but the playwright must decide which to include, which to leave out and how much dramatic licence to take with the characters in order to make the story work. Unfortunately, A Small and Quiet Light sticks too clos...