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Almeida Theatre

  • Theatre
  • Islington
  • Recommended
  1. © creativebusinessphotography.co.uk
    © creativebusinessphotography.co.uk
  2. Rupert Goold  (© Rob Greig)
    © Rob Greig

    Rupert Goold (artistic director)

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Time Out says

Islington's mercurial powerhouse has waxed strong under current artistic director Rupert Goold

One of London's most mercurial and influential houses, the 325-seat Almeida Theatre began life as a radical international receiving house in the '80s, before the joint artistic directorship of Ian McDiarmid and Jonathan Kent led to a stable '90s marked by a close relationship with the great Harold Pinter, whose final plays all premiered there.

The current artistic director is Rupert Goold, who has electrified a venue that had grown rather genteel under its previous leader Michael Attenborough with a mix of bold new writing, interesting experiments and radical reinventions. 

Tickets are reasonably priced, with special offers for students, Islington locals, over 65s and under-25s.

The bar – arguably a slightly bourgeois hangover from the Attenborough era – is light and airy with a pleasant seasonal menu.

Details

Address:
Almeida St
Islington
London
N1 1TA
Transport:
Rail/Tube: Highbury & Islington; Rail: Essex Road; Tube: Angel
Price:
£10-£39.50
Opening hours:
Mon-Sat 10am-7.30pm
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What’s on

King Lear

  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Shakespeare

As we found out to our cost last year, when Kenneth Branagh tried to bosh out a two-hour version, ‘King Lear’ is a play that resists being cut. It’s too long and too weird with too many characters to work in compacted form – as a minimum it gets lost in the lengthy section in which the eponymous monarch is off-stage being mad. You really need to be in it for the long haul with this thing. Enter Yaël Farber. The South African director is by no means the first to rack up a three-and-a-half-hour ‘Lear’. But her superatmospheric, wilfully poised style is perfectly suited to it. She simply has no fast setting – not even a medium one – and her heightened, nightmare-like aesthetic rises to meet the strangeness in Shakespeare’s tragedy of insanity and old age. If you’ve seen a Farber play before, you’ll recognise the hallmarks: the production takes place in a constant, doomy twilight, the night air chased by ominous violin drones and constantly filled with a light haze. Her second play for the Almeida – after 2021’s excellent Saoirse Ronan-starring ‘Macbeth’ – starts off on a modern note, however. Danny Sapani’s bearish Lear is dressed in a blue suit by his three daughters, and then hosts a press conference in which he gives his kingdom away in a detached voice heavy on mic reverb. The scene hints at some greater context to his abdication – usually Lear seems to stand down so he can go on a massive bender – but whatever the case, after the King and his daughters Regan (Faith Omole) a

The Comeuppance

  • Drama

US playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins caused a splash a few years back with the acclaimed 2017 London premieres of his plays ‘An Octoroon’ and ‘Gloria’. We’ve not heard from him since on this side of the pond, but now the Almeida will take a recast transfer of last year’s acclaimed ‘The Comeuppance’. Set at a 20-year high school reunion, it follows a group of former misfits who think they’ve long moved on, but who discover they can’t get away from who they were. US director Eric Ting directs a UK cast of Yolanda Kettle, Ferdinand Kingsley, Tamara Lawrance, Katie Leung and Anthony Welsh.

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