Drayton Arms, LondonAfter a surfeit of Miss Julies in London, it's refreshing to find this rare August Strindberg one-act play popping up in an attractive space above a South Kensington…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:49PMBristol Old VicI normally associate the 30-year-old Complicite with extravagantly theatrical explorations of world literature. Here, however, they have come up with their first family show b…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:43AMHampstead theatre, LondonDavid Mamet reminds me of some veteran pugilist with a pile of trophies yet still anxious for a fight: the old technique is still there, even if the punches no longe…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 10:34AMAlmeida, LondonI complained of Lucy Kirkwood's last play, NSFW at London's Royal Court, that it was too short: no such problems with this gloriously rich, mind-expanding three-hour play, whi…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:10AMOrange Tree, RichmondThe therapist-patient relationship is rarely dramatised, but it lies at the heart of this sharp, perceptive comedy by David Lewis, which uses the circular structure of S…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:11PMCorn Exchange, BrightonThe Brighton festival's theatre programme ended with this extraordinary import from Argentina in which five actors recalled, with the aid of photos, letters, home movi…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:39PMSwan, Stratford-upon-AvonNo one any longer has to make a case for this once-despised play. But, whether it is viewed as a neo-Senecan study in stoic acceptance of grief or a Tarantino-like e…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:47PMBush, LondonWe're used to seeing plays that take a swipe at American liberal guilt. But Ayad Akhtar's Pulitzer prizewinner adds an extra dimension to the subject by exposing the dangers of d…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:21PMSouthwark Playhouse, LondonThis peripatetic theatre finds its third home in a converted warehouse near Elephant and Castle. But, although the space is attractive and the production lively, I…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:29PMWyndham's, LondonThis is the play that in 1967 gave Alan Ayckbourn his first West End hit. Seeing it again after all these years, in Lindsay Posner's witty production, I was reminded of the …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:00PMRiverside Studios, LondonIt is not often that a curtain speech is the highlight of a show, but at the end of this bio-play about the once-famous cabaret artist Hutch, his son, Chris, paid&nb…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:15PMRoyal Court, LondonThe 2004 Perrier award winner Will Adamsdale clearly has a comic following and, as we saw in the National's Detroit, is a creditable actor. But this show, which he wrote w…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:25PMPark, LondonMany years ago Keith Dewhurst wrote a Guardian column arguing that theatre had to move away from city centres to areas where people actually lived. In London the shift away from …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:24PMYoung Vic, LondonThere are no rules in theatre. Updating a classic can sometimes work brilliantly, as with Benedict Andrews' Three Sisters at the Young Vic last year. But David Harrower's ne…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:40AMTrafalgar Studios, LondonHarold Pinter was, among many other things, a comic writer; and I would distrust any Pinter evening that didn't make us laugh. But, richly pleasurable and boundlessl…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMTricycle, LondonLeanne Best received glowing notices when she first appeared in Frank McGuinness's demanding one-woman play, at the Liverpool Playhouse in June 2012. The praise was richly de…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 11:58AMArcola, LondonWhy do we know so little of Alexander Ostrovsky? He was the father of Russian drama and a palpable influence on Anton Chekhov, yet his plays get only scattered revivals. So, ev…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:57PMDuke of York's, LondonIt's a well-known fact that Peter Nichols's play, which first appeared in 1981, forms part of an unofficial trinity of dramas about infidelity: it came after Pinter's B…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:00PMThe Cut, HalesworthQuirky, original voices are rare in a conformist age. But Thomas Eccleshare, whose Pastoral is one of five new plays at the core of this year's HighTide festival in the Su…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:10PMShakespeare's Globe, LondonI've seen Prospero played as a benign schoolmaster, colonial overlord and Faustian necromancer. But Roger Allam brings something new to the party by suggesting tha…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:48PMSoho Upstairs, LondonI first came across Cat Jones's 60-minute play when it was submitted for one of the playwrights' bursaries annually awarded by Pearson. I'm happy to say that this story …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 11:56AMBarbican, LondonTheatre-makers are constantly trying to recapture the shock of August Strindberg's once-revolutionary 1888 play. In Mies Julie, currently at the Riverside Studios, it is done…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:58AMMinerva, ChichesterWith the Festival theatre closed for renovation and Chichester resembling a building site, it seems appropriate to kick off the season in the Minerva with a piec…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:00PMThis year's Tony nominations presage a battle of heavyweight musicals. However, theatre does exist beyond the big-ticket song-and-dance showsTwo heavyweight musicals are engaged in a slugfes…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 11:49AMDonmar Warehouse, LondonWhy, 16 years after its premiere, does Conor McPherson's play still grip us? After all, it seems to consist of little but people telling ghost stories in a …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:31AMTabard, LondonHave we lost our taste for historical melodrama? Apparently not, since this Chiswick theatre pub was packed on a hot afternoon for a rare revival of this curious play by Patric…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 05:29AMRoyal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon"Can one desire too much of a good thing?" asks Rosalind. Maybe not. But, although Maria Aberg's new production of As You Like It is a joyous, b…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:02PMOrange Tree, LondonFantasies of flight fuelled the life and work of Somerset Maugham. They are also the governing theme of this compellingly cruel 1930 comedy, which forms a fascinating comp…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:56AM
