1,386 stories by "Aleks Sierz"
Playwright Martin Crimp is one of British theatre's best-kept secrets. Although his neon-lit name appears in the theatre capitals of Europe, with his work a big hit at festivals all over the…
Harley Granville Barker is hardly a household name, but he was a huge influence on British theatre today. During the Edwardian era, he promoted new writing at the Royal Court; he wrote plays…
What's it like to be young, British and Muslim in the age of austerity? In an era of global financial crisis, high unemployment and shrinking pay packets, what can this country offer British…
Jerwood Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court: This year sees the biggest Royal Court Young Writers Festival in the theatre's history. Celebrating 39 years of good work in discovering and…
The Royal Court has been finding and developing young writers for four decades. Its Young Writers Festival has helped launch the careers of a variety of talents such as Simon Stephens (winne…
Royal Court, Jerwood Downstairs, London: David Eldridge returns to the Royal Court for the first time since 2000, when his Under the Blue Sky was at this venue, with a new drama set in Essex…
Is there a more evocative location than Essex? In his 2000 play Under the Blue Sky, one of David Eldridge's characters shouts the unforgettable words: "I'm from Essex and I'm dancing!" Now b…
Science rocks. In the theatre, this is a subject that offers to provide powerful experiments in metaphor. Most recently, in Nick Payne's Constellations - and most classically in Tom Stoppard…
Twentysomething emotional confusion is fertile ground for drama. In this new play, Stefan Golaszewski - writer of the BBC Three sitcom Him & Her and star of BBC Four's Cowards - explores…
Rose Theatre, Kingston: Before his huge West End success with the musical Matilda, Dennis Kelly's most popular play was DNA, first performed at the National Theatre's Connections y…
Critics can also be historians. In my opinion, the great new wave of 1990s British theatre starts not with Sarah Kane's Blasted in 1995, nor with Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking a year…
Write what you know, the cliché goes, and in his new drama the playwright Chris Lee draws on his day job as a social worker to create a tense two-hander about a middle-class social worker a…
Some theatre openings will be legendary for all time. One such was the Parisian evening of 10 December 1896 when Alfred Jarry's character Père Ubu stepped onto the stage at the Théâtre …
Suddenly, it seems as if the brawling youngster that was once new writing for the British theatre has grown up. Now, all it wants to talk about is the family, about having babies, and about …
Till death do us part: love and death are, like the fingers of a couple holding hands, perfectly intertwined in this play by Abi Morgan, which has been touring the country since autumn and o…
Absent or abusive fathers are a staple of British drama. As such, they are both an explanation for ferocious male violence and a metaphor of a paternal state which, in an age of austerity, s…
At its best, theatre is enthralling, and this year's offerings were led by one brilliant musical and one amazing comedy. With the West End immune to the chills of the recession, its profits …
Loneliness is hard to put on stage. There is something about the feeling of unwanted urban solitude which is so repetitive and, let's face it, boring, that writing a play about it risks send…
Can you replace a wife with a doctrine? Under normal circumstances, the question would be absurd, but given that Joe Penhall's new play, which opened last night, is the latest of a crop that…
This play has a deliberately evocative title: not only does it suggest overabundance ("everything but the kitchen sink"), but also a whole genre of playwriting (Kitchen Sink Drama). At the s…
Ever since 9/11, political theatre has mobilised the techniques of verbatim drama, and the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, north London, has an impressive reputation for its tribunal plays, oft…
It's the God factor. Although, until very recently, most British playwrights - being a secular bunch - have shied away from tackling questions of religious belief in their work, their Americ…
Some plays are so weird they defy description. Well, almost. One of these must surely be the late James Saunders's deeply absurdist play, whose first outing in 1963 launched the career of th…
Family occasions can be fraught affairs, as playwrights from Harold Pinter to Alan Ayckbourn have convincingly proved, but the mother of all family meltdown dramas must be Thomas Vinterberg'…
Journalism is often used to create compelling true-life plays. This drama, written by award-winning actor Nichola McAuliffe, has both a journalistic writing style and a journalist " actually…
