Saturday, October 1, 2011
West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds; Old Vic, LondonIt begins in precarious ritual: a boxed-in court, a red carpet like a stream of blood, a floor so steeply raked that the action hurtles downwa…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMSaturday, September 10, 2011
St Katharine Docks; Theatre Royal, Haymarket; Olivier, National Theatre; Southwark Playhouse, all LondonFigures are pressed against a long pane of glass. They are spread-eagled, as if blown …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:32PMSaturday, August 27, 2011
Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh; King's, Edinburgh; Barbican, London; Hill Street, EdinburghThe djinn is too meek. The surtitles are too wayward – mostly hard to see and often out of synch. T…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMSaturday, August 20, 2011
Trafalgar Studios; Scoop, both LondonLook for Caryl Churchill in the 1996 edition of Oxford's Concise Companion to the Theatre and you'll find her. But only just. She's documented not separa…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:04PMSaturday, August 13, 2011
Donmar Warehouse; Globe; Regent's Park Open Air, all LondonJude Law lands on deck, flung from the ocean like a helpless fish. He's been on board only a few minutes before Ruth Wilson gives h…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:04PMSaturday, July 30, 2011
Theatre Royal BathWhen Noël Coward wrote about the upper classes he made them heartless but witty. When he put the lower-middle classes on stage, he gave them heart, hurt, principles and he…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMSaturday, July 23, 2011
Lyttelton; Hampstead; Piccadilly, all LondonOne is ramrod-stiff, pale and unrelenting; the other is round and rosy and yielding. One, rigid as a mannequin, is lifted up by removal men, to be…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMSaturday, July 9, 2011
Opera House, Manchester; MediaCityUK, Salford; Royal Court, London"What Manchester does today, the rest of the world does tomorrow." That was true of the record of Purcell's "Nymphs and Shep…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMSaturday, July 2, 2011
Old Vic; Barbican; Soho, all LondonHe uses his withered arm as a cosh. He lugs along his lame leg, strapped in a calliper, as if it were a giant log. His hump makes him bend not only over bu…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMSaturday, June 25, 2011
Olivier; Haymarket; Theatre Royal, Stratford East, all London"Peter! Agathon!" bellows the man who will become the Emperor Julian at the people he's talking to. "Julian! Sallust!" yells Medo…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 06:00PMSaturday, June 18, 2011
Comedy; Donmar Warehouse; Theatre Royal Drury Lane, all LondonEnclosed but transmitting, composed but aquiver, Kristin Scott Thomas is an ideal Pinter actress. She manages, in the way that s…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:03PMSaturday, June 4, 2011
Wyndham's; Globe, both LondonHe could have called it "A Lot of Fuss About Fannies". Even if you go to Shakespeare's play without a glossary explaining that "nothing" was Elizabethan slang fo…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMSaturday, May 28, 2011
Lyttelton; Regent's Park Open Air theatre; Royal Court, all LondonWithin minutes of appearing on stage he's somersaulted backwards over an armchair – and caught (he claims) a nut in his mo…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMSaturday, May 21, 2011
RSC, Stratford; Olivier, London, Barbican, LondonThe ducats are dollars. The choice of caskets takes place during a bridal game show called Destiny. Shylock delivers his "hath not a Jew" spe…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMThe Observer's theatre critic chooses the 10 sets that changed the face of modern theatre, from a 1912 Hamlet to Punchdrunk's immersive FaustSusannah Clapp
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:01PMThe Observer's theatre critic chooses the 10 sets that changed the face of modern theatre, from a 1912 Hamlet to Punchdrunk's immersive Faust Continue reading...
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:01PMSaturday, May 14, 2011
Elsing Hall, Norfolk; Halesworth, Suffolk"Compared to this," bellows one of the Queens, "other entertainment will be like standing in fog and in mud." She has an angry point. Dining with Ali…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMSaturday, May 7, 2011
Southwark; Globe, both London; RSC, Stratford-upon-AvonI've never seen a pool of sweat expand on a stage floor as rapidly as it does in Tender Napalm. And never been in a theatre where the a…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMSaturday, April 30, 2011
Port Talbot, WalesIn the beginning was the Word. On the street: "Were you in the town centre when John the Baptist tried to get on the escalator?" At the end, there was an image. By the sea:…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMSaturday, April 23, 2011
House of Detention; Little Angel; Hampstead, all LondonMacbeth is this season's Shakespeare. David Morrissey will soon be strutting and fretting in his old Liverpool haunts and Jonathan Slin…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:04PMSaturday, April 16, 2011
Cottesloe; Novello; Trafalgar Studios, all LondonLondon Road is the riposte to anyone who thinks "musical" must mean either froth or stodge. Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork's wonderfully sung pl…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:03PMSaturday, April 2, 2011
Old Vic; Lyttelton, both LondonVowel-torturing upper-class accents; ferocious feelings; a traditional scene performed in an abstract place. Thea Sharrock – who kick-started the Terence Rat…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:09PMSaturday, March 26, 2011
Gielgud; Almeida; Cottesloe, all LondonIf candyfloss could be set to music, this is what you'd get. A lovely haze, a puffy sweetness, nothing to bite on. Pastel-coloured balloons are waved; …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:04PMSaturday, March 19, 2011
Hampstead; Theatre Royal Haymarket; Vaudeville, all LondonEcstasy: by which Mike Leigh means desperation under a candlewick bedspread. His restaging of this 1979 play, originally devised at …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:04PMSaturday, March 12, 2011
Apollo, London W1; Playhouse, OxfordIt should be the ultimate revival. Noël Coward's 1941 play about the return of the dead is resurrected by the director who has become the diva of the red…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05PMSaturday, February 26, 2011
Olivier; Donmar; Barbican, all LondonIn the centre of the Olivier stage is a pale disc like an enormous seed pod. Within it you can just make out a shadowy figure. It pulses, and the theatre…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:04PMSaturday, February 19, 2011
Tobacco Factory, Bristol; Hampstead; Print Room, both LondonIt rings out clearly as an early stab at Hamlet. It also declares war on a rotten England, a land nibbled away by – it's an ever…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:04PMSaturday, February 12, 2011
Comedy, London; Studio, Sheffield Theatres; Royal Court, LondonThere have been reports of one ticket changing hands for £900. Ian (Jerusalem) Rickson's production of The Children's Hour wil…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PMSaturday, February 5, 2011
Lyceum, Sheffield; Lyttelton, LondonWith a jaunty chorus of "Down Among the Dead Men", spivs in bowlers close in for the kill. The executioner's blade slices to the sound of plainsong. Figur…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:04PMSaturday, January 29, 2011
Lyric Hammersmith; Almeida; Bush, all LondonFirst, he had a success with Ghost Stories, still playing in the West End. Now he has adapted Roald Dahl's adult fictions. Jeremy Dyson, of the Le…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:04PMSaturday, January 22, 2011
Cottesloe; Hampstead; Arcola, all LondonTo celebrate his 80th birthday, Peter Hall has returned to the building he once ran and directed a sweetly autumnal Twelfth Night. His breeches-and-fa…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:06PM 
