Art and Culture, London, Plays

Ed Harris in Buried Child – Don’t Miss This One

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We’ve just come back from seeing 66-year old Hollywood veteran Ed Harris star in his West End debut in Buried Child at the Trafalgar Studios, and what a pleasure it was! Ed Harris’ intensity and aplomb on stage are riveting. It would have been worth the visit just for his acting alone, but as it happens all the other talented actors involved were giving their best too. Well, and can’t really go wrong with a Pulitzer-prize winning play like this that is about the breakdown of the American Dream and its values in rural 1970s America, when most family-run farms descended into poverty and despair due to economic slowdown and the consolidation of the market with a few hundred big players ruling the game. To add to it, it’s so cool that Ed is starring with his wife, Amy Madigan, as he did on various occasions before, both on stage […]

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Art and Culture, London, Plays

‘Art’, the Play, Old Vic

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We just watched ‘Art‘, the third play by Yasmina Reza, the 57 year old French writer and actress, who has been collecting many prestigious awards over the years (Molière, Tony, and Laurence Olivier Awards for ‘Art’ alone) and who is known for her satirical plays about the middle classes, the two best-known of which are, you guessed it, ‘Art’, and ‘God of Carnage’. ‘Art’ premiered in Paris in 1994 and in London two years later. The play was translated into more than 40 languages. I saw the German version in Munich with my parents and my sister in early 1997 and didn’t like it that much, mainly because my Mom was so uber-enthusiastically ecstatic about it that it put me off (it’s simply not cool to like what your parents like when you’re very young). The English-language adaptation, translated by Christopher Hampton, opened in London’s West End in 1996 and […]

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Art and Culture, London, Plays

Two grumpy old men, like that’s what you need for a Friday night

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We had been looking forward to watching No Man’s Land at Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End, a new production directed by Sean Mathias, that had been celebrated on Broadway and that had initially opened at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in California in August 2013. Many say this might be the last time you’ll see Sir Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart on stage together, they’re not getting any younger. We had watched the two together before, lastly in Waiting for Godot, and felt they go together nicely, like rum and cigars. Waiting for Godot is similar in that it also involves no plot and it’s about grumpy old men. The papers reported that McKellen had initially shied away from accepting the offer to take over the role of Spooner in Nobel Prize laureate Harold Pinter’s play, because he had seen the role plaid by other great actors he was looking up […]

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