1,376 stories by "Aleks Sierz"
"Fetch me 'ammer." (Edward Bond, Saved) "Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it." (Bertolt Brecht) A couple of years ago, our family got a new puppy. It …
If neither newspapers nor intelligence services will lose sleep over the way Blyth represents them, The Haystack is insightful enough to be a contemporary state-of-the-nation parable.
Total surveillance: this is the idea that every moment of our waking existence can be spied upon by the state, or by some foreign country. It's a paranoid notion based on the huge growth of …
Your sweet tooth can get you into trouble. Lots of trouble. In this revival of Lucy Prebble's provocative debut, first staged at the Royal Court in 2003, the metaphor of sugar, and of the po…
A new monologue about rage, racism and national identity, Death of England at the National Theatre is magnificent in its fury and perception.
A star cast led by Daniel Radcliffe, Alan Cumming and Jane Horrocks make light work of the Beckett classic Endgame.
Random and topical thoughts and quotes gathered by My Theatre Mates contributor Aleks Sierz, first published on www.sierz.co.uk.
Tonight, I discovered the gasp index. Or maybe just re-discovered. The what? The gasp index. It's when you see a show that keeps making you exhale, sometimes audibly, sometimes quietly. Like…
Random and topical thoughts and quotes gathered by My Theatre Mates contributor Aleks Sierz, first published on www.sierz.co.uk.
Do you hear the people sing? In recent months, you're more likely to have heard news stories about the longest running West End musical than the actual music. Stephen Sondheim " who celebrat…
New touring play The Gift from Eclipse is a wonderfully complex and emotionally powerful account of race and Empire.
Random and topical thoughts and quotes gathered by My Theatre Mates contributor Aleks Sierz, first published on www.sierz.co.uk.
Theatre is a business as well as a craft. And surveys about theatre often have a business side to them. So a recent survey about how many Shakespeare quotations members of the general public…
Excellent revival of Lucy Prebble's disturbing debut play The Sugar Syndrome about loneliness, the internet and illegal desire.
Queen Victoria is a strong symbol of the old British Empire. For some 200 years, up to the 1950s, the country's colonial history dominated the national mindset, and arguably we still live in…
Random and topical thoughts and quotes gathered by My Theatre Mates contributor Aleks Sierz, first published on www.sierz.co.uk.
Maxine Peake struggles to make the voice of reason heard in the rather reactionary feminist history play The Welkin at the National Theatre.
Scenes with Girls at the Royal Court is like an exciting blast of fresh air blowing through the often stale world of contemporary new writing.
A new play about optimism, You Stupid Darkness! is compassionate in conception, but repetitive and frustrating in performance.
The prolific Mike Bartlett " from whose pen have leaped television series such as Doctor Foster and Press, as well as stage hits such as King Charles III " has two things to celebrate …
The 1990s were a great decade for new writing, but although the story of those years is often told as the rise and rise of in-yer-face playwrights " such as Philip Ridley, Anthony Neilson, S…
Turn on the news. Go on. No? Okay, switch on the radio. Why not? Oh, I see, because the news is always bad. Yeah, I know what you mean. All those stories about how we're doomed because of gl…
Random and topical thoughts and quotes gathered by My Theatre Mates contributor Aleks Sierz, first published on www.sierz.co.uk.
New blood courses through the veins of the West End's longest-running musical Les Misérables.
What has Saint Augustine of Hippo got to do with new writing? At first sight, not very much. That is, until you read Alan Burdick's elegant program note to Alexandra Wood's latest play, The …
