Finsbury Park is no longer London theatreland's equivalent of Outer Mongolia. The spanking new Park theatre, whose main space seems to be designed to mimic the intimacy of the successful Don…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 07:11AMOne of my favourite but rare theatregoing experiences is when an actor incarnates a role so totally that it's impossible to imagine any other actor ever playing the same part. Mark Rylance's…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 02:05PMDoes anyone else out there remember Bill Tidy's marvellous northern cartoon strip The Cloggies? It ran for years and years in Private Eye, starting in 1967 -- the year I found myself, a call…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:08PMI don't usually blog about plays which are read at Player-Playwrights, the group of actors and writers where I spend my Monday evenings, and of which I'm the current chairman. Most of the ne…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 07:32AMI can't think of an evening I've spent in the theatre where the acting was so good and the play was so terrible. After the 90-minute first half watching Anne-Marie Duff and the other actors …
SOURCE: John Morrison at 06:55AMLucy Kirkwood's new play at the Almeida is hugely ambitious and well worth seeing. It's had excellent reviews. But for many reasons both the play and the production left me feeling irritated…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 10:37AMThis production of an early, little-known Harold Pinter play at Trafalgar Studios is wonderfully funny, brilliantly acted and highlights a strain of comic exuberance that is less prominent i…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 09:57AMMy trip last week to see Passion Play at the Duke of York's has set me thinking about the eternal subject of West End ticket prices. I was amazed to see the theatre half empty (okay then, ha…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 10:04AMPeter Nichols' Passion Play is one of three classic plays about adultery among the London intellectual middle classes, dating from the period around 1980. The other two are Tom Stoppard's Th…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:30AMWhen James Graham's play about late 1970s parliamentary shenanigans opened at the Cottesloe last September, I decided to give it a miss. Having finally caught up with it more than six months…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 06:31AMIf contemporary artists are going to be arrested for swindling the public by passing off cheap rubbish as art, not many of them are likely to be left at liberty to walk the streets. But luck…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 07:03PMIf Nicholas Hytner's decade and a half in charge of the National Theatre is to be remembered by a single show, this is the one to go into the history books. Like Antony and Cleopatra, Othell…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:58AMAfter Tuesday night's Apocalypse Now experience with Beyonce's helicopters drowning out The Tempest, I'm glad to report that on Wednesday there wasn't even a whisper of a helicopter overhead…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 04:53AMProspero's magic unfortunately doesn't have any effect on helicopters. Last night's performance at Shakespeare's Globe was seriously disrupted by what seemed like a scene from Apocalypse Now…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 06:21AMThe National Theatre does lots of different things brilliantly, but pretending to be an edgy innovative fringe venue isn't one of them. A couple of years ago it converted its backstage paint…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:20PMThis is a classic revival of a classic play by Lindsay Posner, ideally suited to the old-fashioned proscenium arch stage of the Old Vic. I contributed a programme note on the topicality of t…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:58AMThis was a real curiosity. I'm glad I made the trip to the BFI on the South Bank, where each month they exhume forgotten television programmes of the past half century. At the moment there's…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:15AMDeclan Donnellan's gift as the veteran director of Cheek By Jowl is usually in subtraction; he shaves down Shakespeare and Chekhov classics to their bare essentials, relying on the actors an…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:08AMInstallations sit at the border between art and theatre. I usually concentrate on writing about the latter, but I find the self-consciously theatrical stage-set installations of Ilya Kabakov…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 01:45PMPost-1945 Britain produced millions of babyboomers like me who are still alive and kicking, but not many plays that have survived into the modern repertoire. Rodney Ackland's play first saw …
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:24AMAmanda Whittington's playwriting career has been built on sharply written plays about groups of women, starting with Be My Baby. So it's no surprise that her new drama about Ruth Ellis, the …
SOURCE: John Morrison at 06:05AMNever trust a man wearing a bow tie, I always say. One of my other maxims in life is never to discuss the Middle East. I do however occasionally watch plays about the Middle East, and I'm gl…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:52AMIt's a good thing Harold Pinter wrote when he did; his plays and screenplays would never get commissioned for television today. Have a quick read of last week's Guardian extract from a book …
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:49AMI'm going to stick my neck out with an assertion I can't possibly prove: this show at the Riverside Studios is the most theatrically exciting production playing anywhere in London. Mies Juli…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 06:50AMIt takes fourteen minutes of exposition before the samovar arrives on stage in William Boyd's respectful tribute to Anton Chekhov at the Hampstead Theatre. Birds are tweeting, the teaglasses…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:45AM'I'm in a coffee grinder', exclaims the hapless ex-jailbird Wilhelm Voigt. After watching the endless revolving Olivier theatre stage, I know exactly how he feels. In Adrian Noble's frenetic…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 10:50AMMultiple authorship in the theatre can work brilliantly, illustrating different facets of a single theme, as it did for Rupert Goold's exploration of the 9/11 attack, Decade. But the risk of…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 10:46AMI must be one of the last people in the country never to have seen this classic play on stage. My excuse for missing the original production of Timberlake Wertenbaker's hit play at the Royal…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 09:30AMHenry James' The Turn of the Screw is known as a ghost story; it isn't. It uses the classic framing device of a Victorian ghost tale -- the rapt after-dinner audience, the manuscript confess…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:27AMMost people, including me, now feel they know Alan Bennett's late parents better than their own. Like a pair of cracked Babylonian artefacts, Alan's dear old Mam and Dad have been subjected …
SOURCE: John Morrison at 10:58AMThere's a hauntingly beautiful moment in this short play by Iain Finlay Macleod when the music changes from run-of-the-mill rock to the soundtrack of a Gaelic song, performed (I think) by th…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 07:14AM
