Wednesday, March 19, 2014
The notion that a young woman might learn, slowly and painfully, to articulate her thoughts is a novel one in these days of randomly fired Twitter responses. The final, triumphal speech in A…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 01:48PMTuesday, March 11, 2014
The House of Bernarda Alba is one you enter at your peril. Unless, of course, you are an actor of the female persuasion. For this is that rare beast – an all-women play. The bad...
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 04:34AMThursday, February 27, 2014
I admire the pearly prose of Elizabeth Bowen but, beyond the Anglo-Irish heritage that pervades her novels, knew little about the author who was born a Victorian and died an Elizabethan. Cer…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:57AMMonday, February 10, 2014
It’s a dangerous move to make a leading character as repulsive as Joseph, the adoptive father of a Rwandan orphan in The Witness. The audience will not like him. They may think the author …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 08:34AMThursday, January 30, 2014
The tweeting is incessant in Anthony Trollope’s clerical drama The Warden. Rarely is a bird not in full song, the sound acting as the pastoral backdrop to enough diocesan sniping, two-timi…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 03:32AMThursday, January 9, 2014
As a sexy stereotype, Carmen – the lustrous gypsy strumpet in Bizet’s opera – takes some beating. Luckily, along comes Dan Allum, founder of Romany Theatre Company and much-lauded Trav…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 10:33AMMonday, December 9, 2013
So here comes Howard Barker, preparing to torture us with his new radio play. If you extract his own spikily anti-promotional soundbites in the manner of dubious theatre posters – drama sh…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:29AMTuesday, November 26, 2013
It’s enough to give Russian oligarchs a bad name. Exiled in a crumbling London mansion, Mikhail has the cultural aspirations and finesse of an extra in Geordie Shore. Transposing Dostoevsk…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 11:57AMMonday, November 11, 2013
GF Newman, creator of TV’s Law and Order and Judge John Deed, came to radio and caused the kind of furore normally reserved for upsets in The Archers. His 10-part gangland saga The Corrupt…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 03:16AMMonday, October 28, 2013
As a simulation of what his contemporaries must have felt about the doggerel verse of William McGonagall, Lucy Gannon’s drama, Topaz, goes beyond mere narrative. For her play about the 19t…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 04:30AMThursday, October 17, 2013
No one ever accused Lady Macbeth of a lack of ambition. Her Russian literary counterpart, though, is more of a desperate housewife from one of the darker corners of Wisteria Lane, where the …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 03:09AMMonday, September 30, 2013
It is 1963, sexual intercourse has just begun, according to Larkin, and staff at Private Eye are debating the issues of the day – the photos of the naked ‘headless’ man produced du…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:10AMMonday, September 16, 2013
I’ve always had a vague idea that Three Men in a Boat, with the participants’ interminable discussions of the state of their innards, renditions of unfunny jokes and constant trips to th…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 03:44AMTuesday, September 3, 2013
There was always the risk that a dramatic reinterpretation of Pink Floyd’s 1973 concept album, Dark Side of the Moon, would only add to 40 years worth of confusion. The record’s themes o…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 03:43AMMonday, August 19, 2013
The tourist authorities in Parma, north Italy, may have missed a trick. Music may be the food of love – Parma has Verdi and its famous ham and cheese – but mirror neurons, which are...
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 03:54AMMonday, August 5, 2013
The mega-bucks licensing industry is said to have been created in 1930 when the rights to Winnie the Pooh spin-offs were sold, though the ink was hardly dry on AA Milne’s whimsical bear-ce…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 03:59AMMonday, July 22, 2013
The Mighty Carlins sounds like a comedy acrobatic act, perhaps three men of assorted sizes and shapes being fired out of cannons and tumbling from each others’ shoulders. And in a way, tha…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 07:25AMMonday, July 8, 2013
Being sent overseas at six years old to await your marriage, at 15, to a shorter, younger, stuttering groom with undescended testicles would be enough to test the patience of any embryonic f…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 04:13AMMonday, June 24, 2013
The nightmares run the gamut from dystopian to fallopian in BBC Radio 4’s Dangerous Visions season. Packed more tightly than battery-farmed hens into little more than a week, the dramas ar…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 04:00AMTuesday, June 11, 2013
For convincing evidence that BBC Radio 4 – not Boris Johnson’s hair, rainy bank holidays or custard creams – lies at the heart of life as we know it, you have only to listen to...
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:27AMTuesday, May 28, 2013
I begin with a chuckle that turns into a lament. The Pickerskill Reports, the series in which a former public school master reminisces in a tone as lacerating as it is fond, is no more....
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 04:13AMMonday, May 13, 2013
A tender but bruising account of dementia is filtered through an architect’s view of the world in Nicola Baldwin’s Tony and Rose. But all the design mantras in the world can’t help a s…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 04:01AMMonday, April 29, 2013
The moon has many a sail-on part in Ian McMillan’s deliciously quirky and poetic paean to his parents, Love, War and Trains – so much so that it’s a wonder it doesn’t get a mention...
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 04:31AMWednesday, April 17, 2013
If Noel Coward’s Present Laughter is, as generally agreed, drawn from his own life, he goes beyond self-portrait and self-caricature into unflinching self-laceration. Pier Productions’ n…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 04:04AMWednesday, April 3, 2013
It’s ironic that Philip Larkin’s first novel, Jill, written at 21, features a bumbling young protagonist in a series of embarrassments, when he later declared the work itself a juvenil…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 08:17AMMonday, March 18, 2013
Greek economist and tragedian Vicky Pryce was photographed looking at cheap radios the weekend before being imprisoned, along with ex-Lib Dem MP Chris Huhne, for perverting the course of jus…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:15AMMonday, March 4, 2013
We’re in a bar and our charmless ‘hero’ is slurring a compliment. The air is full of cheap come-ons and expensive scent, the kind a man buys for his mistress. The pair reminisce drunke…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 04:00AMMonday, February 18, 2013
A few crummy pop songs and an indifferent script don’t make a musical – as Viva Forever! demonstrates. But not even when the music is brilliant can you prop a thin dramatic edifice along…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 03:34AMThursday, January 31, 2013
If George Orwell were alive today, he would be a pundit par excellence – whoops! He hated the use of foreign phrases – firing off trenchant opinions on platforms not available in his day…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 08:16AMMonday, January 21, 2013
Arriving in a fleet of three, like wise men, blind mice and Bronte sisters, Michael Frayn’s dramas have dominated the mid-January airwaves. With his 80th birthday due in September, perhaps…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 04:13AMFriday, January 4, 2013
The best thing about returning to normal after the Christmas and New Year break is that you know what day of the week it is. But before then, festive ennui led to an unusual experiment...
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:06AM 
