Florian Zeller gets us lost in The Forest ”I'm listening. Do you always tell the truth?" Man in Black Angel Coulby as The Girlfriend and Paul McGann as Man 2…
Cush Jumbo's soliloquies are deep and thoughtful, every word heard as they should be. This is the third time I recall the Young Vic choosing an excellent Hamlet but giving him a problematic production. There was Peter Brook's curtailing Adrian Lester's Hamlet to just Hamlet's lines in the play. There was Ian Rickson's setting of Martin Sheen as Hamlet in a psychiatric ward with Gertrude as a fellow patient and Claudius as the consultant psychiatrist. We walked through an installation of the back of a hospital with a dispensary before seeing the play. The last really successful, all round Hamlet I remember at the Young Vic was Paul Rhys's 1930s European royalty in 1999.
Very rarely am I able to use expressions like heartwarming and unmissable about musicals with the sincerity and integrity that I apply to my critical reviews. Maybe because Everybody's Talking About Jamie is based on the true story of Jamie Campbell, a boy from County Durham (think the brutal, uncompromising North, not far from the scene of Billy Elliot) whose ambition is to be a drag queen.