The Oscar-winning actor will lead Ayad Akhtar’s McNeal, playing a writer with ‘an unhealthy fascination with artificial intelligence’

Robert Downey Jr is set to make his Broadway debut in a new play from Pulitzer prize winner Ayad Akhtar.

The Oscar-winning actor will play the lead in McNeal, the story of a writer struggling with “an estranged son, a new novel, old axes to grind and an unhealthy fascination with artificial intelligence”. It’s described as “startling and wickedly smart”.

Continue reading...

They are comedy sparring partners from Green Wing. Can the duo play stricken lovers in The Deep Blue Sea, the eviscerating play Rattigan poured his own heartbreak into? Warning: contains spoilers

On 8 May 1956, Terence Rattigan stood outside the Royal Court theatre in London after the opening night of a revolutionary new drama. This was not one of his own plays but a sally from the upstart generation: John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Or, as the veteran playwright bitterly renamed it: Look How Unlike Terence Rattigan I’m Being. Refinement was out, the Angry Young Man was in, and the author of Separate Tables and The Winslow Boy had plummeted from favour.

But that all changed in 1993 – with Karel Reisz’s revival of The Deep Blue Sea, Rattigan’s most penetrating work. Penelope Wilton played Hester Collyer, who is separated from her husband, a primly patriarchal high court judge. She now lives in sin with her younger lover, the carousing ex-RAF pilot Freddie Page. The play begins with Hester’s listless body being discovered by her neighbours. She has tried to gas herself after Freddie failed to return for her birthday. (She would have succeeded had there been enough coins in the meter.) The rest of the day, and the play, is spent raking over the detritus of her life. Freddie bowls in obliviously; her husband tries to coax her back to the marital home; and the enigmatic former doctor, Miller, exhorts her to “go on living”.

Continue reading...

A world premiere presented by Factory International, The Accountants combines one tale of two auditing firms with another of friends who have connected British Indian and British Chinese heritages

Continue reading...

It’s still the magic milestone when senior citizenship begins … with a host of money-saving offers to take advantage of

The UK state pension age has risen but many companies and organisations still hold on to “the big 6-0” as the point at which senior citizenship begins, and it continues to represent a money-saving milestone as a result.

Continue reading...

Exclusive: Audience had ‘vitriolic reaction’ to European tone of musical, forced to close early

Rufus Wainwright has defended his musical Opening Night, which was forced to close early after mixed reviews , saying West End audiences lack “curiosity” after Brexit and the British press had turned on the project because it was “too European”.

Opening Night was Wainwright’s first musical and is an adaptation of John Cassavetes’ 1977 film about an actor struggling to cope, who is played by Sheridan Smith. Directed by Ivo van Hove, it opened in March at the Gielgud theatre but a month later announced it would be closing two months early .

Continue reading...

Line of Duty actor will oversee classic plays as well as new pieces inspired by the Irish author in Beckett: Unbound 2024

Adrian Dunbar is to curate a festival in Liverpool dedicated to the work of Samuel Beckett. The programme includes four specially commissioned productions, one involving prisoners at HMP Liverpool.

The Line of Duty actor said of Beckett: Unbound 2024: “Engaging with Beckett makes you think about the fundamentals of life. Those fundamentals are sometimes hard to engage with, but at the end, when he drives everything to a conclusion, he also makes you feel something that is liberating.”

Beckett: Unbound, Liverpool and Paris, 30 May–7 June

Continue reading...

Each time she takes the stage, the Korean choreographer and dancer asks if it will be the last time. She reflects on crushing stereotypes, breaking into theatre and her 100 failed auditions

Sung Im Her was 19 when she took her first dance class. On day one, the teacher told her to lose 20kg in a month and gave her something to bite on while forcing her legs towards the splits. “Harsh, very harsh. Absolutely not recommended,” says the now 47-year-old Korean choreographer and dancer. That punitive beginning would surely have put off many, but Her had become hooked on dance from watching TV and films such as Dirty Dancing and Flashdance. She was hungry – a word she uses many times in our conversation – to discover more.

“Six months later,” she says, “I got on to the contemporary dance course at Hansung University [in Seoul], with top marks. For four years I began at 7am every single day. I then did the two-year master’s degree. But I was still hungry: I wanted more freedom, I wanted to explore.”

Continue reading...

Royal Court, London
Four south London girls tell stories during detention at a mosque in Sabrina Ali’s play, which ends before we know much about them

Four British Somali girls are thrown together in detention at a south London mosque, having erred in “dugsi” (Islamic school). Sabrina Ali’s play is inspired by the high-schoolers in John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club. Like them, these girls, all chalk and cheese, have no choice but to engage with each other, especially when their teacher goes Awol.

Ali also plays Munira, a mischief maker, while Yasmin (Faduma Issa) wears a hot-pink jacket and talks about a friend’s bridal shower, and Salma (Susu Ahmed), a teachers’ pet, won’t reveal why she has been sent to detention with them. The mysterious Hani (Hadsan Mohamud) sits slightly apart, giving the other girls the side-eye, her reason for being there unexplained.

Dugsi Dayz runs at the Royal Court, London, until 18 May.

Continue reading...

York St John University, York
Footsbarn Travelling Theatre’s Twelfth Night and a Turkish Macbeth rubbed shoulders with manga, memoir and a Ukrainian scratch show at this boundary-defying festival

Debra Ann Byrd , founder of the Harlem Shakespeare festival, is speaking at an in-conversation event titled My Black Girl’s Journey , companion piece to Becoming Othello , her “living memoir” solo show: “A black friend asked me: ‘Why are you only doing Shakespeare?’” Byrd’s path to the playwright was set after a theatrical agent told her that the colour of her skin would bar her from playing classical roles. Her friend’s question led her to the conclusion: “Shakespeare is my vehicle. He makes a door open in a way not possible unless we have this one thing in common.”

At the sixth York International Shakespeare festival , people from the UK, EU, US, India, Turkey, Japan, Ukraine and beyond share “this one thing in common”. Over 10 days and nights, multinational audiences and artists crisscross barriers, visible and invisible, via performances, exhibitions, concerts, workshops and seminars.

Continue reading...