1,385 stories by "Aleks Sierz"
Can the act of dusting be a metaphor? This is the all-too-obvious question that jumps into the mind while watching Spring Cleaning, a very site-specific immersive theatre production that …
This is the age of marketing, not the age of criticism. To give an example, I'll start with a small incident that has a wider symbolic value. In November 2013, a new show called Gastronau…
Lorraine Hansberry's debut, A Raisin in the Sun, was the first drama written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, where it opened in 1959. It is now an American classic, but it's …
Edwardian dramatist St John Ervine was once, along with Arthur Wing Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, Harley Granville Barker and George Bernard Shaw, hailed as a British Ibsen. They wrote problem…
A rediscovered Edwardian problem play gives a clear picture of marriage and morals in a bygone era.
Lockdown occasionally spawns some real delights. Like the surprise appearance of a strange creature from the most profound depths. One of these must be Andrew Scott's superb performance in S…
Yesterday, I took a break from my sunny local park and turned a room in my house into the Finborough fringe theatre. You know the kind of thing: very small, very dark, very hot and airless, …
In Continuity, Gerry Moynihan explores the men's fanaticism and the effects of their frustrated masculinity on their political beliefs.
This venue's urgent response to the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter campaign is powerfully realised.
Alan Bennett writes that "I've always had a soft spot for George III", for no better reason than that he had studied the monarch's reign at secondary school and then again at uni.
If any musical can attempt to live up to this title in these troubled times, it must be this show from Graeae, a theatre company whose mission is to champion the work of Deaf and disabled ar…
We are living, I have frequently been told, through weird times. Maybe. But do weird times necessarily require weird art? Do bad times provoke bad art? Well, one of the most unusual response…
The problem with creating theatre in an era of lockdown is that the constraints of working online tend towards a uniformity of creativity
We are living, I have frequently been told, through weird times. Maybe. But do weird times necessarily require weird art? Do bad times provoke bad art?
In his wide-ranging, and widely read, survey of postwar British theatre, called State of the Nation, the Guardian critic Michael Billington sets out his stall: in the introduction t…
This revival of a 2011 HighTide hit, reconceived for streaming, stars Diana Quick and is intimate and quietly moving.
During the lockdown, the best online theatre, more or less, are shows that are specially created for this digital format. Much better than dull records of dramas that might have worked well …
World on fire: The NT Live recording of this classic Young Vic production stars Gillian Anderson and is genuinely unmissable.
Over the past couple of months, theatre reviewing has become film reviewing, and venues all over the country have struggled to make material available for watching online. The biggest instit…
So far, it could be said that the National Theatre is having a good lockdown. Every week, this flagship streams one of its stock of NT Live films, which are always a welcome reminder of the …
Lockdown occasionally spawns some real delights. Like the surprise appearance of a strange creature from the profoundest depths. One of these must be Andrew Scott's superb performance in Sim…
Howard Brenton's docu-drama about the harassment of the Chinese artist is imbued with fresh urgency and relevance.
The megahit NT Live version of this iconic tale of creative hubris features a dynamic acting duo, but it is not perfect.
She's an ordinary young woman, and she really doesn't know what to think. After all, things are way out of control. Out of order. She knows that the natural world is pretty fucked and that n…
Reviewing theatre now means reviewing the film. Knowing that Emma Rice's Old Vic 2018 production of Wise Children, her typically rambunctious version of Angela Carter's last novel, published…
