Full of brash lights and gorgeous colours, Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert rolls into Brighton for the holiday season. What there is in plot, you could hide under two and a half sequins, but that hardly matters when the camp is pitched to the highest level and the audience are having a wonderful time.
“I’m not sure about the songs but the special effects are supposed to be incredible,” was one friend’s response before heading off to see Ghosts at Brighton’s Theatre Royal. “Um, I think you might be thinking of a different show,” I replied. For, rest assured, there are no musical numbers or sexy encounters at a potter’s wheel in this, Stephen Unwin’s re-imagining of Henrik Ibsen’s 1881 play Ghosts, a miserable reflection on patriarchal society and family secrets.
Roald Dahl’s enduring tale of Charlie Bucket is nearly fifty years old. First published in 1964, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has captivated generations, with two screen versions cementing it in the public’s affections. Adapted by David Greig, with a fresh score from Marc Shaiman & Scott Wittman (Hairspray, Smash) and direction from Skyfall director Sam Mendes, the story has now been re-imagined for the stage.
London-based readers have just a fortnight to catch Richard Eyre’s production of Ghosts, before it vacates the Almeida to make way for Matt Smith’s American Psycho.
“Feminism always gets associated with being a radical movement – good. It should be.” So said Canadian actress Ellen Page in a recent Guardian interview, and now another spiky actress, Sherlock’s Louise Brealey, throws her fist in the air with her first play, Pope Joan.
In a world where Russia has apparently been flicking through the Maggie Thatcher Manual for Disposing of Gays, a West End revival of Alexei Kaye Campbell’s rainbow-flag-waving debut play The Pride seems an appropriate response.
You’ve been here before. The Great War, fast approaching its centenary, has inspired many hundreds of stories, novels, plays, films and – yes – poems.
If Daniel Radcliffe’s face had not been emblazoned throughout the playhouse, I wouldn’t have recognized him as the eponymous handicap in The Cripple of Inishmaan; his performance was a clear step from out from under the overhanging shadow of Harry Potter.
Stick the word ‘American’ in the title of your play, and you’re invoking some pretty big spirits, whether it be the deeply buried but suddenly dislodged secrets of well-meaning families in an Arthur Miller, or the suffocating summers and memory plays of a Tennessee Williams.
On paper, it’s red-hot. Capitalise on the Jubilee / Will & Kate / Royal Baby mania with a show starring Helen Mirren as Elizabeth Regina (again) backed by the writer and director of The Queen and a neat concept: a series of era-hopping sequences giving us a backstage pass to the Queen’s weekly audience with the Prime Minister.