1,418 stories by "Aleks Sierz"
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 …
The pleasures of The Girl with Glitter in Her Eye " its acting, music and shadow images especially " do make up for some of the banality of the writing.
Actor James McAvoy is much in demand: in the BBC's His Dark Materials he is busy saving a parallel world, while in the poetic universe of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac he i…
Theatre can touch thousands of lives. But can it compete with the success of a bestselling book? First published in 1988, mountaineer Joe Simpson's Touching the Void has apparently sold more…
The trouble with prejudice is that you can't control how other people see you. At the start of her career, playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's work was set in her own Sikh community. But, like…
Media hysteria needs good branding. So when in March 2014 an email letter was leaked to the press, claiming to be by Islamist extremists and detailing how to take control of several Birmingh…
Random and topical thoughts and quotes gathered by My Theatre Mates contributor Aleks Sierz, first published on www.sierz.co.uk.
Family dramas are a staple of British new writing, but as well as talking about our nearest and dearest, can they also say something about the wider society? The Arrival, by the director, tu…
Random and topical thoughts and quotes gathered by My Theatre Mates contributor Aleks Sierz, first published on www.sierz.co.uk.
