Tag Archives: Rufus Norris

My Country: a work in progress

Theatre Royal, Stratford East, London (****)

© Sarah Lee, Penny Layden (Britannia)

© Sarah Lee, Penny Layden (Britannia)

A `Sacrament of Listening’ could be the subtitle for Carol Ann Duffy and Rufus Norris’s post-Brexit project that opened three months ago at the National and which, caught now at the end of its UK tour with it’s almost white cast and similar audience, sits so oddly in a theatre normally packed with multi races and ownership. Continue reading

Everyman

Olivier Theatre, London

© Richard Hubert Smith

© Richard Hubert Smith

The opening moments of Rufus Norris’s Everyman feels very much like a follow-on to his Mumbai based Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Bhangra music blares out as a group of party-goers sashay onto the Olivier stage. Previously, Kate Duchêne’s Mrs Mop has been quietly working back and forth. Thus the production’s two book-ends: God as a charlady, cleaning up after human mess; contemporary hedonism in all its selfie grossness. Continue reading

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Olivier Theatre, National Theatre, London

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

© Richard Hubert-Smith

There’s something deeply disturbing about sitting in a comfortable western theatre bearing witness to the dire poverty lived elsewhere in the world. That, of course, is the power of theatre and it’s a testament to Rufus Norris’ blazing production, the assiduity of journalist Katherine Boo’s dedication in the slums of Mumbai and David Hare’s smooth adaptation that it has such a conscience pricking effect.

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