Latest news with #YoungVic
Western Telegraph
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Western Telegraph
NT Live: A Streetcar Named Desire showing at Torch Theatre
From director Benedict Andrews, the production was filmed live during a sold-out run at the Young Vic Theatre in 2014. The cast features Gillian Anderson, Vanessa Kirby, and Ben Foster in Tennessee Williams' timeless masterpiece, which explores the fragile world of Blanche as she seeks solace from her sister Stella amidst the chaos brought by Stanley Kowalski. This production is the fastest-selling in the Young Vic's history, receiving critical acclaim and 5-star reviews. It has been watched by 1.2 million people worldwide, making it one of NT Live's most popular titles. Anwen Francis, rom the Torch Theatre's marketing team, said: "A Streetcar Named Desire, one of the most critically acclaimed plays of the 20th century, will be released for cinema viewings on Thursday 5 June and the Torch Theatre is delighted to be showing the play the very same night as its international release." NT Live: A Streetcar Named Desire can be seen on the Torch Theatre screen on Thursday 5 June at 7pm. Ticket prices are £15, £13 for concessions, and £8.50 for U26. For tickets, phone the Box Office on 01646 695267 or visit the Torch Theatre website.
Time Out
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
The Young Vic has announced its first season under new artistic director Nadia Fall
It's been a long time since we had a proper season announcement from the Young Vic: its previous artistic director Kwame Kwei-Armah announced his departure – ands a year's worth of programming – in February 2024. But his successor Nadia Fall has been beavering away behind the scenes, and finally has her first season ready to go. And a very decent season it is, focussing on the Young Vic's historical bread and butter of big name classic plays with interesting directors. Fall will kick things off herself in September by directing the first Joe Orton production London has seen in an age, tackling the 1964 classic Entertaining Mr Sloane (Sep 15-Nov 8), a dark comedy about a lodger who infiltrates a brother and sister's family home, to the deep misgivings of their father. Not seen in London since 2009, this production will star Tamzin Outhwaite and Daniel Cerqueira as middle-aged siblings Kath and Ed. The big show over Christmas will be the UK premiere of US playwright Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (Dec 2-Jan 31 2026), which previously ran on Broadway in a production starring Robin Williams. Set in a chaotic post-Saddam Iraq, surrealist director Omar Elerian's production will star David Threlfall as a fast-talking tiger wondering what the hell he is doing in the chaos of Baghdad – the production will also star Arinzé Kene, Ammar Haj Ahmad and Hala Omran. Into next year and Jordan Fein – director of the recent smash hit revival of Fiddler on the Roof – will turn his hand to non musical theatre with a revival of Arthur Miller's late classic Broken Glass (Feb 21-Apr 18 2026), casting tba. Following that, auteur Brit Alexander Zeldin directs the UK premiere of CARE (May 11-Jul 11 2026), his drama about an elderly grandmother unceremoniously moved to a care home by her busy family. Kwei-Armah made little use of the Young Vic's second space the Maria, but Fall seems to be a fan, and there will be three studio productions in her first season. Ohio (Sep 30-Oct 24), by Abigail and Shaun Bengson, is an intimate autobiographical folk musical about their experience of losing faith in religion but finding it in music. The Museum of Austerity (Dec 5-Jan 16 2026) is a mixed-reality headset-based exhibition from Sasha Wares that confronts the reality of life in the UK for disabled people who whom the social security net has failed. Finally, running next summer is Sophie Swithinbank's Sting (Jun 18-Jul 18 2026), a satire on systematic institutional failure that follows an off-the-rails young woman who has just started work on an assignment to catalogue historic cases of women being accused of witchcraft in the UK.
Irish Times
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
An Oak Tree at the Young Vic review: Pregnant Jessie Buckley brings extra poignancy to this theatrical wonder
An Oak Tree Young Vic, London ★★★★☆ An Oak Tree unpicks what it means to make-believe. Returning for a 20th-anniversary production, Tim Crouch's tricksy two-hander sees him toy with a guest star who has never seen the script before they are fed it, piece by piece, in front of an audience. Thrumming with liveness as it tells a story of grief, the play illuminates the manipulation and the wonder of the way stories transform us. Inspired by Michael Craig-Martin's 1973 conceptual artwork that insists a glass of water is an oak tree, Crouch's theatrical illusion talks things into being. He tells us a piano stool is an oak tree and an oak tree is a girl, so each insistence becomes true. He tells us his guest is a grieving father, and suddenly what we can see cracks in two. By layering these suggestions, he highlights the wizardry of any actor walking on to any stage, saying they are a character and asking us to believe them. READ MORE The script is always the same, but, with a different second actor each night, every performance is unique. On Tuesday night we are gifted Jessie Buckley, laughter spilling out between her allotted lines. Crouch is a showman, handing the Irish star her scripts on clipboards and feeding her lines, asking if she's okay then telling her to say yes. As we watch her, she watches him, the trust and determination and delight evident in the sideways lean of her smile. It becomes a game between them, but never to the point of excluding us. An Oak Tree: Jessie Buckley and Tim Crouch at the Young Vic in London. Photograph: Pamela-Raith Underneath the absurdity of the conceit, the story's sadness is a butterfly net chasing us through the show, fluttering at our backs until it swallows us whole. Buckley's speech about losing a child, given to her one line at a time as Crouch stands in the shadows, gains extra poignancy as she holds her pregnant belly. The play's manipulation – of the actor's freedom, of our feelings – is deliberate and all-knowing. The wonder of the performance lies in the way Crouch appears to point back at what he has done, drawing our attention to the architecture of the action. He is a scientist explaining his technique, a magician rolling up his sleeves, a puppeteer showing us how he pulls the strings. He tells us it's not real and still we insist that it is. He lays bare the act of making theatre. – Guardian An Oak Tree is at the Young Vic , London, until Saturday, May 24th
The Guardian
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Why are Hollywood stars lining up to appear in a play they know nothing about?
The standard routine in theatre goes something like this: an actor is cast in a play; they read, learn and rehearse it; and then, at last, they perform it to an audience, who will hopefully soak up their hard work. But for Tim Crouch, one of the industry's chief experimenters, this exercise began to feel reductive. 'A lot of actor training is about holding focus within the stage and putting the audience into a receiving role,' says Crouch. 'I used to go to pubs and bitch about it.' An Oak Tree – his 2005 play that is now seen as a landmark work – was born directly from these frustrations. The script, which is written to be performed by Crouch and a new actor each night, celebrates its changeability. 'It is a finished piece, but it contains an unfinished element,' Crouch says. An Oak Tree's story concerns a meeting between two men: a father who has lost his 12-year-old daughter in a car crash (played by the actor), and the person behind the wheel (played by Crouch). The one basic requirement is that the actor arrives at the theatre oblivious. They must have never seen the play, nor read the script, and be willing to stand on stage with no idea what will happen over the course of the evening. Frances McDormand, Peter Dinklage, Mike Myers and David Harewood are some of the many names to have played Crouch's unwitting castmate over the years. One of the play's early performers was Toby Jones, who 'rocked up' at the Brighton festival run of the show in 2006. 'Tim said you don't need to know anything; come on stage, it will all become clear,' Jones laughs. Part of the appeal for him was the opportunity to 'go on a journey with Tim' and lean into the unexpected. 'In a way, it is about submission of control … it is very moving; there's quite a lot to take in'. Susan Wokoma, who performed in An Oak Tree at Rada in London in 2018, was similarly excited by the play's uncharted territory. 'When I started acting as a kid, there was so much ensemble work, and it was about trust,' she says. 'Then you become an actor, and there is absolutely zero risk.' After An Oak Tree finished, Wokoma 'missed it immediately because I had to go back to what we've decided theatre is. I felt proud that I was part of it – you're part of the largest company ever'. Now, 20 years after its conception, Crouch is preparing to celebrate its anniversary with a three-week run at London's Young Vic. Actors including David Tennant, Jessie Buckley, Meera Syal and Mark Gatiss are all due to take the second role in Crouch's ever-evolving drama. As the one constant, Crouch has now performed An Oak Tree 380 times at theatres all across the globe. He keeps a list on his laptop of actors who have joined the play's ever-growing company. His play, he says, 'is like a lizard; it loses its tail and regrows it'. Crouch started his career in the theatre company Public Parts and trained as an actor at the University of Bristol and the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. He branched out into writing with his debut My Arm, a play that uses objects from the audience to a tell a story about a man who holds his arm above his head for 30 years. 'I was an unhappy actor and didn't know what the fuck I was doing,' he says, '[and] I wrote My Arm just for myself'. But the play was a success, and from it grew An Oak Tree. 'I wanted to effectively keep doing what I was doing with My Arm – to use an actor's projection to turn a human into another human.' Nowadays Crouch is considered a master of form. His plays challenge the traditional expectations of theatre. But it's surprising to learn that An Oak Tree's narrative came before its structure, with Crouch writing a story about two men meeting up after the death of one of their children. Inspired by a sculpture by Michael Craig Martin, which labels what is clearly a glass of water as an oak tree, the father in the play turns a nearby oak tree into his daughter. In 2005, Crouch, alongside his now-longtime collaborator Andy Smith, wrote a play that 'aligned both' form and story. Originally, Crouch wanted the father to be played by a non-actor. 'But then it expanded into using a different actor every time,' he says. 'The story is about a man who is lost, played by an actor who is lost'. In rehearsals, Smith took the role of the unknowing actor/father. 'Kind of like Men in Black, Andy would erase his memory of the previous day's work,' he says. 'He would note me on my tone, clarity, and how enabling my instructions were.' The second character is still called Andy in the published playscript of An Oak Tree. Eventually, Crouch started to 'bring in friends' to see how they'd react. 'We'd talk to them afterwards and go: 'How was that for you? Was there anything that was unclear? Where did you feel overwhelmed?'' he says. After two preview runs in Germany, An Oak Tree opened at the now defunct Nightingale theatre in Brighton with Deborah Asante playing the role of the father. Putting the second actor at ease is hugely important to Crouch. He meets them an hour before the show to prepare them for what to expect. 'I start by saying they can't get it wrong, and they can't get it right,' he says. Taking part in Crouch's 'formal game' was a liberating experience for Jones. 'It was quite unsettling, but Tim has written it so you're constantly being reassured that however you're doing it, it's right,' he says. 'I remember coming off and thinking the play was just a beautiful idea.' Since then, Jones has encouraged any actor considering signing up for An Oak Tree to do it. 'I tell them they'll be absolutely fine'. Michelle Terry, the actor and artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe in London, who is on the cast list for the forthcoming Young Vic run, admits that she's been a fan of Crouch's work 'for ever' and lists off some of her favourite plays that he has written, including I, Malvolio, I Cinna (The Poet), and Truth's a Dog Must to Kennel in quick succession. 'I think anyone who loves theatre and works in theatre just thinks he's the best,' she says. The rules of An Oak Tree are followed closely by the actors. Also due to appear at the Young Vic is Game of Thrones actor Indira Varma, who has avoided talking to anyone who has been in the play before. 'We're not allowed,' she laughs. 'How do you prepare for something you don't know anything about? I think I'm just going to go with the flow.' 'It must be exciting for the audience,' she says, 'watching someone potentially make a twat of themselves but also maybe succeed.' The only thing that worries Terry is that the script's font might be too small to read; 'otherwise, it is just a beautiful offer to go and just be there'. Now big-name actors queue to perform in An Oak Tree, a play that began its life on the fringes. How does this feel for Crouch, whose work is created in antithesis to the mainstream theatre world where Hollywood Oscar winners dominate? 'I would very happily play to university theatres for ever,' says Crouch. 'But I think the play is more than that. It has something to say about the bigger structures that operate in theatres.' Clearly, Crouch's 'imperfect' play appeals to the masses. 'It took me a long time to have the confidence to call myself a playwright,' he admits. And yet Crouch has new ideas bubbling to the surface. He wants to write more work for children: his twist on A Midsummer Night's Dream, I, Peaseblossom, is on at the RSC in May. But, never once in 20 years has he been bored by An Oak Tree. 'It keeps my brain alive and alert,' he says. 'Until theatre changes profoundly, I will keep doing it.' An Oak Tree is at the Young Vic, London, Tuesday to 24 May.
BBC News
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
25 of the best theatre shows to see in spring and summer 2025
Many theatres around the UK are staging fewer original productions than a decade ago, BBC research has revealed. But there are still plenty of plays and musicals on offer. Here are highlights from some of the theatres covered by the research. Playwright James Graham's latest powerful drama Punch, about the fallout from one fatal moment on a Saturday night out, is based on a true story. It has had rave reviews at Nottingham Playhouse and now at the Young Vic in London, where it runs until 26 April. It will transfer to the West End's Apollo Theatre in September. Raoul Moat, who went on a murderous rampage and spent a week on the run in 2010 is examined by award-winning playwright Robert Icke in Manhunt, which attempts to imagine what was going through Moat's mind. Royal Court, London, until 3 May. Psychological thriller Our New Girl by Nancy Harris, who wrote acclaimed TV comedy-drama The Dry, follows a woman struggling to deal with work and a troubled son when the arrival of an au pair does anything but help. Belfast Lyric, until 4 May. Alexis Deacon's children's book Beegu, about a lonely yellow alien who finds herself lost on Earth, is adapted for ages three to seven and is at the Unicorn Theatre, London, until 4 May. The UK stage premiere of a stage show based on feelgood 1994 Australian film Muriel's Wedding turns the story of the woman who longs to have the wedding of her dreams into a musical. Original songs are mixed with tunes by Muriel's beloved Abba. Leicester Curve, until 10 romantic comedy Much Ado About Nothing takes place in the world of footballers, wags and the celebrity high life, led by Freema Agyeman (Doctor Who) and Nick Blood (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.). Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 24 Man, Two Guvnors playwright Richard Bean's touching and comedic portrait of a Humberside family dealing with ageing and generational frissons, To Have and To Hold, stars Paula Wilcox, Ian Bartholomew and Stephen Tompkinson when it comes home to Hull Truck, 1-24 left an image of a girl standing in falling snow – which is actually ash from a fire – on the corner of a garage near the steelworks in Port Talbot, south Wales, in 2018. Now, Port Talbot Gotta Banksy uses the real words of local people to examine how the community reacted. Sherman Theatre, Cardiff, 2-10 May, then New Plaza, Port Talbot, 15-17 May, and author Roddy Doyle's book Two Pints, about two middle-aged men reflecting on life over a drink in a Dublin pub, gets its UK stage premiere at Coventry's Belgrade Theatre, 2-24 Addy plays a man who decides to walk the length of England to visit a former colleague who has cancer, in the world premiere of a stage adaptation of 2012 best-selling book The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. Rachel Joyce has adapted her own novel, with songs by chart-topping singer-songwriter Passenger. Chichester Festival Theatre, 5 May-4 Luther King meets his match in the form of a Memphis hotel maid in an imagined meeting on the eve of his assassination in Katori Hall's The Mountaintop, in a new production by Edinburgh Lyceum, 31 May-21 final play by unsung Stoke-on-Trent writer Arthur Berry finally gets its world premiere to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth. The title character in Whatever Happened to Phoebe Salt? dreams of swapping the grind of her butcher's job for a life in showbusiness. New Vic, Newcastle-under-Lyme, 31 May-21 Tick, Tick… Boom!, about an aspiring composer confronted by his 30th birthday, became an Oscar-nominated film in 2021. It now reopens Theatr Clwyd in Mold, north Wales, after a three-year, £49m refurbishment. 2-28 June. James Cooper and Jamie Morton - two-thirds of the team behind hit podcast My Dad Wrote A Porno - have made Lovestuck: A New Comedy Musical, which is billed as a "riotous romantic comedy" about dating and the quest to find love. Theatre Royal Stratford East, London, 6 June-12 children must fend for themselves after their addict mother abandons them in their caravan for the summer holidays in "dark comedy" Flumps (not to be confused with the 1970s children's TV show!). Colchester Mercury, 6-14 pairs of dancers have made it to Blackpool's National Amateur Championships, but rivalries and mis-steps threaten the fixed smiles and fake tans in Amanda Whittington's Kiss Me Quickstep, Derby Theatre, 6-21 people in different corners of the world – the fjords of Norway, the mountains of Colorado and the Tesco in Halewood, Merseyside – have encounters with wild animals in The Walrus has a Right to Adventure, inspired by real events. Liverpool Everyman, 12-21 June.A fictional lesbian choir – said to be the only one in the country – face tensions from inside and out as they try to win a place on the Pride main stage in The Ministry of Lesbian Affairs, a musical comedy at the Kiln, London, 13 June-12 July. Welsh 19th Century aristocrat Henry Cyril Paget, the fifth Marquess of Anglesey, scandalised high society with eccentricities that included using a car that converted exhaust fumes into perfume, and blowing his family's fortune on diamond frocks. His story is told in How To Win Against History, Bristol Old Vic, 19 June-21 July.A man who lost his wife to Covid occupies himself by walking his neighbour's dogs. When they escape one day, he takes chase and finds a dead body, forcing him to confront his own grief, in Man's Best Friend at Tron, Glasgow, 19 June-12 Lenny Henry's children's book The Boy With Wings, about a boy who discovers he has inherited superpowers and is tasked with saving the world, gets its stage premiere at Polka Theatre, London, 21 June-16 August, then Birmingham Rep, 21-30 August. A couple dealing with the everyday challenges of dementia take inspiration from Leeds United's 2020 promotion-chasing team and their manager Marcelo Bielsa in Through It All Together, which looks set to be perfectly timed to coincide with the team's latest return to the Premier League. Leeds Playhouse, 23 June-19 July. Liberation will mark the 80th anniversary of the Fifth Pan African Congress, which was held in Manchester in 1945 and was a key moment for independence movements. Royal Exchange, Manchester, 27 June-26 July. The writer and director of smash hit Prima Facie, starring Jodie Comer, reunite for a new legal drama. Saltburn's Rosamund Pike plays a judge in Inter Alia, billed as a "searing examination of modern masculinity and motherhood". National Theatre, London, 10 July-13 Brian Cox returns to the Scottish stage for the first time in a decade, playing pioneering 18th Century economist Adam Smith in Make It Happen, James Graham's new satire about the history of the Royal Bank of Scotland and its role in the 2008 financial crash. Dundee Rep, 18-26 July, then Edinburgh Festival Theatre 30 July-9 August.
