Stage: Summer Round-up
From Noel Coward’s Volcano and Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, Sussex has an exciting season of theatre ahead
While normally at this time of year the idea of sitting on prickly red plush in the heat is somewhat off-putting, this year’s inclement weather means that theatre is a great option. So here are some regional highlights.
In Brighton the summer season kicked off with a new production of Dandy Dick but this week it’s Educating Rita at Theatre Royal Brighton. Willy Russell’s classic was made famous on film by Julie Walters and Michael Caine, but the stage version is a far more succinct telling of the story as Rita finds her real self with the aid of her open university tutor, an alcoholic failed poet. Claire Sweeney is perfect in the role and gives a fine performance and Matthew Kelly once again proves that he is a great stage actor.
Mon 16 – Sat 21 July
The following week Jenny Seagrove leads a star cast in Noel Coward’s newly discovered gem Volcano. Recently widowed Adela Shelly finds herself being seduced by the suave Guy Littleton, a visitor to her elegant Pacific house. When Guy’s acid-tongued wife Melissa decides to fly in to see off the competition, she hasn’t considered that Adela’s best friend might also be falling for her husband’s charms! As tensions begin to erupt, so does the volcano, with explosive consequences.
Never performed in the author’s lifetime, this is the first major production of a work which gives a fascinating insight into the glamorous and scandalous Caribbean lifestyle that Coward himself enjoyed.
Mon 23 – Sat 28 July, Theatre Royal Brighton
Box office 08448 717 650
www.atgtickets.com/brighton
Over in Chichester the festival season continues at a pace with the brilliant Kiss Me, Kate running until September and Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills (until July 14) launching the 50 year celebration temporary performance space The Fly. Next in the season is The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui. Written in 1941 just before the exiled Brecht arrived in the USA, and described by the author himself as a ‘gangster play that would recall certain events familiar to us all’, The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui is a sharp and thrilling parable of the rise of Hitler shot through with razor-sharp wit.
Chicago in the 1930s, the Great Depression – a time of unemployment, fear and corruption, and the perfect time for a small-fry crime boss and his henchmen to make it big, to seize a greater power, an absolute power. Arturo Ui and his mob of gangsters run protection rackets for both workers and businesses. Soon Ui’s menacing shadow looms large, from the markets, to the docks and across the city itself.
Minerva Theatre, Until 28 July 2012
Also this month Heartbreak House starring Derek Jacobi. On the brink of World War I, pragmatic Ellie Dunn, her father and her fiancé are invited to a house party at the home of eccentric Captain Shotover by his daughter Hesione Hushabye. The family is soon divided by Ellie’s decision to marry for money, not love.
As their hearts and minds become inseparably tangled in Ellie’s dilemma, Bernard Shaw, master of wit and social commentary, brilliantly debates money and morality, idealism and realism, and with uncanny prescience and comic insight chronicles a society teetering on the threshold of enormous change.
Festival Theatre, Chichester
Box office 01243 781312
www.cft.org.uk
Over in Eastbourne this week they plan to rock you with Bohemian Rhapsody as the spellbinding celebration of the music of Freddie Mercury and Queen rocks into the Congress Theatre for one dynamic week. Queen’s biggest hits explode on to the stage in this amazing Broadway style production, with a full-scale cast of 25 incredible performers including a rockin’ on stage band. Featuring a company of dancers, a live orchestra and nine phenomenal West End singers, including X Factor finalist and former lead singer of G4, Jonathan Ansell.
Jonathan will be joined onstage by an array of sensational musical theatre performers who come direct from lead roles in West End hits, including Rachael Wooding and Victoria Hamilton-Barritt who are both making a welcome return to the Sunshine Coast.
Until Saturday 14 July, Congress Theatre, Eastbourne
Box office 01323 412000
www.eastbournetheatres.co.uk
