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A night of melancholy and mirth was had by the Whatsonstage.com theatregoers that attended last night’s performance of Brian Friel’s Olivier Award winner Dancing at Lughnasa.

This wonderful production, Dancing at Lughnasa’s first major revival since its premiere almost twenty years ago, comes beautifully to life thanks to a strong ensemble cast including Niamh Cusack, Andrea Corr and Susan Lynch under the skillful direction of Anna Mackmin. The Old Vic, transformed into a theatre-in-the-round, is the perfect setting for this deeply moving story of five spinster sisters in a small invented Irish town in the 1930s. Neatly involving the wider problems of the day in this very personal story Friel gives us a snap shot not only of a collapsing family but also of a rapidly changing world. (more…)

I went to Paradise yesterday evening and was slightly disappointed to find Lyn Gardner and Benedict Nightingale there, too. As a sneak preview of the life hereafter, the installation at the Barbican was a severe let down, in fact.

Another lost soul, Susannah Clapp, confided that she almost had a Milton Shulman moment — he’ll huff, and he’ll puff, and he’ll blow that house down — while contemplating a naked man reaching out vainly towards some flowing water cascading  into the black void.

And that was it: I’m certainly not going to mend my habits or recant my false dogmas on the off chance that I’ll find my way eventually to an avant-garde tableau notably deficient in choirs of angels, vestal virgins and heaps of harp music.

In the Barbican Theatre proper, Romeo Castellucci’s trip through Dante’s Inferno was more like it, a hell of a show, you might say, with massed ranks of mournful extras in cheap leisure wear, a flaming piano, a painted horse and a terrifying opening of wild dogs smelling the place out and attacking poor old Castellucci as if demanding their money back.

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This is my last Critical Comment, so I suppose I should sound a valedictory note – perhaps a nostalgic ramble through the delights of the last two or three years. Instead I’d like to look to the future. What kind of theatre can we expect as economic recession bites? Will people shun the expense of a night out, retreat to their domestic screens and venture forth only for big, spectacular musicals? That’s what many people predict. But all the evidence points the opposite way: what is staggering right now is the palpable hunger for … plays!

I was reminded of this by a colleague who’d skipped a number of first nights and had been going to theatre with parties of American students. What amazed her was that all the theatres they’d been to were packed to the rafters. Alan Bennett’s Enjoy at the Gielgud nightly sends large audiences into a state of delirium. It’s the same story with Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane at Trafalgar Studios. I gather that A View from the Bridge at the Duke of York’s is an equally hot ticket and that Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa is drawing crowds to the Old Vic. And, at a Sunday-night celebration of the work of Simon Gray, I bumped into an actress friend who is currently in Peter Flannery’s Burnt by the Sun at the National. “How’s it doing?” I nervously asked, knowing that the advance for a play based on a little-known Russian film was not that great. “Ever since the reviews came out,” she said, “we’ve been absolutely packed.” (more…)