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Review of the Year 2007 - The London Stage (5)4. Other Major TheatresDateline: 23rd December, 2007The Royal Court thoroughly enjoyed a year of transition as Ian Rickson retired from the post of artistic director on a high and Dominic Cooke took over and maintained the standard, despite taking considerable risks with his programming. Rickson signed off in fine style, directing one of the year's two high-profile productions of The Seagull. With Kristin Scott Thomas, Mackenzie Crook and Chiwetel Ejiofor this was always going to be a special event and, in fact, Rickson's interpretation and some great acting, not only from this trio but also Katherine Parkinson as Masha, ensured a real treat that is now bound for Broadway. Before he left, he programmed several other plays. These included a staging, with the National Theatre of Scotland, of Anthony Neilson's Edinburgh Festival hit The Wonderful World of Dissocia, a strange trip into the head of an odd person. The 2007 Young Writers Festival introduced is to The Eleventh Capital by Alexandra Wood, a play distinguished as much by an inventive staging from Natalie Abrahami, later to take over at The Gate, as the writing, which showed talent in flashes. Miss Wood was paired with Bola Agbaje, whose thoroughly enjoyable Festival play Gone Too Far! featured two young brothers, one brought up in London, the other Nigeria. Another young playwright, 25-year-old Northern Irishwoman Lucy Caldwel,l took us into the Irish problem from the perspective of a family's highly intelligent, growing daughters in Leaves, a play co-produced with Druid. Dominic Cooke opened up with a stream of fantastic new writing that bodes well for this historic theatre's future. His first production, Upstairs, was That Face by Polly Stenham, a play about a girls school and prefects with sadistic tendencies, that brought to mind Tom Brown's Rugby. It was such a success that it has already won an Evening Standard Award Best New Writer Award for its 20-year-old author. Even better, was Mike Bartlett's short play My Child about family breakup, which turned the Theatre Downstairs into a claustrophobic train carriage in which actors had to pick their way between members of their engrossed audience. Next came Alaska by D. C. Morris which showed the seamier side of contemporary life and featured an impressive Rafe Spall playing that most dangerous of animals, an educated racist. The hits just kept rolling along as Bruce Norris' eerie American play, The Pain and the Itch, seemed mysterious until it reached a shocking ending and Marius von Mayenburg's The Ugly One, beautifully directed by Ramin Gray and featuring a talented trio of actors wittily addressed issues of beauty and its commercial value. Bringing things up to date, the Upstairs Theatre has had a season of worthwhile short-running works from overseas including two more fine plays, Gianina Carbunariu's Kebab from Eastern Europe and Anupama Chandrasekhar's Free Outgoing from India, both of which addressed delicate subjects in true Royal Court style. Downstairs, Cooke's first two revivals played in rep using most of the same actors. Ionesco's Rhinoceros was great, absurd fun while Max Frisch's The Arsonists didn't have quite the same comic or dramatic impact. Michael Grandage also had a hard act to follow when he took over at the Donmar from Sam Mendes. He has gone from strength to strength with a mixture of popular and more intellectual programming. The musical Parade by Jason Robert Brown won a lot of friends with its exploration of the tricky topic of racial discrimination in the Deep South of the United States. With a combination of tuneful music, which owed much to Stephen Sondheim, and a true story that on occasions got far too close to melodrama, it has arrived on several year-end awards lists. Charlotte Westenra directed a really atmospheric revival of Manuel Puig's prison classic Kiss of the Spider Woman, featuring an outstanding performance from Will Keen, well supported by Rupert Evans. Many might regard Betrayal as Harold Pinter's most accessible and quite possibly best play. It now has added resonance resulting from the revelations of the background to the story featuring Joan Bakewell as well as Pinter and her husband Michael. It seems to appear in the theatrical repertoire on a regular basis and this year under the direction of Roger Michell, Sam West taking a break from directing himself, Toby Stephens and Dervla Kirwan ensured that this love story in reverse made the usual hard-hitting impact. Grandage has become fond of bringing Ibsen to his theatre and this year, he chose to direct John Gabriel Borkman with a star cast led by Ian MacDiarmid, Penelope Wilton and Rafe Spall. The Almeida's hit rate has not been as high as its supporters would like in recent years. However, there have been some good moments during 2007 especially in a pair of plays that have explored the American Depression from different viewpoints but come to similar conclusions. Awake and Sing by Clifford Odets looked at the Jewish response, while Theodore Ward's Big White Fog showcased the Black experience. Each was powerful and well produced. For comedy with serious undertones, Attenborough turned to Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine, a really fascinating play juxtaposing British colonialists of the Victorian era with their 1970s equivalents and also Nikolai Erdman's The Suicide, a black Russian farce now called Dying for It, in a very funny new version created by Moira Buffini and starring Tom Brooke. Less successful was Frank McGuinness's Irish elegy, There Came a Gypsy Riding, which featured some nice performances from Eileen Atkins and Imelda Staunton but didn't quite manage to combine the wistful and the businesslike as it intended to. This year at the Globe, Dominic Dromgoole chose a more popular Shakespearean programme than he had for his inaugural season. This was ill-fated in the extreme, with the press night of The Merchant of Venice ending two actors short from the originally programmed cast. The Shakespearean highlight on home ground was probably The Comedy of Errors, which is always fun and much appreciated by an audience that does not necessary know Shakespeare or for that matter the English language. Jack Shepherd's new play about the Chartists, Holding Fire, was well directed by Mark Rosenblatt and proved to be one of the open-air theatre's high points. Another even less anticipated pleasure was their touring Romeo and Juliet, spotted at Lord's for a single lively and extremely enjoyable performance, which allowed a crew of young actors led by Richard Madden and Ellie Piercy to shine under the direction of Edward Dick. David Lan's programming at the Young Vic has been consistently adventurous, some might argue too much so in that the revelatory big hits have been balanced with one or two disasters. He has really ended on a high with South African versions of Dickens' Christmas Carol and Mozart's Magic Flute. The latter in particular, which has deservedly been rewarded with a West End transfer, was a glorious delight, featuring superb sopranos accompanied on marimbas rather than by a more traditional orchestra. The stories in both of these plays took on fresh nuances, with their African veneer adding an extra dimensional to well-known tales. That was playing in the main theatre at the same time as an impressive American play, The Brothers Size by Tarell Alvin McCraney was in the Maria Studio. This gritty drama from the southern part of the United States but based on Nigerian myth, had the simplest of stagings by Bijan Sheibani. As a result, it was possibly even more moving than had massive resources been invested in the project. Earlier in the year, the theatre had offered four short plays by Bertolt Brecht under the witty title of The Big Brecht Fest, in new versions all of which were worthwhile, in particular the opening pairing of the tragedy of The Jewish Wife and a ribald comedy in Rory Bremner's new version of A Respectable Wedding. Fragments was another compilation that allowed Londoners to see five short plays by Samuel Beckett featuring some of the best physical actors in the business, Jos Houben, Kathryn Hunter and Marcello Magni. The stage adaptation of DC Pierre's the Booker prize-winning novel, Vernon God Little, got mixed reviews but did give debutant Irish actor Colin Morgan a memorable opportunity to shine. Philip Fisher
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