Preview: Lucha Libre, Roundhouse, London

Monday, 16 June 2008

What is life like for a Mexican wrestler who fights in the lucha libre style? The luchador Mystico de Juarez, also known as Incognito, from El Paso, Texas, is one of 16 top Mexican masked wrestlers coming to the Roundhouse to perform.

bahok, Sadler's Wells, London

Sunday, 15 June 2008

Home, wrote John Berger, is not an address. It's what you carry with you. And this is the thread of thought that runs through bahok, the latest piece by Akram Khan, himself the product of a split heritage, British and Bengali. In a loose sense the search for home, for national identity in a shifting world, has been the presiding theme of all his work, not least zero degrees, the duet that continues to garner plaudits around the world. Bahok, though, is his most literal production to date – it even has characters and dialogue – and it's the first in which Khan himself does not appear. Instead, he has brought together eight strongly individual dancers who between them represent six nationalities; three are on loan from the National Ballet of China.

Don Carlo, Royal Opera House, London
Bluebeard, Grange Park Opera, Hampshire
L'incoronazione di Dario, Garsington Opera, Oxfordshire

Sunday, 15 June 2008

Afterlife, NT Lyttelton London
Dickens Unplugged, Comedy, London
The Chalk Garden, Donmar, London

Sunday, 15 June 2008

I guess Michael Frayn couldn't call his new play Half-life. It would have sounded like the radioactive coda to Copenhagen, his previous NT hit about physicists, nuclear fission and Nazism. Afterlife is, rather, a biodrama about the arts and the Anschluss and, specifically, Max Reinhardt. We first encounter the celebrated impresario of Jewish stock in middle age. At the height of his fortunes, before the rise of Hitler, he's being lionised in Germany, Austria and worldwide for his spectacular stage epics – with casts of up to 2,000 actors.

The Chalk Garden, Donmar Warehouse, London (Rated 4/ 5 )

Friday, 13 June 2008

The Chalk Garden had its English premiere in April 1956, just a month before Look Back in Anger lobbed a landmine at the theatre of well-heeled gentility. So it's intriguing to note that Kenneth Tynan, a critic not disposed to warm to plays set in Sussex manor houses, hailed Enid Bagnold's play as a glorious final flourish by the old brigade – a miraculous justification of the West End in the sunset of its decline. He declared that The Chalk Garden "may well be the finest artificial comedy to have flowed from an English (as opposed to an Irish) pen since the death of Congreve".

You write the reviews: Troilus and Cressida, Barbican, London (Rated 4/ 5 )

Friday, 13 June 2008

Declan Donnellan's clear conceptualisation of the cynicism of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, in which all is "war and lechery", gives scope for some memorable performances in this Cheek by Jowl production. Paul Brennen as the Greek general Achilles and David Caves as the Trojan prince Hector expose the self-indulgent vanity of the top brass on both sides of the Trojan war. The costumes are part-Grecian, part-Nazi, part-colonialist, alluding to more recent conflicts.

Afterlife, National Theatre: Lyttelton, London (Rated 2/ 5 )

Thursday, 12 June 2008

Afterlife is Michael Frayn's third National Theatre play in succession to spring from a real historical situation. The big difference is that Copenhagen and Democracy are complex masterpieces, whereas Afterlife – premiered now in Michael Blakemore's handsomely staged but perforce hollow production in the Lyttelton – is a disappointing dud.

If I Were You, Library Theatre, Manchester (Rated 3/ 5 )

Thursday, 12 June 2008

Ever imagined yourself inside your husband's (or wife's) body? No, me neither, but Alan Ayckbourn has a vivid idea of what if must be like to find yourself with the physical attributes of the opposite sex while retaining your own personality.

Preview: Albert Herring, Glyndebourne Festival, Glyndebourne

Thursday, 12 June 2008

Inspired by the serious comedy of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte, and employing the Mozartian recipe of recitatives and set numbers, Benjamin Britten's sparkling Albert Herring – which transplants a story by Guy de Maupassant to Suffolk – might have been thought the ideal chamber opera for the Glyndebourne audience for whom it was intended, but they missed the point. On the other hand, the production staged by Peter Hall for the same festival four decades later became a mainstay of its repertoire. But I doubt if it has ever had a stronger cast than the one we will see next week.

Dickens Unplugged, Comedy Theatre, London (Rated 2/ 5 )

Wednesday, 11 June 2008

Adam Long could not be less aptly named since length is evidently anathema to him. He's the maestro of abridgement – one of the American founder members of the Reduced Shakespeare Company whose zany compression of the Bard's Complete Works to a breakneck 97-minute romp ran for nine years at the Criterion Theatre.