Orange 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 07:56AMOlivier, LondonTo call this production eagerly awaited would be an understatement. Ever since Adrian Lester gave us a taste of the Moor, when playing the 19th-century American actor Ira Aldr…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 05:30PMBelgrade, CoventryChekhov's Platonov, written when he was 20, is an untidy beast that several writers, including Michael Frayn and David Hare, have successfully tamed. But this new version, …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:10PMSwan, Stratford-upon-AvonPlays, like musicals, often depend on a moment of ecstasy. One occurs at the end of Tanika Gupta's drama, when Abdul Karim, the aged Queen Victoria's Hindi teacher, …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:41PMHampstead Theatre, LondonHoward Brenton's most recent play, 55 Days, dealt with the imprisonment, trial and execution of Charles I. His new one could easily be called 81 Days since it cover…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:04PMLyttelton, LondonMaxim Gorky takes up where Anton Chekhov leaves off. Written in 1905, shortly after what would become known as Bloody Sunday, when peaceful protesters were shot down by…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 09:13AMJermyn Street, LondonI suspect this 1927 comedy by Frederick Lonsdale had its influence on Noël Coward's Private Lives: the clipped dialogue, the dance for two couples and the tiptoeing exi…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:13PMThe Shed, LondonDurable tables emerge from workshops. So too does Tanya Ronder's ambitious new play, which spans six generations of a single family and opens the National's inviting new temp…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:53PMBarbican, LondonHow do you recapture the shock impact of Alfred Jarry's 1896 play, with its savage portrait of a grotesque monster? Given that Jarry's play started as a schoolboy prank aimed…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:43PMIn 10 years, Hytner has given the National a sense of purpose, large new audiences and great drama. Who can succeed him?It's no great surprise to learn that Nicholas Hytner will be leaving t…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:03AMPhoenix, LondonMusicals these days tend to batter you into submission. This one, winner of eight Tony awards and based on a 2006 low-budget movie by John Carney that I have deliberately avoi…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:01PMOld Red Lion, LondonIt's a good bet that not many British theatre-goers are intimate with the work of Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949). Yet in his day this Belgian playwright and …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:41PMShe had little time for culture – and once hailed Andrew Lloyd Webber as a great British export. But Thatcher dominated playwrights' imaginations, along with so much elseMargaret Thatcher …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 11:44AMTrafalgar Studios, LondonThis first play by Dermot Canavan is about two Preston sisters who, having grown up together, inexorably grow apart. What might once have been a modest memory-play t…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:00AMRose theatre, KingstonTen years ago Richard Bean wrote this black comedy about a drug-dealing family living in leafy suburbia for Live Theatre Newcastle. Now it has been relocated to Kingsto…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:39PMThe Print Room, LondonI was wrong about Brian Friel's play. Seeing it for the first time at the Almeida in 1994, I took it to be an arid replay of Friel's Faith Healer: again two men and a w…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:44PMFinborough, LondonIt's always fascinating to see famous writers' early work. But the real value of this 100-minute, 1972 radio play by Caryl Churchill, which draws heavily on Frant…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 09:37AMAlmeida, LondonIt's an old rule that dramatists need to show a measure of sympathy, even to dislikable characters. But, although this 1949 Rodney Ackland adaptation of a Somerset Maugham sho…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:37PMRoyal Court theatre, LondonDominic Cooke bows out at the Court as he came in, with a new play by the American writer Bruce Norris. And what a play! It's a three-hour extravaganza with 20 act…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:01AMRoyal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-on-AvonHamlet always reflects the spirit of the age. Where the 1960s gave us a rush of politicised productions, today the emphasis – as in 2011's Young…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:17PMThere's Kristin Scott Thomas, yet not her co-star Lia Williams. And a best new play list that omits one of the year's best new plays. What's going on?We're nearly there. The announcement of …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 10:10AMNoel Coward, LondonJudi Dench and Ben Whishaw were last professionally united as M and Q in Skyfall. They now come together again to play the real-life inspirations for Lewis Carroll's Alice…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:00PMKing's Head, LondonThere's a big back-catalogue of movies, musicals and operas based on Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris. This, however, is the first public staging of the unfinished Lionel…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:32PMPrince of Wales, LondonStrip away all the hype surrounding this hit Broadway import and what do you find? A mildly amusing musical, with some knowingly parodic songs, that takes a few pot sh…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:00PMOld Vic, LondonThe case for Terence Rattigan has been steadily made over the past decade, and this revival of his 1946 play is only likely to advance the cause. But two things make Lindsay P…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:47PMThe Old Rep, BirminghamRobin French, Birmingham Rep's writer-in-residence, isn't the first to update Ibsen's Hedda Gabler: in Thomas Ostermeier's Berlin Schaubühne version, seen at the Barb…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:00PMOrange Tree, RichmondThis 1931 play by GB Stern is part of the Orange Tree's ongoing focus on drama about women's issues in the interwar years. It may not be quite as radical or rivetin…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:13PMUstinov, BathUntil now I've never understood the enthusiasm of American critic, Frank Rich, for the plays of Richard Greenberg. But this one is an absolute cracker and far superior to Three …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:41PMJermyn Street, LondonCan you imagine a serious play about religion enjoying a two-year West End run today? That, however, is what happened to Graham Greene's debut play in 1953. Watching its…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:17PMFinborough, LondonI am delighted to see that JB Priestley is back in fashion. But even if this "immoral comedy" from 1933 doesn't seem as restlessly experimental as Cornelius, revived at the…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:00PMHampstead theatre, LondonWilliam Boyd has fused two Chekhov stories from the 1890s, A Visit to Friends and My Life, to create a new play. The result is inevitably something of a hybrid: neit…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:27PM
