Nottingham PlayhouseThis ponderous adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's 2003 novel is lightened by master musician Hanif Khan's on-stage tabla playing and by involving performances from its 10-st…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMBelgrade theatre, CoventryYou know those football matches where, from that very first touch of the ball at kick-off, you can tell this is going to be a good one – and then it really is? Th…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMHull Truck, HullTim Fountain's new piece operates on two levels: romantic and political. As a romance it plays out a standard story of lovelorn westerners finding fulfilment in the east. Deb…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMThéâtre des Bouffes du Nord, ParisThe prose, poems, songs and reworkings of existing texts that make up Michael Ondaatje's 1970 meditation on the life of one of the United States's best-kn…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMCrucible Studio, SheffieldSixty people on a studio stage, hemmed on three sides by audience – they surge, they pulse; they shimmer like a shoal of fish changing direction, shiver into cont…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMPlayhouse, LiverpoolAll creatures are mysterious. A child with the kind of brain that doesn't allow for co-ordinated movement or communicative speech or gesture is more mysterious than most.…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:04PMStudio, Old Vic, Bristol; and touringA magic dismemberment act in which a head appears to be removed from a body was once billed in a theatre programme as being "exceedingly amusing and in n…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMRSC, Stratford-upon-AvonA set should not be so distracting. An arrangement of earth and skulls – clustered in threes – borders the wooden floorboards of an old-fashioned gymnasium, where…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:05PMBrae Hall, ShetlandIt is night. We're sitting in cars facing darkly glittering water and a distant horizon. To our left, in the middle distance, flares flame: refinery burn-off, I guess…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:05PMUstinov Studio, BathIt's a fragile thing, this drama by multi-award-winning US playwright Richard Greenberg, written in 1990 and here receiving its British premiere. The 1960s action takes p…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:05PMHampstead, LondonWilliam Boyd is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter. Until now, though, he had never written a play. To get himself started, he decided, as he put it, to "stitch toge…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMOctagon, BoltonWalter Tull (1888-1918) was "the first black outfield footballer to play in the old First Division in England" and, later, a second lieutenant in the Special Reserve of office…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMOctagon, BoltonWalter Tull (1888-1918) was "the first black outfield footballer to play in the old First Division in England" and, later, a second lieutenant in the Special Reserve of office…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMLyceum, SheffieldIt's not surprising that when it appeared in 1997 The Full Monty was instantly dubbed a "feelgood" film. Set in the late 1980s, it tells the story of a group of skilled men …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:04PMSwan, Stratford-upon-AvonAt first, Ian McDiarmid's performance seems way too actorly – like a TV historian overly eager to communicate enthusiasm. Stripped to the waist to perform his morn…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMOlivier, London; Dukes, LancasterIn spite of Antony Sher's valiant efforts in the title role, it's hard to believe, watching this ponderous production, that Carl Zuckmayer's 1931 satire is c…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMOctagon, BoltonJohn Steinbeck's 1937 novel makes a great story but a long-winded drama (as well as, twice, a film). It turns around one unresolvable conflict – between (wo)man and the wide…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:04PMCitizens, GlasgowDirector/designer Stewart Laing's production of The Maids is vividly theatrical (the stage curtain gets a round of applause). But its visual surprises and non-textual interv…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:04PMThe Studio at the Lowry, SalfordThe disadvantage of underground theatre (unsubsidised, popping up in pubs and other non-standard venues) is that productions usually run for only a few days. …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMBarbican, London EC2The stage is almost entirely black. In the centre, a white oblong rises, a scroll about as tall and wide as an unfurled roll of wallpaper. Black and white smudges flow ov…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:01PMNorthern Stage, Newcastle; Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon; York Theatre Royal; Sir John Mills theatre, IpswichThis is a fantastic time of year for a theatre reviewer – it's…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:04PMStephen Joseph theatre, ScarboroughElla has a mark on her brow made by a falling cinder from a passing star. So says Woody Drift, her fanciful seafaring father, whose vivid imagination outst…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMRoyal Exchange, Manchester; Lowry, SalfordAncient storytelling traditions kaleidoscope to life in two texts by contemporary writers. Rats' Tales sashays out of shadow-fraught European forest…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:04PMUstinov Studio, Theatre Royal, BathLaurence Boswell's response to the challenge of transforming The Double for the stage is astutely theatrical. In Dostoevsky's second novel, a clerk is driv…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:02PMSalisbury Playhouse, SalisburyIdeally, an adaptation should do two things: it should reflect its original and it should work on the terms of its new medium. Bizarrely, Roger Spottiswoode's t…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:01PMRoyal Exchange, ManchesterThis wild confection of southern belle pettiness, redneck malevolence and racist viciousness takes pretty much every trope of the deep south, laces them with poetic…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:06PMTron, GlasgowJames Joyce's notoriously dense 1922 novel follows a group of characters on a voyage through the events and imaginings of a superficially mundane Dublin day (16 June 1904). Derm…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:04PMTheatre Royal, YorkWriter Susan Watkins's debut drama about the second world war pilots who became the "guinea pigs" for innovative plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe delivers a great story i…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:03PMCurve, LeicesterLast week, speaking on Front Row on Radio 4, the director of the National theatre, Nicholas Hytner, called on our government to reinstate the money it has cut from the b…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:02PMRoyal Lyceum, Edinburgh; then touringMichel Tremblay's 1968 play is set in a working-class district of Montreal and written in the local French-Canadian dialect (called joual). Translated in…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:03PM
