Monday, February 29, 2016
Best actor nomination for Farinelli and the King comes hours after winning Academy Award for best supporting actorThe “double O” category in Britain has traditionally been associated wit…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:43PMSaturday, February 27, 2016
Between them, two current stagings of Ibsen and Chekhov classics offer audiences five intermissions. While some see an art form reasserting itself, the move comes with a number of hitchesA r…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:18AMThursday, February 18, 2016
HG Wells’ prose is the hero of Jeff Wayne’s full-blown musical revival, which has enough bombast to drown out any ringtones in the audienceThere was always an overlap between the concept…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:32AMWednesday, February 10, 2016
Debut plays can be instant classics and false starts. From Ibsen’s Catilina to Shaffer’s Five Finger Exercise, they often contain thrilling hints of where a dramatist is headingImagine t…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 05:16AMSunday, January 31, 2016
First Direct Arena, LeedsA greatest hits show made more poignant after Mortimer’s recent heart bypass meandered even more than usualEvery performance of Reeves and Mortimer’s new stage t…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:40PMTuesday, January 19, 2016
A previously unperformed 1900 play about a proto-feminist painter has received a rehearsed reading at the National Theatre. Is a full revival now in order?It is both the dream and the nightm…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 09:54AMSunday, January 17, 2016
Sharon D Clarke studied to be a social worker before becoming a doctor … on Holby City. Now she’s an Olivier award-winning stage star, singing the blues in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Sh…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 10:44AMMonday, January 11, 2016
From new writing at the Royal Court to revivals at the NT, theatre schedules suggest that plays by women are finally getting better representation – but there’s still cause for concern O…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:10PMThursday, December 24, 2015
Complex writing, leftfield family shows and thoroughly bleak dramas make theatre stages far from jolly this Christmas. Praise be, then, for the new wave of pseudo-pantoThe theatrical form mo…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:38AMWednesday, December 23, 2015
The year brought radical rethinkings of Chekhov and Beckett, superior Shakespeares and new plays that were daring, engaging and powerfulChekhov wrote so few plays, which are revived so often…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:48AMTuesday, December 15, 2015
A lost work is often buried for a reason, but the recent rediscovery of a seminal Miller play, No Villain, confirms his brilliance and anticipates later masterpiecesThe biggest dream of all …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 03:39AMSunday, December 6, 2015
Recent openings present theatregoers with a choice between interval-free one-acters such as Here We Go and epics including Henry VIt struck me recently how useful it would be if theatre tick…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 04:24PMFriday, December 4, 2015
Mixing spy thriller with quantum physics, Stoppard’s play Hapgood received rude and confused reviews in 1988. Will a rare revival reverse its fortunes?In March 1988, Tom Stoppard gave an i…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:44AMWednesday, December 2, 2015
The appointment of Sheffield Theatres’ artistic director to lead at Chichester Festival theatre reflects his talent for musicals – and his innovative recordDaniel Evans has been appointe…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 10:42AMMonday, November 30, 2015
The temptation to update the text of an old play for a modern audience is resisted in two productions that refresh the originals in more intelligent waysTwo striking revivals last week – o…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 10:16AMFriday, November 20, 2015
As a female playwright who didn’t give interviews, Churchill has in the past been underestimated. So how has she come to be celebrated as one of Britain’s greatest dramatists?In the last…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:34AMWednesday, November 18, 2015
Wolverhampton GrandDavid Hasselhoff plays a nightclub owner who once, strangely, starred in Baywatch in this creaky addition to his personality cultMany actors, rattling around Britain in a …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:33AMFriday, November 13, 2015
Theatres can't keep asking us to hang about in the dark while actors move house. We may as well go to the cinemaAll performers hope for applause – but the new London West End production of…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:28AMThursday, November 12, 2015
From Gypsy to Harlequinade and The Moderate Soprano, London’s theatres are awash with shows about showbiz. Are they a valid celebration of the power of art, or just for self-indulgent luvv…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:13AMFriday, November 6, 2015
Chancellor Caryl Churchill, foreign secretary Gore Vidal, defence minister David Greig … Ahead of the National Theatre’s revival of Harley Granville Barker’s explosive play, Waste, Mar…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 09:44AMTuesday, November 3, 2015
New projects at the National Theatre and Chichester Festival theatre substantially rework the material of two great authors, raising questions of fidelity and freedomIf there is an afterlife…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 09:48AMTuesday, October 27, 2015
Measure for Measure has been staged three times in London this year. It goes to show just how resonant its themes of sexual licentiousness and twisted democracy are today – especially in R…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 11:36AMFriday, October 16, 2015
Lifetime achievement in music theatre acknowledges Lansbury’s prolific career in theatre and film spanning seven decadesPeople like to pass landmark birthdays in meaningful places, so it s…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 04:16AMFriday, October 9, 2015
Macbeth, starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, joins Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet and Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight in my top 10 films based on the Stratford playwright’s w…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 05:13AMMonday, October 5, 2015
The jokes were dated and non-PC, the delivery perfectly timed: for one night only, the showbiz survivors teamed up to create a piece of theatre historyWith the two performers having a combin…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:50PMWednesday, September 23, 2015
The secretive immersive-theatre sensation is back for another sellout run. It’s an uplifting and unsettling experience – think Disneyland meets DismalandAt the curtain call for Agatha Ch…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:37PMFriday, September 18, 2015
Tipping the Velvet has opened to less fanfare than her Benedict Cumberbatch production, but Turner seems to prefer it that wayThe last time the theatre director Lyndsey Turner opened a produ…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:18PMThursday, September 17, 2015
Doctor Foster, Suffragette, Game, Splendour … hits keep on coming for Abi Morgan and Mike Bartlett. The success of these British playwrights comes from transcending the limits of both stag…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:30PMTuesday, August 18, 2015
A Desert Island Discs spoof, brooding circus performers who strip naked and a Yoko Ono-inspired love-fest … our critics choose their hot tickets at this year’s fringeO No!In less skilled…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:49AMFriday, August 14, 2015
Last year, with the referendum imminent, playwrights turned their hand to the subject of Scottish independence. This year the big issue is IsisIn Scotland, Labour has largely been replaced b…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 11:37AMThursday, August 13, 2015
Edinburgh festival has a long tradition of taking on leaders and legislation as dramatic subject matter and this year sees performers’ satire as sharp as everWho is the odd one out among T…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:09PM 
