Sting’s The Last Ship draws on his experience of growing up in Wallsend, Tyne and Wear, as the shipbuilding industry that shaped the community went into decline. Dominating the stage is an enormous ship, freighted with the hopes and dreams of a community dwarfed by political and economic forces beyond its control. The last ship becomes both a symbol of the dying yard and a vessel for the community’s aspirations in the face of the harsh reality that their livelihoods and way of life are about to disappear. It also becomes an image of the human condition and the inevitability of death, as Sting plays the ailing foreman Jackie White, awaiting Charon, the mythic ferryman played by Shaggy, to take him across to the other side. Against this grim backdrop unfolds the story of Meg and Gideon, whose relationship was ruptured seventeen years earlier when he went to sea, unknowingly leaving her pregnant and exposed to the judgement of a critical community. One of the great strengths of the show ...

In Leipzig in 1930, Bertolt Brecht’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny was disrupted by Nazi supporters protesting against what they regarded as politically and morally offensive material. Unsurprisingly, Brecht is frequently referenced in Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists and, like Brecht’s work, Tiago Rodrigues’ drama proves to be both intelligent and incendiary. The play’s central premise is that a Portuguese family has created a rite of passage in memory of a woman who was murdered by Fascists. On turning 26, members of the family are expected to kill a selected fascist. The family members all take the name Catarina in memory of the murdered woman, and now it is the turn of one of the great-granddaughters of the family matriarch to carry out the ritual killing. When she hesitates to follow the family tradition, what ensues is a multi-layered exploration of resistance to authoritarianism and the morality of killing in the name of political resistance. The dense ...

With this production, Tilda Swinton returns to the Royal Court Theatre in a role she originally played there at the age of 26 in 1988. Manfred Karge's Jacke wie Hose is a complex allegorical drama about the necessity for the underclass to constantly transform itself simply to survive the shifting social and political storm of German history, from the Second World War to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The shape-shifting and gender-bending demanded of its protagonist by the sweep of events are brilliantly mirrored in Swinton's performance. Yet Ella's poignant longing for a feminine, fairy-tale existence is somewhat eclipsed by the sheer success of Swinton's transformation from Ella to Max. The young girl who dreams of being Snow White, waiting to be awakened by a prince's kiss, never feels quite as present as the extraordinary figure Swinton creates as Max. The duality of Ella's desires, to believe in the fairy tale while finding a way to survive in a hostile world,...

The 1991 film Thelma & Louise received six Academy Award nominations, including Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Actress nominations for both Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis. The film took the usually male-dominated buddy-movie and road-movie genres and placed two women at its centre, while also raising provocative questions about cultural misogyny, victimhood and the struggle for personal freedom. The characters themselves were not especially complex, but their situation and search for authenticity resonated with audiences. The question, then, is whether a musical version of such a successful film can really add anything to the original. Unfortunately, although the performances are strong, the musical elements and staging do little to deepen the story. The thumping country score often overwhelms the drama, while the wordy narrative lyrics tend to explain rather than illuminate the action. The single set, centred on a barroom, also struggles to convey the expansive ...

Written in 1937, Golden Boy is probably Clifford Odets’ most famous work. The story of a young man torn between becoming a violinist or a boxer is a critique of the corrupting influence of the materialism that underpins the American Dream. The theme echoes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby , right down to the famous scene in which Gatsby contemplates his beautiful shirts. Young Joe Bonaparte is similarly seduced by a world that values appearances over substance when the gangster Eddie Fuseli showers him with silk shirts and other trappings of success. In forsaking his calling as a musician for the fame and money of boxing, Joe ultimately sacrifices not only his family ties but also his sense of self. The performances are uniformly strong. Josh O’Connor gives Joe an intense, increasingly volatile presence, convincingly charting his transformation from a gifted young musician into a man consumed by ambition and violence. Hayley Squires is equally compelling as the hard-nosed Lorna ...

On 3 December 1984, a leak of methyl isocyanate gas from the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, released a highly toxic cloud over the surrounding area. Thousands of people died within days, while many more suffered serious injuries and long-term health problems. The disaster is regarded as one of the world’s worst industrial catastrophes, with estimates of the eventual death toll reaching into the tens of thousands. The scale of the tragedy is almost impossible to comprehend, but in Darkling , Linnea Berthelsen creates an individual who becomes emblematic of those whose lives were devastated by the catastrophe. The overwhelming scale of the event is brought down to a human level, allowing the audience to grasp its impact through the story of one poor young girl and her family whose lives are shattered. The monologue evokes the everyday life of a girl growing up in the slums of Bhopal, capturing its mixture of joy and hardship. There is abuse and racism, but also a strong ...

The Mill at Sonning is a theatre that knows its audience, and this latest offering should appeal to the usual suspects. Agatha Christie’s well-plotted mysteries have a comfortable, timeless quality, built around a reassuring formula with which we are all familiar: there is a cunning murder, a colourful line-up of suspects and a clever detective who will inevitably outsmart the police. This time, it is Miss Marple, Christie’s insightful elderly spinster, who finds herself drawn into the world of a glamorous film star and her entourage, one of whom may be intent on murder. When local luminary Heather Leigh is poisoned after drinking a daiquiri at a party, the question is whether the drink was really intended for leading lady Marina Gregg. As the delightful Miss Marple assists Chief Inspector Dermot Craddock in unravelling the mystery, the audience is invited to puzzle it out along with her. We are on familiar ground here and will be neither shocked nor disturbed by what follows. Indeed, ...

Kimberly Levaco is a young American girl with a medical condition that causes her to age at four times the normal rate. Although still at high school, she appears to be in her sixties. Added to this, her home life is totally dysfunctional. Her father is an alcoholic, her mother is a narcissist, and her aunt, Debra, is a criminal fleeing after an assault which resulted in a man's death. With her condition, which might be described as the reverse of Benjamin Button’s, Kimberly appears to be the only sensible and morally grounded adult in this household of ne’er-do-wells. However, when Debra turns up on the family’s doorstep once again, she brings with her yet another get-rich-quick fraud scheme and threatens to disrupt the normality Kimberly is desperately trying to create. Aunt Debra presents her living-for-the-moment, everyone-out-for-themselves philosophy in the song “Better”. It is a siren call to take risks, break rules and act on impulse, no matter who gets hurt. Surprisingly, ...

Bigfoot or Sasquatch is a legendary large, hairy, human-like creature said to inhabit remote forests, particularly in the Pacific Northwest of North America. Typically described as two to three metres tall, with a powerful build, long arms and exceptionally large feet, this phenomenon has become a staple of American folklore. In this latest offering from the team of Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland, the beast is used by two teenage girls to create hysteria in their small town. The narrative recalls Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour , both of which examine the corrosive consequences of rumour, suspicion and collective hysteria with considerably greater dramatic and psychological depth. What makes this show stand out, however, is not its commentary on crowd panic and mass manipulation, subjects that feel particularly pertinent in the current political climate and the digital age, but the sheer inventiveness of its performances. Following their recent su...

Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel is about two flawed individuals whose pride and wayward spirits must be curbed before they can learn to rely on God’s love and on each other. At the story's heart is the need to learn Christian humility and to submit the self to a higher moral purpose. It is a sentiment unlikely to resonate with a contemporary secular audience, which may explain why the novel is more often remembered or presented as a tempestuous love story between two strong-willed characters. This latest musical version does grapple with Brontë’s religious themes, notably through its presentation of Helen Burns as Jane’s role model and the recurring emphasis on forgiveness in her signature song. The reconciliation between Jane and her childhood tormentor, Mrs Reed, similarly brings Brontë’s moral concerns to the fore, as do songs such as “My Maker” and “Children of God”. Yet these elements sit somewhat uneasily alongside the bodice-ripper of a romance that audiences are more likely t...