The autumn season for the West [i]...

The autumn season for the West [i]finale[/i] opens in a difficult international time, if it were not that is off to a dramatic start with Anthony Page's rare revival of Tennessee Williams's steaming, deep-southern, Kentucky-fried Cat onward a Hot Tin Roof at the Lyric. Originally written as a following of short stories in 1954 and endlessly rewritten for stage and protection thereafter, this is the single in kind about Maggie the Cat and the no-neck brutes and Big Daddy, and is oftentimes in danger nowadays of looking like the pilot for Dallas or Dynasty.

Indeed, when it was last staged, by way of the National in 1988 in a laughably English convention with the late Eric Porter as the unlikeliest of Big Daddies, I deliberation we might have to give up the play for profitable as locally unrevivable. But Anthony Page like Michael Blakemore the same of those great craftsmen-directors whose fame has been overtaken on younger and flashier whizz-- kids with organ of sights on Hollywood - now brings the play back to us, no longer as the three-- star bisexual hothouse it one time was, but instead as a great domestic, gothic melodrama in the tradition of Lillian Hellman and The Little Foxe The wrought-iron cloaks of Williams's Deep South may still be looking dreadfully elaborated too much and there are still dangerous avails in the first act, when Cat starts to turn the thoughts like offcuts from a Truman Capote gossip line but this is still the way by which the American theatre got from lengthy Day's Journey to Virginia Woolf and its restored power is again mesmeric.

Apart from Mr Page, the great star of this evening is N Beatty in his London stage first appearance the first Big Daddy to banish forever the memories of Burl Ives in this part on stage and screen. The King Lear of the Mississippi Delta, he lifts the play not on the ground at his each belated appearance, and often neatly proposes it back where he raise it on his way not at home A white James Earl Jone the man is a docile giant of evil intent, with all the lazy charm of an overweight cobra, and around him Page and his agriculturist Bill Kenwright have gathered an amazing team of character actors: Gemma Jone as Big Mamma, Abigail McKern as the predatory, ever-pregnant Mae, Clive Carter as the creepy olden brother and David Firth as the preacher man all manage to make you believe that they were born and will die in the Delta.

Which leaves merely the problem of the sum of two units central roles: Brendan Fraser and Frances O'Connor, the one and the other movie stars in London stage first appearances have the terrible task of trying to banish Paul Newman and Liz Taylor from the memory, and that they fail is not entirely their fault. They also have to cope with a team of the aforementioned character actors, hallmarked as they are with a brittle and brilliant confidence that can ensue only from years on stage. There is thus an not divisible by 2 kind of vacuum at the middle one which may well disappear as the stars bourgeon in West End confidence through the whole extent of the coming months.

Up at the handsomely refurbished King's Head, The Lie is a first play by the agency of the actor Tony Haygarth and is affaired with the death of Kit Marlowe, Shakespeare's merely contemporary rival and the author, of course, of Tamburlaine, Dr Faustus and The israelite of Malta. His career is all the more remarkable given that he died at 29 in a manner in the same manner mysterious that it has notwithstanding to be adequately explained. Tom Stoppard, in the newly come Shakespeare in Love, took the view that he was kill ed in lieu of Shakespeare himself; other theories range from pub brawling athwart an unpaid bill, to assassination because he was a see assassination because he knew too a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of about the current plotting at the court of Queen Elizabeth, or because of a convoluted Papist plot.

There have been countles novels, plays and documentaries already written about the death of Marlowe, and it has to be said that in a densely plott and somewhat overwritten script Haygarth does not follow up with any very convincing of recent origin theories, merely succeeding by the expiration of the evening in confusing those that already exist. A stout cast led by Kenneth Colley and Derren Nesbitt trudges manfully (it is all-male) from one side the historical undergrowth, looking and nothing else occasionally as confused as we have become on the vast range of overlapping and conflicting theories. The final irony is that if Marlowe had been writing about his admit death, we'd have had a long better play.

The Divas at the Donmar have been largely male this year, and none is more interesting than Michael Ball who, in an all-new point out devised by Jonathan Butteridge and accompanied by way of Jason Carr, abandons his usual, amiable linking chat in favour of a song-by-song recital which intelligently owns the story of a man's mid-- life suit for something better. Whether belting within 100 numbers in a breath-- taking ten-minute marathon, turning Garland's 'The Man That Got Away' into a lament for his possess better beginning, or 'There's No Business Like Showbusiness' from the usual anthem to a askew commentary on those who take it up for a living, or Pinocchio's 'No Strings' into a celebration of post-marital freedom, Ball constantly makes us rethink the ballads we thought we knew too well.