Wednesday, March 12, 2014
The Cockpit, London: David Ryall is in his 80th year and, having recently undergone chemotherapy, is suffering memory lapses - the role is a mountainous challenge for any actor; to attempt i…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 08:46AM[SHARE]Monday, March 10, 2014
The full title of Jackie Sibblies Drury's play, first produced in Chicago in 2012, is deliberately gauche and in need of editing. No review is complete without it, however, so here it …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 12:30PM[SHARE]Wednesday, March 5, 2014
New Wimbledon Theatre, London: This is the sixth tour of Hot Flush! so there must be an audience for it. Much as many in the audience laughed uproariously, much of the humour in the piece is…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:19AM[SHARE]Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Lyttelton Theatre, National, London: A Taste of Honey has taken second place in theatre history to another story, that of its writing. In 1958 Shelagh Delaney, an inexperienced 19-year-old f…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:35AM[SHARE]Sunday, February 2, 2014
In 2011 Tim Pigott-Smith gave us an impressive, humane King Lear at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Here he is again, a patriarch learning how "sharper than a serpent's tooth" it is to have th…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 11:24AM[SHARE]Thursday, January 9, 2014
Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon: Hilary Mantel describes the second book in her trilogy about the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell as "shorter, more concentrated, fiercer". Anoth…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:29AM[SHARE]Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon: Hilary Mantel says her Man Booker-winning novel is "a gigantic play". True, the book is written in dramatic episodes, often in dialogue, but the …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:29AM[SHARE]Thursday, December 19, 2013
Rhys Ifans enters as a rough sleeper who has wandered in off the street, his sleeping bag over his shoulders, beany hat pulled low over unwashed hair, muttering to himself. For a moment he's…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:37PM[SHARE]Thursday, November 28, 2013
Tricycle Theatre, London: Mary J O'Malley's comedy about 1950s convent schoolgirls has come home. An award-winner at the Royal Court in 1977 and then running in the West End for a …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:29AM[SHARE]Sunday, November 24, 2013
Award-winning Toronto-born playwright Claudia Dey is also an advice columnist and here she presents us with three wildly off-the-wall case studies. The twin Ducharme sisters, who share an is…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:55AM[SHARE]Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Take a Victorian library and a play which had its premiere 100 years ago and - surprisingly - you have a new arts centre featuring a challenging, dystopian drama. Omnibus in Clapham has exch…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]This near-legendary short play, devised by Athol Fugard with the actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona (who gave their names to its characters), was first shown - daringly - in Cape Town in 1…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:00AM[SHARE]Thursday, November 7, 2013
Charing Cross Theatre, London: Philip Larkin was exaggerating: sexual intercourse did not begin in 1963. Nevertheless, the culmination of the Profumo scandal that year put sexual intercourse…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:20AM[SHARE]Monday, November 4, 2013
David Pinner's 1973 play showcases a string quartet working out their own problematic relationships while world leaders decide the shape of post-war politics. Between bouts of playing Haydn,…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:00AM[SHARE]Wednesday, October 2, 2013
Tricycle, London: Four identical handbags feature in every scene of Moira Buffini's very funny satirical comedy. This full-length version of her contribution to the nine short plays whi…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:52AM[SHARE]Monday, September 9, 2013
Royal Opera House, Linbury Studio Theatre, London: Wagner delved so deeply into human consciousness that he was "bound to come up with as much shit as gold". So says Simon Callow t…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:28AM[SHARE]Thursday, August 15, 2013
Duke of York's, London: There are no real surprises: in its second revival (after two outings at the Young Vic) this is still a superlative production. True, the Duke of York's lacks th…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 07:09AM[SHARE]Thursday, July 18, 2013
Bush, London: Josephine Baker was some woman - born in poverty in St Louis in 1906, she became a star of the Folies Bergere in the 1920s, painted by Picasso, eulogised by Hemingway. In World…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:10AM[SHARE]Tuesday, July 9, 2013
The celebrated 1955 Ealing comedy starring Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers and Herbert Lom, was apparently intended as a cartoonish satire of post-war British decline. In 2013, with the Empire …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:17PM[SHARE]Thursday, June 27, 2013
Hampstead Theatre, London: Peter has been widowed for 18 months, he is mortgaged up to the hilt and his teenage daughter Daisy is sick - but he is coping, just. She needs weekly treatment in…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:51AM[SHARE]Tuesday, June 25, 2013
It is a truth universally acknowledged that it is essential to quote the famous opening line in any reference to Jane Austen's best-loved work. Pride and Prejudice is 200 years old and being…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:57PM[SHARE]Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Finborough Theatre, London: Stephanie Williams' beautifully detailed, messy traverse set takes us right into the kitchen-cum-living room of the graduate house share from hell. Friends t…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:53AM[SHARE]Sunday, June 16, 2013
In Bracken Moor Alexi Kaye Campbell inhabits similar territory to J B Priestley, whose work he admires. Like his predecessor, Campbell combines social comment with the mystical and spiritual…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:30PM[SHARE]Wednesday, June 5, 2013
There was a sense of nervous anticipation in the Maria, the Young Vic's studio space. Ninety minutes of torture was on the menu, and I'll admit to feeling some trepidation. But this show - a…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:15PM[SHARE]Monday, May 20, 2013
The Tower of London and Gippeswyk Hall, Ipswich: Anne Boleyn is endlessly fascinating - was she a sexy minx, political manipulator, religious reformer or all of these? The facts of her life …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 07:11AM[SHARE]Thursday, May 16, 2013
Park, London : The new Park Theatre's first season in its main space, Park 200, opens with an American docudrama, an antidote to Gatsby mania, set in 1920s Chicago.
Read the full review
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:04AM[SHARE]Wednesday, April 17, 2013
During rehearsals of his new play, Howard Brenton and the company had a sudden realisation: they were willing partners in "the vast Ai Weiwei project". The Chinese dissident artist, a consta…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:14PM[SHARE]Friday, April 5, 2013
Trafalgar Studios, London : Dermot Canavan describes himself as "a blunt Northern man with a good ear and a decent pencil". A sometime actor, he wrote this two-hander when his frie…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:55AM[SHARE]Tuesday, April 2, 2013
Molly Sweeney has been blind since early childhood. Supported by her understanding father, she has grown into a confident, independent woman. Then her new husband Frank and an ambitious opht…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:13PM[SHARE]Thursday, March 21, 2013
Menier Chocolate Factory, London: David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, written in 2000, was first seen in London in 2002 at the Donmar, starring Gwyneth Paltrow as Catherine. It …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:31AM[SHARE]Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Mathematicians are a breed apart, bandying numbers about in a way that few outside their magic circle can fully understand. David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning play uses this exclusiveness…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:38PM[SHARE] 
