Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Trafalgar Studio, LondonWomen are currently making the running in the new writing stakes. Confirmation comes with the transfer from Hampstead Downstairs to the West End of this play from Mor…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:30PMTuesday, June 21, 2011
Vaudeville, LondonIn the heyday of variety and vaudeville, eccentric jugglers, dancers and musicians would be one item on a gloriously mixed bill. Now what were once known as "speciality act…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:30PMThe Old Shepherd's Bush Library, LondonThis is like a jolly house-warming before the new occupants have fully moved in. The Bush theatre has temporarily taken over the three-storey building …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:07PMThursday, June 16, 2011
Comedy Theatre, LondonHaving rubbished Harold Pinter's Betrayal on its appearance in 1978, I seem to have spent much of my life discovering its complexities. Each production yields fresh ins…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:39PMWednesday, June 15, 2011
Gielgud, LondonFirst-rate musical farces, with the signal exception of A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, are rare for one obvious reason: the songs tend to hold up the action. …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:03PMOlivier, LondonIbsen's enormous double-drama has had to bide its time: written between 1868 and 1873, it is only now receiving its British stage premiere, in Jonathan Kent's stunning staging…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:00PMTuesday, June 14, 2011
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, LondonOnce upon a time musicals drew their inspiration from books, plays or even real life; now they seem to be based on animated movies. But, although Shrek stems…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:00PMLittle Angel, LondonProspero, at the end of The Tempest, promises to break his staff and "bury it certain fathoms in the earth." Clearly he didn't make a very good job of it since, in Michae…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:58AMMonday, June 13, 2011
Donmar Warehouse, LondonMichael Grandage, with his revivals of Don Carlos and Mary Stuart, has made Schiller sexy. Now he and translator Mike Poulton turn their attention to this earlier 178…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:01PMJerusalem and War Horse triumphed at this week's Tony awards. What a great night for subsidised British theatreWhere would Broadway be without the British taxpayer? I ask because it always s…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 05:00PMThursday, June 9, 2011
Young Vic, LondonThere are, broadly speaking, two possible approaches to Gogol's classic 1836 comedy. Treat it as a realistic satire on provincial corruption or as a wild fantasy. Given his …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:35PMNew Diorama, LondonFact or fiction: which is the best way to deal with the issues raised by the Baha Mousa inquiry into the death of an Iraqi civilian in army custody? Coming hot on the heel…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 10:06AMTuesday, June 7, 2011
Royal Court, LondonEither because of a paucity of good new plays or an urge to rediscover the recent past, this is proving to be a summer of revivals. Now it is the turn of Arnold Wesker, wh…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:38PMMonday, June 6, 2011
Tricycle Theatre, LondonVerbatim theatre is at its best the closest it comes to the condition of classical drama. That was certainly true of one of the Tricycle's most famous tribunal plays,…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:48PMDuchess, LondonSeeing Simon Gray's play revived in the West End, after a gap of 40 years, induces a feeling of nostalgia. Despite how much one may have mocked the commercial theatre of the p…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:01PMSunday, June 5, 2011
Orange Tree, RichmondKenneth Tynan first had the bright idea of staging a trio of mid-Victorian farces by the forgotten John Maddison Morton, claiming he is "better than Feydeau". A single M…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 10:33AMFriday, June 3, 2011
Wilton's Music Hall, LondonEveryone is busy celebrating the quatercentenary of the King James bible. Jonathan Holmes, in this ambitious historical drama, takes a more oblique approach. The y…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:35PMWednesday, June 1, 2011
Director Deborah Warner's meshing of Sheridan's 18th-century comedy of manners with modern culture proves some classics are best left as they areIt's good to find Deborah Warner responding t…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:00PMWyndham's Theatre, LondonArt is not a competition. Since, however, this is the second Much Ado in five days, comparisons are inevitable. And, while Jeremy Herrin's version at Shakespeare's G…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:00PMChichester Festival TheatreTrevor Nunn's fine production of Tom Stoppard's 1966 play begins with a striking image: the two heroes seen against the stark background of a leafless tree. The Be…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:35PMSunday, May 29, 2011
Riverside Studios, LondonLondon is finally catching up on Alan Ayckbourn's ghost stories. After the all-female Snake in the Grass (2002), we now get the metropolitan debut of its 1994 all-ma…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:00PMFriday, May 27, 2011
Globe, LondonOn a chill, damp night Jeremy Herrin's production, pre-empting next week's West End version (starring David Tennant and Catherine Tate) conquered its audience. But, although Her…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:53PMWednesday, May 25, 2011
Garrick, LondonLast year in Chichester I found Philip Prowse's production of Shaw's indestructible play coarse and overstated. If it has improved, it is partly because it fits more snugly in…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:47PMTuesday, May 24, 2011
Lyttelton, LondonIn 1746, Carlo Goldoni wrote a classic comedy normally translated as The Servant of Two Masters. Richard Bean has used it for a riotous farce combining the original's struct…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:25PMRoyal Court, LondonThe second play, they say, is the hardest. But Anya Reiss more than fulfils the promise she showed last year, as an 18-year-old, with Spur of the Moment. Even if this new …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 05:33AMMonday, May 23, 2011
Originally published in the Guardian on 23 May 1980Written, composed and directed by Ernest Maxin (to whom we raise our hatchets), Barnardo at the Royalty is everything one expects a British…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:44AMSunday, May 22, 2011
Barbican, LondonI fear that the great tradition of English artificial comedy, written mainly by Irishmen and running from the Restoration to Oscar Wilde, is in danger. Either we neglect it o…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 11:50AMThursday, May 19, 2011
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-on-AvonWhat to do with this endlessly problematic play? Directors such as Peter Zadek and David Thacker set it in the stock exchange. But Rupert Goold, a…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:22PMWednesday, May 18, 2011
Hampstead, LondonFilter is an experimental company famed for its sonic virtuosity: David Farr is a writer/director with the language-driven RSC. So there is a certain irony in seeing them wo…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:35PMTuesday, May 17, 2011
Olivier Theatre, LondonGiven Howard Davies's brilliant productions of Bulgakov and Gorky, I had perhaps extravagantly high hopes for his rare excursion into Chekhov. But, while this producti…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:33PMNottingham PlayhouseIbsen fanciers are in seventh heaven. In advance of the National's Emperor and Galilean, we get the British professional premiere of this 1869 prose comedy, although I di…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:00PM 
