Sunday, June 5, 2016
Sometimes in the theatre I look at my watch and hope the play will end soon. Just occasionally -- it happened last night -- I enjoy myself so much that when the show ends I want to see it al…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 04:22PMSunday, May 29, 2016
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. That's clearly not the belief of Emma Rice, who took over with a bang as artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe last month. Her two very successful predece…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 08:15AMWednesday, May 18, 2016
Joe Penhall's Blue/Orange is a play with more questions than answers. One of the reasons it has become a classic is because the audience leaves the theatre after two and a half hours still u…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 09:38AMTuesday, May 10, 2016
Thank heavens for a playwright who is prepared to wade into controversial issues but refuses to tell the audience what to think. May Sumbwanyambe's play, set in Zimbabwe in the late 1990s, h…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 12:26PMSunday, May 8, 2016
What would that grand master of the art of pauses Harold Pinter have made of this play? Annie Baker's extraordinary low-key drama, now playing a sellout run at the National Theatre's Dorfman…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 12:02AMSunday, April 24, 2016
President Obama and I both dropped in at Shakespeare's Globe this weekend. He watched a short extract from Hamlet while I stood as a groundling to see the whole performance on Saturday night…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 08:45PMFriday, April 1, 2016
Over a decade ago I was at Wilton's Music Hall for the most fascinating production of Macbeth I have ever witnessed, a promenade production set in a war-torn African country and directed by …
SOURCE: John Morrison at 08:08PMTHIS REVIEW CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS Denise Gough has won rave reviews for her central performance as a drug-and-booze-fuelled actress trying to detox in Duncan Macmillan's play, which first o…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 08:08PMFriday, March 25, 2016
Nobody who saw South African director Yael Farber's stunning version of Mies Julie or her Old Vic reinvention of The Crucible will be surprised to hear that her new production is an absolute…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 02:56PMFriday, March 4, 2016
Everbody has heard of the French writer Jean Genet, but his plays are still unfamiliar to many people, and that includes me. This makes this stunning version of The Maids (Les Bonnes), writt…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 07:19PMTuesday, February 16, 2016
My heart sank when I read in the programme for this revival of Uncle Vanya that Tobias Menzies, the actor playing Dr Astrov, had a spent a day in the woods learning about forestry as prepara…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 01:13PMFriday, February 5, 2016
I made a last-minute outing to the NTLive transmission of the Donmar's stunning revival of Christopher Hampton's play, based on a classic French novel from the late 18th century. Seduction a…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 09:54AMFriday, January 29, 2016
August Wilson's 1984 Broadway hit was a landmark in American theatre, launching his career as the 20th century's leading black playwright. This new production on the National Theatre's Lytte…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 10:55AMWednesday, January 27, 2016
Here's your starter question. Which play by Harold Pinter features references to a cheese roll and a Humber Super Snipe? The answer, of course, is The Homecoming, a play revived by Jamie Llo…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 10:02AMFriday, December 18, 2015
I know people who couldn't be dragged by wild horses to a Caryl Churchill play. That's perfectly okay by me (I have my own list of playwrights whose work I really don't want to see again) bu…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 12:51PMFriday, November 27, 2015
Nothing is ever certain to succeed in the theatre, though some plays and productions are certain to fail. But if you're consulting the form book, a production of an Ibsen play at the Almeida…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 08:49PMFriday, November 20, 2015
Some plays are like dogs. They sniff around a series of lampposts but never actually raise their legs. So it is with Wallace Shawn's new play at the National Theatre. At 100 minutes, it is a…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 11:10AMThursday, November 19, 2015
Harley Granville Barker's play, banned by the dead hand of the Lord Chamberlain more than a century ago because its story involved an illegal abortion, has been given a sparkling revival by …
SOURCE: John Morrison at 10:32AMSunday, November 8, 2015
Anna Chancellor's Irina Arkadina is the highlight of this production, offering a superb demonstration of how to play a character whose life is a series of overacted performances without upst…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 09:56AMMoliere wrote quite a few farces, but his greatest play Tartuffe isn't one of them. It's a sophisticated dark comedy about a family being preyed on by a fraudster. The best production I ever…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 09:56AMWednesday, November 4, 2015
James Rushbrooke's Tomcat is a tense, chilling and totally absorbing 90 minutes of theatre that proves once again that the Papatango annual competition is the place to go for new stage writi…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 08:28AMSunday, November 1, 2015
Two courses of what you fancy can be just right. Three courses on the same day can lead to indigestion and exhaustion, however excellent the chef. So I decided to postpone enjoying The Seagu…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 01:13PMThursday, October 29, 2015
As You Like It is a difficult play for a director to ruin completely, but Polly Findlay comes very close. Her new production in the Olivier Theatre leaves no space for the actors, who are 'c…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 06:20AMMonday, October 26, 2015
Long ago in 1930s theatreland, girls were 'fast' and chaps were extremely slow. The fact that sex rarely if ever happened between them can be laid at the door of the English public school sy…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 11:00AMSunday, October 25, 2015
Unlike professional critics, I almost always buy my own tickets for the theatre, though I do get the occasional comp (thank you, Almeida). Even allowing for a personal bias in favour of affo…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 04:27PMSaturday, October 24, 2015
Coal. It used to be everywhere. Sticking in the miners' pores, packed in hessian sacks, rattling in the scuttle, sending soot and smoke up every chimney. I still have a couple of hundredweig…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 03:45PMSunday, October 18, 2015
Violence on stage can look phoney; so can promenade performances in derelict buildings. Luckily, neither is the case in this terrifying revival of Barrie Keeffe's play about three young men …
SOURCE: John Morrison at 07:43AMSaturday, October 17, 2015
One of the hardest things in theatre is to create a play in which not much happens, and still fully engage the audience. Barney Norris's new play at the Arcola almost gets there, but ultimat…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 07:31AMSunday, October 4, 2015
Medea is the last play of the Almeida's Greek trilogy and unfortunately the least impressive, despite a commanding performance in the central role by Kate Fleetwood. The Oresteia (now at Tra…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 08:21AMSaturday, September 26, 2015
Mid-September turned out to be a great time for theatregoing. I saw four excellent plays in less than ten days. Starting with Al Smith's Harrogate at the Hightide Festival in Aldeburgh, I we…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 11:21AMSunday, September 20, 2015
'Have you read much Kierkegaard? Has that question ever been asked in Oldham?' Taking the piss can land you in big trouble. Particularly in Oldham, and particularly in a pub whose landlord u…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 03:14PM 
