There'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 07:14AMReally good new plays are still as elusive as the Higgs boson, though more common than they were 15 or 20 years ago. The Royal Court Theatre has probably done more to bring this about than a…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 01:39PMOh, the joy of it! 'You'll need a piece of four by two/To get a really good pull through'. Anyone who remembers how to clean the barrel of a .303 rifle, as I did in the school cadet force in…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 06:15AMHow do you describe a production which throws everythng but the kitchen sink at a play in the hope that a few things will hit the target? A few years ago I would have used the term Rupert (a…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:34AMThere's a thrilling level of tension throughout this imaginative and adventurous production by Phyllida Lloyd at the Donmar. Watching the second preview on Friday night, I remained on the ed…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 04:59PMThat grinding sound coming from the direction of my blog is me revising my critical view about updating Chekhov's plays to the modern era. Anya Reiss's sparkling rewrite of The Seagull is an…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 12:59PMThe best moment for me in this production at the National Theatre came after 45 minutes when the house lights went up for the end of act one, and I was able to escape. As most of the reviewe…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 06:22AMOften in the theatre I'm happy to shut my eyes because there's nothing interesting to watch on stage, but here is a radio play during which I was afraid to blink because I might miss somethi…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 09:35AMFirst, let's hear it for the actors. Nick Dear's new play about the life and death of the poet Edward Thomas has two luminous performances by Pip Carter and Hattie Morahan, supported by a st…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 06:06AMFeeling depressed about the state of British theatre? Lying awake worried about the lack of good new writing? Don't take a pill -- just cadge a ticket for this terrific new play by Lucy Preb…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 07:04AMA grim guard in black battledress barks out orders: single file, walk faster, keep up! We rarely see the inside of prisons these days, and I imagine the warders have to say 'please' and 'tha…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:34AMI've been enjoying Chekhov on stage in English and Russian since the mid-1960s, but I can't think of a production I have disliked more intensely than Rimas Tuminas' expressionist version of …
SOURCE: John Morrison at 02:08PMWhich relationships are more important? The ones we have with buildings, places and the historical past, or the ones we have with people in the present? That's the question Alan Bennett asks…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 09:15AMDramatic irony has nothing to do with irony. I don't know who coined this awkward phrase for a bit of scriptwriting technique that is extremely simple -- yet many playwrights don't know how …
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:52AMWhen an audience titters at a tragedy, it's usually a sign that something isn't quite right, either in the text, the acting or the production. I hesitate to give a definitive verdict on what…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 06:36PMI've been lucky enough to catch a performance of a new play at RADA by Jessica Swale, better known as the talented artistic director of Red Handed Theatre. This short run is effectively a pr…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 02:14PMGo to Trafalgar Square and there, looking down Whitehall, is Charles I, a few hundred yards from the place where he lost his head. Walk as far as Parliament and you'll find another statue to…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 11:07AMOf all British theatre's great curmudgeons (Arnold Wesker, Edward Bond et al), Howard Barker is the most curmudgeonly of all. He grumbled to the Guardian that Scenes from an Execution, now r…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 07:48AMIf I had to name five British male actors on whom I would slap a 'National Treasure' export ban if they ever planned to move to Hollywood, Adrian Lester would be one of them. Long ago he was…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 07:07AMAfter the RSC's dismal Twelfth Night at the Roundhouse earlier this year, it's a sheer joy to rediscover the play in this brilliant production at Shakespeare's Globe. This is a revival of an…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:12AMI'm no Ibsen expert, but this version of his play by Brian Friel contains a raft of rewrites which are at best unneccessary and at worst, seriously bonkers. Friel, who is extremely keen on C…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 06:37AM'You looked as if you didn't want to be woken up.' No, that is not a line from Caryl Churchill's new play. It's what the lady on my right said as we left the Royal Court stalls at the end...
SOURCE: John Morrison at 06:36PM'We're worth an evening in the stalls/We might be girls but we've got balls' Underneath the brick railway arches at Southwark Playhouse, there's an unmissable masterclass going on nightly in…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:46AMMy guide to pronouncing the names of Chekhov's characters and getting the stress right has proved to be one of my most popular blog postings ever. I hope actors and directors everywhere in t…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 01:30PMThis wasn't a play and so I'm not writing a review. Several hundred people crowded into the Royal Court Theatre's underground cafe in Sloane Square this morning to hear three actresses, incl…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 01:45PMThere are moments in Mark Rylance's long-awaited Richard III which, like his performance in Jerusalem, conjure up the ghost of Laurence Olivier playing Archie Rice in The Entertainer. He's a…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 01:07PMI'm not usually a big fan of directors who want to update 19th century classics, but this Young Vic production of Ibsen's best known play by Carrie Cracknell is a model of how to do it; and …
SOURCE: John Morrison at 06:02AMFrom Falstaff to Macbeth, from Hamlet to Iago, from Leontes to Benedick -- I find it hard to think of a Shakespearean actor with the range of Simon Russell Beale, except Mark Rylance. Like G…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 06:01AMHow do you stage one of Shakespeare's most problematic plays? The Merchant of Venice may have a whiff of antisemitism, but it also has layers of ambiguity; The Taming of Shrew, on the other …
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:05AMA link to my theatre blog piece for the Guardian yesterday. The headline was written by someone else. I'm griping about productions of Shakespeare, not Chekhov, Ibsen, Shaw and everyone else.
SOURCE: John Morrison at 04:48AMWhatever happened to lunchtime theatre? Is it dead and buried, just like the traditional lunchbreak? It seems to be in terminal decline in London, a victim of a world in which people have to…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 04:56PM
