Young Vic Theatre, London: There is a thrilling restlessness to Benedict Andrews' production of this American classic. Tennessee Williams describes a particular place in a real street i…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:28AMWe know how the story ends, but then so did Euripides' first audience in Athens in 431 BC. Medea was already a familiar character of myth, a sorceress whose ungovernable passion for Jason le…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:44AMWhen Daytona was premiered at the Park Theatre last year some of the critics went into contortions to avoid giving away the two "reveals" in Oliver Cotton's plot. The challenge remains, but …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:57AMOld Vic Theatre: Arthur Miller's 1950s forensic, passionate examination of personal and public morality still resonates. After All My Sons in Regent's Park and Ivo van Hove's …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:59AMGate Theatre, London: According to Homer's Iliad, Idomeneus, King of Crete, was a general in the Greek army which sacked Troy. What happened to him afterwards varies according to differ…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 07:05AMDirector Nadia Fall has taken that patriarchal purveyor of footwear Henry Horatio Hobson and his family out of their natural habitat - a traditional proscenium arch theatre - and into a diff…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 11:46AM"Johnny get your gun" was a popular American recruiting call in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries and, according to the Irish-American song "When Johnny comes marching home, …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 12:33PMYellow Face comes into the Shed a year after it was greeted enthusiastically when it was first seen in London at the newly-opened Park Theatre. Its category was generally agreed to be "mocku…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:46AMSwan Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon: Arden of Faversham is described both as an early domestic tragedy and a black comedy. Polly Findlay, making her RSC directorial debut, has plunged enthusia…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:58AMThere is something forensic about Marius von Mayenburg's examination of human nature in this 2004 play, written when he was in his early 30s and the Iraq war still on the television news. El…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 11:04AMThe Cockpit, London: David Ryall is in his 80th year and, having recently undergone chemotherapy, is suffering memory lapses - the role is a mountainous challenge for any actor; to attempt i…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 08:46AMThe full title of Jackie Sibblies Drury's play, first produced in Chicago in 2012, is deliberately gauche and in need of editing. No review is complete without it, however, so here it …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 12:30PMNew Wimbledon Theatre, London: This is the sixth tour of Hot Flush! so there must be an audience for it. Much as many in the audience laughed uproariously, much of the humour in the piece is…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:19AMLyttelton Theatre, National, London: A Taste of Honey has taken second place in theatre history to another story, that of its writing. In 1958 Shelagh Delaney, an inexperienced 19-year-old f…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:35AMIn 2011 Tim Pigott-Smith gave us an impressive, humane King Lear at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Here he is again, a patriarch learning how "sharper than a serpent's tooth" it is to have th…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 11:24AMSwan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon: Hilary Mantel describes the second book in her trilogy about the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell as "shorter, more concentrated, fiercer". Anoth…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:29AMSwan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon: Hilary Mantel says her Man Booker-winning novel is "a gigantic play". True, the book is written in dramatic episodes, often in dialogue, but the …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:29AMRhys Ifans enters as a rough sleeper who has wandered in off the street, his sleeping bag over his shoulders, beany hat pulled low over unwashed hair, muttering to himself. For a moment he's…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:37PMTricycle Theatre, London: Mary J O'Malley's comedy about 1950s convent schoolgirls has come home. An award-winner at the Royal Court in 1977 and then running in the West End for a …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:29AMAward-winning Toronto-born playwright Claudia Dey is also an advice columnist and here she presents us with three wildly off-the-wall case studies. The twin Ducharme sisters, who share an is…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:55AMTake a Victorian library and a play which had its premiere 100 years ago and - surprisingly - you have a new arts centre featuring a challenging, dystopian drama. Omnibus in Clapham has exch…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PMThis near-legendary short play, devised by Athol Fugard with the actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona (who gave their names to its characters), was first shown - daringly - in Cape Town in 1…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:00AMCharing Cross Theatre, London: Philip Larkin was exaggerating: sexual intercourse did not begin in 1963. Nevertheless, the culmination of the Profumo scandal that year put sexual intercourse…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:20AMDavid Pinner's 1973 play showcases a string quartet working out their own problematic relationships while world leaders decide the shape of post-war politics. Between bouts of playing Haydn,…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:00AMTricycle, London: Four identical handbags feature in every scene of Moira Buffini's very funny satirical comedy. This full-length version of her contribution to the nine short plays whi…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:52AMRoyal Opera House, Linbury Studio Theatre, London: Wagner delved so deeply into human consciousness that he was "bound to come up with as much shit as gold". So says Simon Callow t…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:28AMDuke of York's, London: There are no real surprises: in its second revival (after two outings at the Young Vic) this is still a superlative production. True, the Duke of York's lacks th…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 07:09AMBush, London: Josephine Baker was some woman - born in poverty in St Louis in 1906, she became a star of the Folies Bergere in the 1920s, painted by Picasso, eulogised by Hemingway. In World…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:10AMThe celebrated 1955 Ealing comedy starring Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers and Herbert Lom, was apparently intended as a cartoonish satire of post-war British decline. In 2013, with the Empire …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:17PMHampstead Theatre, London: Peter has been widowed for 18 months, he is mortgaged up to the hilt and his teenage daughter Daisy is sick - but he is coping, just. She needs weekly treatment in…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:51AMIt is a truth universally acknowledged that it is essential to quote the famous opening line in any reference to Jane Austen's best-loved work. Pride and Prejudice is 200 years old and being…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:57PM