Saturday, December 10, 2011
It's been a great year for Southwark Playhouse, Hampstead and the National – and an unforgettable one for Michael SheenThe Passion was the year's revelation. Ranging over the whole of Port…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:08PMSaturday, November 12, 2011
Young Vic; Bussey Building, LondonIt would be worth it for this alone. Michael Sheen's "To be or not to be" is a marvel. It is not only that Sheen makes each phrase ring out fresh and true. …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMSaturday, November 5, 2011
Cottesloe; Trafalgar Studios; Only Connect, LondonThe stage is buckled. Rimmed with scarlet, it dips like a fairground ride. Cabaret, dance music and stark sequences of strings fill the air;…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:06PMSaturday, October 29, 2011
Hampstead; Olivier, London; Rudry parish hall, CaerphillyYou can't talk to the duchess because of the lawyer. You can't get much out of the lawyer – because she is a lawyer. You start to w…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:07PMSaturday, October 22, 2011
Royal Court; Donmar Warehouse; Bush, LondonTwo years ago when she was 17, Bel Powley was one of the stars in Polly Stenham's Tusk Tusk. Now here she is again, proving the staying power of th…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMFriday, October 14, 2011
Lyric Hammersmith, London; Theatre Royal BathPeople go to Saved thinking they know what they will see. They've been told often enough. A baby is stoned to death in a park by a group of youth…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:00PMSaturday, October 8, 2011
Wyndhams, LondonThe car in Driving Miss Daisy is an awkward thing: a wheel and two wooden seats. It's not a vehicle that could have come from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang but it's not a Complicit…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:04PMSaturday, October 1, 2011
West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds; Old Vic, LondonIt begins in precarious ritual: a boxed-in court, a red carpet like a stream of blood, a floor so steeply raked that the action hurtles downwa…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMSaturday, September 10, 2011
St Katharine Docks; Theatre Royal, Haymarket; Olivier, National Theatre; Southwark Playhouse, all LondonFigures are pressed against a long pane of glass. They are spread-eagled, as if blown …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:32PMSaturday, August 27, 2011
Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh; King's, Edinburgh; Barbican, London; Hill Street, EdinburghThe djinn is too meek. The surtitles are too wayward – mostly hard to see and often out of synch. T…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMSaturday, August 20, 2011
Trafalgar Studios; Scoop, both LondonLook for Caryl Churchill in the 1996 edition of Oxford's Concise Companion to the Theatre and you'll find her. But only just. She's documented not separa…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:04PMSaturday, August 13, 2011
Donmar Warehouse; Globe; Regent's Park Open Air, all LondonJude Law lands on deck, flung from the ocean like a helpless fish. He's been on board only a few minutes before Ruth Wilson gives h…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:04PMSaturday, July 30, 2011
Theatre Royal BathWhen Noël Coward wrote about the upper classes he made them heartless but witty. When he put the lower-middle classes on stage, he gave them heart, hurt, principles and he…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMSaturday, July 23, 2011
Lyttelton; Hampstead; Piccadilly, all LondonOne is ramrod-stiff, pale and unrelenting; the other is round and rosy and yielding. One, rigid as a mannequin, is lifted up by removal men, to be…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMSaturday, July 9, 2011
Opera House, Manchester; MediaCityUK, Salford; Royal Court, London"What Manchester does today, the rest of the world does tomorrow." That was true of the record of Purcell's "Nymphs and Shep…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMSaturday, July 2, 2011
Old Vic; Barbican; Soho, all LondonHe uses his withered arm as a cosh. He lugs along his lame leg, strapped in a calliper, as if it were a giant log. His hump makes him bend not only over bu…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMSaturday, June 25, 2011
Olivier; Haymarket; Theatre Royal, Stratford East, all London"Peter! Agathon!" bellows the man who will become the Emperor Julian at the people he's talking to. "Julian! Sallust!" yells Medo…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:00PMSaturday, June 18, 2011
Comedy; Donmar Warehouse; Theatre Royal Drury Lane, all LondonEnclosed but transmitting, composed but aquiver, Kristin Scott Thomas is an ideal Pinter actress. She manages, in the way that s…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:03PMSaturday, June 4, 2011
Wyndham's; Globe, both LondonHe could have called it "A Lot of Fuss About Fannies". Even if you go to Shakespeare's play without a glossary explaining that "nothing" was Elizabethan slang fo…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMSaturday, May 28, 2011
Lyttelton; Regent's Park Open Air theatre; Royal Court, all LondonWithin minutes of appearing on stage he's somersaulted backwards over an armchair – and caught (he claims) a nut in his mo…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMSaturday, May 21, 2011
RSC, Stratford; Olivier, London, Barbican, LondonThe ducats are dollars. The choice of caskets takes place during a bridal game show called Destiny. Shylock delivers his "hath not a Jew" spe…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMThe Observer's theatre critic chooses the 10 sets that changed the face of modern theatre, from a 1912 Hamlet to Punchdrunk's immersive FaustSusannah Clapp
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:01PMThe Observer's theatre critic chooses the 10 sets that changed the face of modern theatre, from a 1912 Hamlet to Punchdrunk's immersive Faust Continue reading...
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:01PMSaturday, May 14, 2011
Elsing Hall, Norfolk; Halesworth, Suffolk"Compared to this," bellows one of the Queens, "other entertainment will be like standing in fog and in mud." She has an angry point. Dining with Ali…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMSaturday, May 7, 2011
Southwark; Globe, both London; RSC, Stratford-upon-AvonI've never seen a pool of sweat expand on a stage floor as rapidly as it does in Tender Napalm. And never been in a theatre where the a…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMSaturday, April 30, 2011
Port Talbot, WalesIn the beginning was the Word. On the street: "Were you in the town centre when John the Baptist tried to get on the escalator?" At the end, there was an image. By the sea:…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMSaturday, April 23, 2011
House of Detention; Little Angel; Hampstead, all LondonMacbeth is this season's Shakespeare. David Morrissey will soon be strutting and fretting in his old Liverpool haunts and Jonathan Slin…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:04PMSaturday, April 16, 2011
Cottesloe; Novello; Trafalgar Studios, all LondonLondon Road is the riposte to anyone who thinks "musical" must mean either froth or stodge. Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork's wonderfully sung pl…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:03PMSaturday, April 2, 2011
Old Vic; Lyttelton, both LondonVowel-torturing upper-class accents; ferocious feelings; a traditional scene performed in an abstract place. Thea Sharrock – who kick-started the Terence Rat…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:09PMSaturday, March 26, 2011
Gielgud; Almeida; Cottesloe, all LondonIf candyfloss could be set to music, this is what you'd get. A lovely haze, a puffy sweetness, nothing to bite on. Pastel-coloured balloons are waved; …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:04PMSaturday, March 19, 2011
Hampstead; Theatre Royal Haymarket; Vaudeville, all LondonEcstasy: by which Mike Leigh means desperation under a candlewick bedspread. His restaging of this 1979 play, originally devised at …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:04PM 
