The week on stage: From ‘bold’ supernatural epic The Glow to a ‘painfully unsexy’ Fatal Attraction
Highs and lows of the week’s theatre
It has been a week of icy magic, supernatural time-travelling and bunny boiling on the UK stage – to varying degrees of success. These are the most talked-about productions from the past seven days. Next week, we’ll be reviewing the likes of Wuthering Heights, Purple Snowflakes and A Number.
The Glow – Royal Court ★★★☆☆
Alistair McDowall’s latest offering is properly bold stuff. The Glow is an epic that presents the supernatural as a violent, yet often funny thing – but as soon as you think you’ve accepted what it’s about, the play shifts unrecognisably. A true game of two halves, it’s one of those theatre experiences that would benefit from multiple watches to dull all the head scratching.
In act one, it’s 1863 and Mrs Lyall (Rakie Ayola), a “writer, social thinker and spiritualist medium of some renown”, is looking for an accomplice to help with her work – a “passive” woman who she can summon the spirits through. In act two, left behind are Mrs Lyall and the 1860s – now it’s a time-travelling adventure spanning from 300,000 BC to 1999. On paper, bringing in multiple timelines should expand McDowall’s already unusual world. But the tone is closer to a more convoluted Doctor Who adventure and lacks the drive of the fast-paced first half. Isobel Lewis
Read the full review here.
Fatal Attraction – Touring ★★☆☆☆
Fatal Attraction wants to have its bunny and boil it too. On the one hand, writer James Dearden has dragged the Glenn Close and Michael Douglas erotic thriller into the modern day, seemingly in an attempt to wrestle with outdated gender stereotypes. But on the other hand, it seems hellbent on reinforcing them. It’s also painfully unsexy – an erotic thriller sans eroticism.
The production is held together by Kym Marsh, who is “doing the most” as spoon-licking temptress Alex. She’s somehow able to bring moments of subtlety to a character we expect to be a pure stereotype, and her New York accent is by far the least dodgy. Unfortunately, there’s negative chemistry between her and Oliver Farnworth as Dan. The film is so gripping because you believe that raw, animalistic connection between Douglas and Close, even when you know it’s wrong. Without it, you’re left wondering why either of them went to all this trouble in the first place. Isobel Lewis
Read the full review here.
Ava: The Secret Conversations – Riverside Studios ★★☆☆☆
Downton Abbey star Elizabeth McGovern is banking quite a bit on her Ava Gardner impression. A whole show, in fact. She’s written this uneven biographical drama as a vehicle for her talent for impersonating the raucous, sexually voracious Hollywood star. And although she nails the drawling Dust Bowl accent, the script doesn’t do much to make Gardner’s story an attractive proposition.
Director Gaby Dellal’s production is structured as a series of conversations between Gardner and a crass English journalist who’s obsessed by the size of her ex-husband Frank Sinatra’s penis – conversations that turned into a lurid tell-all. But the more McGovern tries to twist her source material into a more high-minded form, the less successful this play is. Ultimately, it feels like a feeble, oddly bitter attempt to capture the lustre of a star who’s already fading from cultural memory. Alice Sanville
Read the full review here.
Frozen – Theatre Royal Drury Lane ★★★★☆
A sea of mini Elsas and Annas file into the Theatre Royal to watch this joyful stage adaptation of the phenomenally successful Disney film. Before it begins, the usual announcement asking us to turn off our phones ends with a special welcome to those littluns who are about to witness their first-ever musical: “We hope it is the beginning of a life-long love of musicals.” It sets the tone for a poignant, visually magnificent and enormously fun production. Samantha Barks brings plenty of pathos to the role of snow queen Elsa, while Stephanie McKeon nails Anna’s charmingly hapless energy.
Sure, there are a few underwhelming new musical additions, and a handful of puzzling lyrical changes, but none of that matters when Elsa, halfway through singing “Let It Go” in her newly created ice palace, magically changes her outfit into the iconic sparkling dress and the entire auditorium gasps with delight. Those mini Elsas and Annas have been well-served. Alexandra Pollard
Nish Kumar: Your Power, Your Control – Touring ★★★★☆
The former Mash Report host’s new show honours intense, weighty news items – from the Colston statue being chucked into the river to the numerous Conservative Party failures – with humour. “Buzzkill on a group chat, great laugh on a panel show,” Kumar tells us, with a chuckle. “I contain multitudes.”
But where Your Power, Your Control breaks fresh ground is less about the news than Kumar as a newsworthy figure. The cancellation of The Mash Report and the BBC’s unwillingness to defend him is briefly described as “heartbreaking”, but the show fixates on one fateful gig back in 2019. For those who don’t remember, Kumar was pelted with bread for making jokes about Brexit at a charity cricket lunch days before the election. For what it’s worth, he tells us, their aim was pretty shoddy anyway.
But if he’d criticise the Tories to his prime audience at the Soho Theatre, it would have been hypocritical not to make them at the cricket club gig. And in the end, Nish Kumar having a bad gig made front-page news. That has to count for something. Isobel Lewis
Read the full review here.
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