Tuesday, May 16, 2023
Playing in the vast ancient amphitheatre, imaginative new productions of Euripides and Aeschylus find fresh nuance even in this huge space
How best to stage the great Greek classics? The fas…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06AMSunday, May 7, 2023
A blend of pageantry, procession, music and mystery, with many private moments to savour
A coronation is pure theatre. But how does one review it when there is so little to compare it with? …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:02PMMonday, April 24, 2023
A new revival of The Circle is a reminder of a dramatist who smuggled vital messages into broad crowdpleasers
Never trust what dramatists say about themselves. Noël Coward spent decades dis…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 04:06AMMonday, April 17, 2023
Actor, archivist of the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, and director, with a long career in theatre, film and televisionThe actor and director Murray Melvin, who has died aged 90, had a rich …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 11:02AMThursday, April 6, 2023
Thirty directors from all over Europe converged on Greece for a showcase of its fizzing new talent that even included a play about the Nazis by Tony Kushner. What did they learn on this five…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:24AMThursday, March 23, 2023
There are invigorating versions of Guys and Dolls, Oklahoma! and Cabaret in London – and some enticing new dramas coming – yet theatre risks being cut off from its past
David Hare has ar…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:12PMTuesday, March 21, 2023
He presented himself as a message-free entertainer but, 50 years after his death, it is time to reconsider the variety of the great playwright’s work
Anniversaries offer a chance for reapp…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:17AMSunday, January 22, 2023
Dramatist and screenwriter whose best-known stage play, Alpha Beta, is a scorching study of marriage and morality
As a passionate lover of football, in particular of Liverpool FC, Ted Whiteh…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:06PMMonday, January 9, 2023
It was a box-office hit directed by John Gielgud and created turmoil on stage and off. Now, the 1964 Broadway staging has inspired The Motive and the Cue, a new play by Jack Thorne
In 1964 R…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 03:00PMTuesday, January 3, 2023
Paul Mescal and Patsy Ferran battle it out in the Almeida’s new production of a poetic drama whose ambiguity is enthralling
Tennessee Williams’s old bus keeps on running. The Almeida’s…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:48PMThursday, December 8, 2022
Pitting the capital against the regions is a cynical political ploy and the Arts Council’s cuts are a catastrophe for new writing – as well as the entertainment industry
The resignation …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:54AMMonday, October 17, 2022
Costumes, props, posters and archive footage all feature in an exhibition that leaves you itching to see some shows again
Weave your way round the new exhibition Re:Imagining Musicals at the…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 09:03AMTuesday, September 20, 2022
An immense task awaits the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new artistic directors who must attract top talent, prioritise verse-speaking and combine classic repertory and contemporary drama
It…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:55PMWednesday, September 14, 2022
The whodunnit starring Saoirse Ronan is a fun spoof but tinkers with history and never captures the unique way Agatha Christie’s play fascinated audiences in the 50s
The smell of greasepai…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 04:49PMMonday, September 12, 2022
Mike Bartlett’s 2014 play anticipated a constitutional crisis, while playwrights including Shakespeare and Chekhov have shown how traumatic a transfer of power can be
What does the future …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 09:03AMFriday, September 9, 2022
The monarch was sympathetically depicted by dramatists and at a 1999 production of Oklahoma! her eyes lit up when she recalled her own theatrical outings
“I’ve never been fond of the the…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:49AMThursday, September 8, 2022
Michael Frayn’s comedy is not just extremely funny but also acknowledges the fragile artifice of order – in theatre and the world beyond
All plays, wrote critic John Lahr, are dated. He …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 03:33AMMonday, August 8, 2022
The two titans of modern drama were both cricket obsessives. What if they had faced the fast bowlers together? Playwright Shomit Dutta explains why he made it happen – with darkly comic dr…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 03:54AMMonday, July 25, 2022
An actor of innate tenderness and grace, Warner had a theatre career of two halves, each with superb performances at the RSC
I have never forgotten my first sighting of David Warner, who has…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:18PMMonday, July 4, 2022
In our many meetings, the director’s conversation was as invigorating as the way he led audiences through the night in his staging of The Mahabharata
In 1979, Peter Brook made a film of Gu…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:03PMMonday, June 13, 2022
Sam Mendes’s The Lehman Trilogy and Marianne Elliott’s Company took 10 prizes between them and demonstrated the power of UK subsidised theatre
“Brits Triumph on Broadway” is one of t…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:00AMTuesday, June 7, 2022
A meeting of minds at the National Theatre showed ways to stage drama along environmentally sound lines. But is everyone on board?
‘Theatre will be measured by its response to the climate …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:42PMFriday, May 27, 2022
A provocative new film at Cannes featuring Ian McKellen attempts to de-romanticise the Dane but lags behind what theatre productions have been telling us for decades
TS Eliot called Hamlet �…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 09:37AMMonday, May 23, 2022
Beth Steel’s The House of Shades unites national politics and private lives through the fortunes of a working-class family from 1965 to 2019
Old myths die hard. One of the greatest in thea…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 05:03PMMonday, April 25, 2022
Gregory Doran has achieved much at the RSC and directed some fine productions. Let’s have an actor in charge next: how about Adjoa Andoh or Simon Russell Beale?
When the boss of a big thea…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:18AMThursday, April 14, 2022
Bertie Carvel is brilliant in The 47th, Mike Bartlett’s ingenious play about the former US president, but the real parallel is not with the Bard’s kings but his hollow braggarts
If you w…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:12AMWednesday, March 16, 2022
Criticised for moral ambiguity on its premiere, the 1965 drama – about a woman in a masculine world of aggression and pretence – is back to provoke and disturb
Call a play a “modern cl…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 03:54PMMonday, March 14, 2022
Owen Horsley’s new production of Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3, uses a cast of 120, including professionals and community participants, with some of them filming the action on stage
I discovered…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 04:18AMFriday, March 11, 2022
Ian Smith’s moving tribute to the late Colin Cowdrey is a gentle reminder of the abiding link between the stumps and the stage
Cricket and theatre have long been intimate bedfellows. Strol…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:12PMTuesday, January 25, 2022
The Tragedy of Macbeth follows in the footsteps of Orson Welles’s 1948 film, which showed how imagination can turn Shakespeare’s text into more than a costume epic
With Joel Coen’s The…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:12AMTuesday, January 18, 2022
Despite some clever reimaginings of Tartuffe, UK stages remain depressingly inattentive to one of the greatest playwrights
In France the 400th anniversary of Molière’s birth is being cele…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 03:54AM 
