Matt Boothman

Inoculate yourself against the World Cup

15th June 2010 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree

Image courtesy of Martin Shippen Arts Marketing and Media
Written by John Graham Davies
Directed by Matt Rutter
Starring Paul Duckworth
King's Head Theatre, until Sunday 4th July, £10-£20 (book tickets)
If you’re on tenterhooks for the World Cup, you could do worse for a warm-up than Beating Berlusconi. But you don’t need a review to tell you that; you can work out from the poster alone that it’s pitched at football fans. This review is...

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Napoleon Noir: still neglected by history

1st June 2010 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree

Written by Marcus Heath
Directed by Hannah Kaye
Starring Cavin Cornwall
Lost Theatre, until Saturday 5th June, £10-£30 (book tickets)
Poor Toussaint L’Ouverture – known in his native 18th century San Domingo (modern Haiti) as the Napoleon Noir – is apparently doomed to historical oversight. Despite being a...

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TR Warszawa take on 4.48 Psychosis

25th March 2010 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree

Written by Sarah Kane
Directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna
Starring Magdalena Cielecka
Barbican Theatre, until Saturday 27th March, £10-£30 (book tickets)

4.48 Psychosis is a gift for a director. Kane's text - her last - is more prose poem than script, lacking stage directions or delineated characters: a nearly blank slate onto which a director can impose context, character and narrative. To Grzegorz Jarzyna, of Polish company TR Warszawa, that creative freedom is a double-edged...

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Lyn Gardner fully expects to be replaced by Katie Price

1st March 2010 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree

The national newspapers' habit of replacing their retired head theatre critics with columnists and political sketchwriters is pretty worrying for those of us on the bottom rungs of the theatre criticism career ladder, as I pointed out in January, when The Times announced Libby Purves would be replacing Benedict Nightingale in their top spot.
Well, it turns out up-and-comers like me aren't the only ones concerned by the trend: some of...

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“I’d rather be in the pub” is not an excuse

19th February 2010 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree

It's understandable that a lot of people would rather spend their evening in the pub than at the theatre. Who cares if the tickets are more affordable than you might think? Theatres are stuffy and elitist, plays are boring, and you can't even fortify yourself beforehand or commiserate properly afterwards because the beer is expensive and the wine is expensive and nasty...
...all right, you've caught me; that was a test. ...

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Olivier Audience Award shortlist: four musicals and a horse

9th February 2010 | 2 comments | 1 person likes this

I promised you a reminder to vote in the second round of the Olivier Awards' brand-new category, the Audience Award - so here it is.
The winner of the Audience Award for Most Popular Long-Running Show of 2009 is determined by the votes of the general public - the first time an Olivier Award winner has been decided by anyone outside the Society of London Theatre. The first round of voting...

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Excuse me, you’re standing in my dead men’s shoes

28th January 2010 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree

Theatre reviewing is a dead men's shoes business. One someone lands a chief critic position at a national newspaper, they'll traditionally hold onto that position until they're buried or senile. So for all the deputies and second-stream critics, and for all us up-and-comers watching hawklike for new deputy or second-stream opportunities, the voluntary retirement of two chief critics within a year of one another should have been a cause for...

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The Noughties according to Theatre503

22nd January 2010 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree

What do you remember about the Noughties? (Yes, it turns out that is what we're calling them.) Theatre503 asked that question to ten playwrights - five established, five as-yet unproduced - and the result is Decade, a collection of ten ten-minute plays, each one representing a single year. So what do the Decade writers remember about the Noughties?
First and foremost, they remember global catastrophes. Summing up a whole year in...

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New Olivier Award celebrates the power of you

21st January 2010 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree

This year's Laurence Olivier Awards will include a brand new category, the Audience Award, introduced to celebrate the nation's favourite long-running production of 2009. Notice that I say 'the nation's favourite', not 'the Society of London Theatre's favourite'. The nominees and eventual winner of the Audience Award will be decided by a public vote.
Public opinion polls aren't exactly news, especially in Theatreland; Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group make their...

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No excuses: theatre is affordable

14th January 2010 | 3 comments | 2 people like this

Hey, did you see Avatar? Did you see it in 3D? What about IMAX 3D? What did you pay? I paid £12.50, plus online booking fee, to see it in IMAX 3D (at the Odeon in Wimbledon, if anyone's asking), and I was just one of millions: millions of people who have proven themselves willing to spend £12.50 or thereabouts on an evening's entertainment.
If you're one of those millions, you...

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