Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Nottingham 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 06:00PMSunday, May 15, 2011
Nuffield, SouthamptonHaving produced two series of live drama for Sky Arts, Sandi Toksvig has now written her own play about postwar trauma. The result, belying Toksvig's familiar comic pers…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 11:59AMFriday, May 13, 2011
Almeida, LondonWhich is Edward Albee's best play? I'd plump for this one. Written in 1966, it may not have the emotional extravagance of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but it has a greater …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:10PMWednesday, May 11, 2011
Stratford-upon-AvonIt is always good to see The Swan, conceived as a venue for non-Shakespearean classics, reverting to its original purpose. But, much as I enjoyed this rare revival of Phil…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:52PMTuesday, May 10, 2011
Young Vic, LondonYou can't beat a pre-emptive strike. Both Jon Fosse and Patrice Chereau, the Norwegian author and French director of this strange piece, have said in advance they expect to …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:21PMMonday, May 9, 2011
Orange Tree, London"It's been a strange evening," says a character at the end of Lars Noren's play. That seems an understatement for a work in which a family dinner party turns into a psycho…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:04PMSunday, May 8, 2011
The Cut, Halesworth, SuffolkGiven that Andrew Motion is a poet, novelist and biographer, it's surprising it has taken him so long to get round to writing a play. But, prompted by an invitati…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 09:00AMFriday, May 6, 2011
Globe, LondonThis is a good, clear, well-spoken production by John Dove of one of Shakespeare's most beguiling but least-loved plays. All it misses, for reasons that may not be entirely its …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 04:30PMAcademia should be a bastion of intellectual freedom, but this retraction shows writers are expected to keep the status quoPlaywrights who speak out often suffer a backlash. It happened to H…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:57AMThursday, May 5, 2011
The Print Room, LondonNo one would claim that this rarely seen work is vintage Tennessee Williams. But, though savaged by the New York critics in 1968 and palpably self-plagiarising, it has …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 04:45PMWednesday, May 4, 2011
Trafalgar Studios, LondonDarren Murphy is clearly a generous man. We go to the theatre expecting one play and he gives us at least three: a psychological study of sibling rivalry, a social p…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:04PMThursday, April 28, 2011
Barbican Pit, LondonTold By An Idiot is a company that, since 1993, has achieved a reputation for wild, innovative comedy. Now, in a show conceived by Hayley Carmichael and Paul Hunter, they…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:13PMWednesday, April 27, 2011
The Swan, Stratford-upon-AvonThey're billing this at Stratford as Shakespeare's "Lost Play" Re-Imagined. The inverted commas are well placed, since it's a matter of surmise how much of it is…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:25PMTuesday, April 26, 2011
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-AvonMacbeth claims that Duncan's sons flee Scotland "filling their hearers with strange invention". But Michael Boyd's production, the first new sho…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:46PMFriday, April 22, 2011
Barbican, LondonYou have to suppress a smile: a show obsessively concerned with bowel movements being presented as part of the experimental Spill festival. But, for all the shock-horror adva…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:21AMThursday, April 21, 2011
Hampstead, LondonFifty years ago, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the earth. But Rona Munro, in this epic play for the RSC, has shrewdly chosen to focus on the little-known figure…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:00PMWednesday, April 20, 2011
Salisbury PlayhouseToo many plays have a brief metropolitan life and then disappear off the map. So it is good to find Martin Crimp's cryptic thriller, originally seen at the Royal Court in …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:44PMIn St Petersburg, the German great received a long-overdue award but ran into technical difficulties, while the Icelandic acrobats made a huge leap in public estimationSt Petersburg proved t…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:15PMWednesday, April 13, 2011
Novello, LondonMusicals these days are constantly being based on movies. But this witty and delightful adaptation of the 1984 film A Private Function strikes me as better than the original. …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:00PMTuesday, April 12, 2011
Donmar Warehouse, LondonI find it strange that one of Harold Pinter's most accessible plays has had to wait 18 years for a major London revival. It deals, after all, with mortality, love, lo…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:37PMKing's Head, LondonRapidly transferred from the Cock Tavern, which has been forced to close, this 75-minute play by Rob Hayes proves weirdly compelling. Although the image of three men …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:27PMFriday, April 8, 2011
Salisbury PlayhouseI'm delighted to find Marivaux's 1730 comedy being staged by this stylish regional playhouse. I wish, however, that Philip Wilson had chosen another version than that by N…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:55PMThursday, April 7, 2011
New Diorama, LondonIrish drama was until recently dominated by male voices. But Teresa Deevy, along with Lady Gregory, was a shining exception. Deevy wrote a string of hits for the Dublin Ab…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 03:04PMWednesday, April 6, 2011
Royal and Derngate, NorthamptonI brusquely dismissed Terence Rattigan's play when it opened in 1973 accompanied by a clunky curtain-raiser: I even have a copy of the play inscribed to me by …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:59PMTuesday, April 5, 2011
Royal Court, LondonAlthough the title of Simon Stephens's new play refers to the deepest lake in Britain, it is set on the fringes of Heathrow; and part of its point is that the airport envi…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:30PMIbsen considered Emperor and Galilean, his massive two-part drama about Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor of Rome, to be his masterpiece but it has never been staged in Britain bef…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 03:00PMSunday, April 3, 2011
Stop complaining about me giving away plots. I'm doing you a favourAm I guilty of indecent exposure? I only ask because I am frequently accused by bloggers of revealing too much of a play's …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 05:01PMCock Tavern, LondonYou have to admire the enterprise of this tiny north-London pub theatre. In celebration of the centenary of Tennessee Williams's birth, it has staged no less than two worl…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 04:29PMFriday, April 1, 2011
Menier Chocolate Factory, London"Is there anything that matters less than a musical?" a character irreverently asks in this revival of the late Jack Rosenthal's 1981 play. It's not a sentime…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 04:30PMThursday, March 31, 2011
Lilian Baylis, LondonIn 1931, this Broadway revue was considered the last word in sophistication. It starred Fred and Adele Astaire, boasted satirical sketches by George S Kaufman and H…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:05PMWednesday, March 30, 2011
Lyttelton, LondonWhat was Clifford Odets up to in this strange 1938 play? Was he, as he once claimed, writing about the near-impossibility of love between man and woman in a deeply competiti…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:48PM 
