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]Monday, March 11, 2013
Jermyn Street Theatre, London: The living room is a room in which no one has died. Helen and Teresa Browne, with the concurrence of their priest-brother James (symbolically cut off at the kn…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 08:11AM[SHARE]Friday, March 8, 2013
If only there were more Chekhov! Theatregoers in England, for whom Anton Pavlovich is little short of a god, must have wished this often enough. The handful of great plays come round almost …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:15AM[SHARE]Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Clybourne Park won Bruce Norris a slew of awards on both sides of the Atlantic a couple of years ago. His fearless, shocking, very funny response to Lorraine Hansbury's classic A Raisin in t…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:24AM[SHARE]Wednesday, February 6, 2013
A little man takes on Authority and fails. A little man dons a colourful uniform, complete with boots and spiked helmet, and he becomes Authority. Carl Zuckmayer wrote Der Hauptmann von Köp…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:01AM[SHARE]Tuesday, January 22, 2013
While Kafka specifically declined to indicate exactly what kind of creature Gregor Samsa becomes in his horrific overnight transformation, translators of the novella have gone for a variety …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:21AM[SHARE]Wednesday, December 19, 2012
St James, London: Warning - this is Cinderella without a Fairy Godmother or a magical coach but with some quite impressive amputations instead.
Read the full review
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:40AM[SHARE]Friday, December 14, 2012
'Tis the season to be jolly. 'Tis also the season to dust off the stories of the Grimms and Perrault and present them as drama, sometimes transmogrified into panto. There are sometimes attem…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:46AM[SHARE]Thursday, December 6, 2012
Woking and Mars both provide subject matter for cartographers. John, who reckons he's an achiever, is updating the local A to Z, while Behrooz, once a colleague of John's, is exhibiting his …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:34PM[SHARE]Hampstead Theatre, London: It is a delicious premise - a woman, no longer young, finds the courage to be herself after years spent fulfilling the requirements of others. Jenny Joseph's …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:14AM[SHARE]Friday, November 16, 2012
Almeida Theatre, London: Lyric poetry - unlike the performance kind - is private, internal. It is the opposite of drama. A poet's life, can, of course, be dramatic, but telling a writer…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:04AM[SHARE]Saturday, November 10, 2012
This is a short play, but not a sweet one. Nevertheless, the ban on under-16s and the warning that it "contains themes that some audience members may find distressing" seems unnecessary for …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:05PM[SHARE]Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Lyric Hammersmith, London: "Purdy" - the idiomatic word glints repeatedly through O'Neill's 1924 play, which takes its central idea - an adulterous affair between a beaut…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 07:13AM[SHARE]Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Donmar Warehouse, London: Racine's 17th century rhyming couplets are often pronounced untranslatable. Our ears are more tuned to the five-stress pentameters of blank verse than 12-sylla…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 07:12AM[SHARE]Friday, September 28, 2012
September 24-October 27: There is much ado indeed in this energetic production with its vivid colours, music, dance and teeming communal hubbub. Iqbal Khan has set the action in present-day …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 07:07AM[SHARE]Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Old Rep, Birmingham: It is tempting but pointless to adopt a trainspotter's approach to Calixto Bieito's Catalan-English Shakespearian collage. Here are gobbets of As You Like It, …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:30AM[SHARE]Thursday, August 9, 2012
Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon: Placed between the comedies and tragedies in the First Folio, Troilus and Cressida has always defied categorisation beyond the unhelpful 'problem play…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 07:11AM[SHARE]Thursday, June 21, 2012
Gate Theatre Notting Hill, London: The text-programme for The Prophet helpfully lists bloggers and tweeters as a means of keeping up with swiftly changing Egyptian politics. Despite being se…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 07:29AM[SHARE]Friday, June 8, 2012
Theatre 503, London: Vincent works in an abattoir. A young man in his community is killed. By the end of Jimmy Osborne's play, the interconnectedness of these two facts has been rammed …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:41AM[SHARE]Thursday, May 31, 2012
Olivier, National Theatre, London: The head of state and assorted generals and apparatchiks cluster round a screen much as Obama and his staff did to watch the death of Osama bin Laden. But …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:42AM[SHARE]Monday, May 14, 2012
Theatre Royal, Brighton: This was an exemplary festival event. First, it provided an enjoyable mix of star glamour (Vanessa Redgrave, its guest director) and local talent (the young Brighton…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:58AM[SHARE]Friday, May 11, 2012
Jermyn Street, London: Adam is both son and mother to Mammles whom he tends - as he has for 15 years - in the cluttered attic of their home. She is bed-ridden, crippled with arthritis. He is…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:52AM[SHARE]Tuesday, March 27, 2012
New Victoria Theatre, Woking: Meeting Sharon, Tracey and Dorien again is a bit like encountering distant relatives after a gap of more than a decade. Will they have changed much? Will they b…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:38AM[SHARE]Thursday, March 15, 2012
Cottesloe, National, London: This beautiful play set in post-war Trinidad won Errol John the newly-inaugurated Observer award for an undiscovered playwright in 1957. It was produced the foll…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 07:09AM[SHARE]Thursday, March 8, 2012
Hampstead Theatre, London: Richard Nelson has set himself quite a task in writing a play about Harley Granville-Barker. Not only is his subject revered by modern directors and theatre histor…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:34AM[SHARE]Thursday, March 1, 2012
Bush Theatre, London: Uncertainty is the keynote of Ishy Din's first full-length play, the last of Josie Rourke's programming here before her departure for the Donmar.
Read the fu…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:53AM[SHARE]Friday, February 17, 2012
Lyric Hammersmith, London: Puck's beautiful speech at the end of the play, beginning "If we shadows have offended", comes as something of a surprise. Not because it is deliver…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:09AM[SHARE]Thursday, May 5, 2011
The Print Room, London: This buzzing new 80-seat venue in Notting Hill is celebrating the centenary of Tennessee Williams's birth with this late, lesser-known melodrama. Full of William…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 07:19AM[SHARE] 
