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Critic's Choice: Top Five Plays
By Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard 04.09.06
Round the bend: The multi-tasking cast of The 39 Steps
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Nicholas de Jongh picks out five of the best theatrical productions currently onstage in the West End, from the highly entertaining The 39 Steps, to the superb Frost/Nixon...
The 39 Steps
Tricycle, NW6
It doesn't take much tweaking for The 39 Steps to be played for laughs (writes Fiona Mountford). Director Maria Aitken and adapter Patrick Barlow give us only four actors, a handful of props and a flash of shadow puppetry to recreate a world of glamorous female secret agents and dastardly threats to national security. From this, they produce 150 characters - I lost count - and recreate such seminal scenes as Richard Hannay's escape on the Flying Scotsman and escapades on the Forth Bridge as all the chestnuts of am-dram are sent up. (020 7328 1000). Tonight 8pm. Until 9 September.
Frost/Nixon
Donmar Warehouse, WC2.
Now politics and showbusiness are locked in a mutually adoring embrace, there could be no better moment to present Peter Morgan's enthralling drama recreating the disgraced Richard Nixon's TV interview with David Frost. Frank Langella's Nixon steers a comically evasive, sentimental and artful course through the soft barrage of questions from Michael Sheen's politically vacant Frost. However, a killer question in the final show just about slaughters the former president. Frost/Nixon, warns us that politicians now live and die by television. (020 7240 4882). Tonight 7.30pm. Until 7 October
The Life Of Galileo
National's Olivier, SE1
What a disturbing, contemporary resonance there is about Bertolt Brecht's epic drama of faith, truth and reason, in which that visionary mathematics professor and stargazer, Galileo Galilei, designs a subversive telescope to challenge the Catholic church's cherished fantasies about the Earth and Sun and eventually recants his heresy. David Hare's wittily modernistic version of The Life Of Galileo has inspired director Howard Davies to stage his atmospheric, spectacular production in modern dress, giving Simon Russell Beale's thrilling Galileo, tieless, in loose shirt and cigarette to hand, the air of a 21st-century redbrick university professor up against the tricky authorities. (020 7452 3000). Tonight 7.30pm. In rep until 31 October.
LAST CHANCE: The Boy Friend
Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park, NW1.
How ludicrous. And how wonderful (writes Kieron Quirke). The Open Air Theatre's delicious production of Sandy Wilson's homage to the Twenties is a no brainer, a gorgeous fantasy set among the The young flappers of Mme Dubonnet's finishing school for ladies in Nice, that demands you suspend meaningful thought while your heart claps along to its syncopated rhythms. Wilson's songs ring out with the simple freshness of a summer breeze, while the performances are enthusiastic and endearing. A divine evening. (08700 601811). Tonight 8pm. In rep until 9 September.
LAST CHANCE: Fool for Love
Apollo, W1
Hollywood stars often fizzle out when they venture on the West End stage, but between them Juliette Lewis and Martin Henderson generate enough sexual electricity to set Shaftesbury Avenue throbbing. You cannot miss the charge of eros in Sam Shepard's enthralling Fool For Love as Miss Lewis's May, wild and vulnerable, clings to the knees of Henderson's bearded Eddie in a low-rent motel room in the Mojave desert. Lindsay Posner's superb production screws the tension to the tightest point and creates an atmosphere of dream-struck strangeness that is true to Shepard's haunting vision of what passes for American family life in some of its darker regions. (0870 890 1101). Tonight 8pm. Until 9 September.
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