(photo credit: Unsplash)
We so miss going to concerts and theatres! (And you know, we do not think we will ever fall out of love with London’s theatres).
Don’t you?
It’s finally happening: London’s theatres are reopening (here is a rolling list) and we are hopeful this would be a real one (after the disappointments from the earlier false starts).
We hear: “#BackOnStage”, “a new wave of creativity”, “In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead”.
We hear more: “I am most excited about a post-pandemic theater that embraces its literal beginnings to find itself; sound and movement; an actor and language; story in space. A deck, a chair, a performer?”
And: “We do not lack subjects nowadays because the world is undergoing cataclysmic, colossal changes.”
As for our thoughts? Well, we are excited about a number of new productions, including, at long last, Bach & Sons. As you know, we love the Bridge Theatre, and this new commission by Nina Raine (which will receive its world premiere in June, with Simon Russell Beale in the title role) has been in the making for at least 3 years. Bach, of course, famously, had 20 children (with half of them, 6 sons and 4 daughters, surviving into adulthood, and with at least 3 of them making a serious name for themselves as composers), and this drama focuses on his relationship with them and ponders on the meaning of life on the way.
We cannot wait!
We are also looking forward to this interesting new production at one of our favourite theatres, the Harold Pinter. Walden is about a NASA botanist returning from a year on the moon!
The third new production we are much intrigued by is Dylan Thomas’s classic Under Milk Wood – a drama about the eccentric denizens of a fictional Welsh village – at the National Theatre in Southbank. There isn’t enough staged Dylan Thomas and the Olivier will be set up in the round for the entire run, so we think this is rather unmissable!
For more surrealism, the next new production in our round-up is After Life, an adaptation by Jack Thorne of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 1998 film. This will be the first 2021 show at the National Theatre, and is a surreal drama about a mundane town in which recently deceased souls arrive and must negotiate an intensely bureaucratic system in order to choose their happiest memory and remain in it for all eternity.
The final item in our round-up is a revival of Nick Payne’s Constellations, a witty but suddenly very sad drama about a couple – he a beekeeper and she a cosmologist – whose relationship exists across an infinite number of parallel possible universes that slowly converge on one inevitable outcome. The original (2012) production iconic set at the Royal Court – featuring a giant balloon – is transferred to the Vaudeville.
There you have it: five “stories enacted in 3D space” to be part of for an evening! We already feel a glow from sharing our passion for London theatre and thinking of getting to these shows.
