Theatre

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Leopoldstadt ★★★★

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Leopoldstadt ★★★★

My Stoppard journey began more than 40 years ago with the heady cocktail of verbal fireworks, erudition and wit that is his 1966 play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Now it seems it is to end, with what the great playwright suggests is his last play, as he navigates his own…

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Rendezvous in Bratislava ★★★★

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Rendezvous in Bratislava ★★★★

“We had the biggest party in the darkest time,” declares one of the gloriously evocative numbers in Miriam Sherwood's self-styled ‘grandad cabaret’. Rendezvous in Bratislava is a love letter to her late grandfather Jan ‘Laco’ Kalina, a Slovakian Jewish satirist, joke collector, cabaret creator…

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Falling in Love Again ★★★

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Falling in Love Again ★★★

There’s a pleasing synchronicity to Ron Elisha’s take on the abdication of Edward VIII and how no less a femme fatale than Marlene Dietrich might have tried to change history by getting him to ‘fall in love' again. The play arrives onstage just as royals seeking to abdicate their duties…

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Interview: Patrick Marber

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Interview: Patrick Marber

“I consider myself a Jewish writer, like all my heroes: Tom Stoppard, David Mamet, Philip Roth, Arthur Miller, Woody Allen,” said director Patrick Marber in an interview in 2015. Now he is directing a play from one of those “heroes”, Tom Stoppard – a play which might be…

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Rags the Musical ★★★★

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Rags the Musical ★★★★

With book by Fiddler librettist Joseph Stein (sympathetically revised by David Thompson), it’s clear that Rags might represent the future of Anatevka’s plucky emigrants. Designer Gregor Donnelly loads piles of battered suitcases around the action as another boatload of…

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The Ballad of the Cosmo Café ★★★★

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The Ballad of the Cosmo Café ★★★★

Stepping inside Director/Scenographer Pamela Howard’s bustling evocation of the much-loved meeting place that was the Cosmo Café, notably for Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe, is to be instantly swept up in its vibrant life. Even before the show begins, Santiago del Fosco’s head waiter…

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The Cosmo comes to life again

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The Cosmo comes to life again

“I loved The Cosmo, which I got to know in the mid-50s. This was the time when not much English could be heard in Finchley Road, and the bus conductor would call out “Jerusalem” or ‘Vienna”! The German accent in the streets was predominantly Austrian, as was the conversation in…