Ryan Calais Cameron does it again: he portrays the male black British experience with joy as well as pain.
When do you have to take a stand? What compels you to do it? And what are the costs involved? These questions, which not only reflect the desire to protest against injustice in our increasin…
In 1987, Caryl Churchill " without doubt the best living playwright in Britain " premiered her Serious Money, a satire on financial capitalism written in the form of a scintillating Restorat…
You can't keep a great playwright down. Ron Hutchinson, whose award-winning stage plays, such as Rat in the Skull (1984) and Moonlight and Magnolias (2005), are contemporary classics, has be…
When theatres closed during the pandemic, the first reaction was shock. Then was born, at least among the more progressive spirits in the theatre community, a desire to build back better. To…
Ruth Wilson delivers an acting masterclass in Jean Cocteau modernist classic adapted by Ivo van Hove.
Is there really such a thing as an unmissable show? Depends on your taste of course, but for sheer hype this event takes some beating: two-time Olivier Award-winning star Ruth Wilson (last s…
Mike Bartlett's Cock invites suggestive comments, but the main thing about the play is that it has proved to be a magnet for star casting.
Football stories are never just about a game " they are also about life and how to live it. In Tyrell Williams's Red Pitch, his debut play now getting an enthusiastically energetic stagin…
Let's start with stereotypes: British theater is naturalistic, down-to-earth and explains everything clearly to the audience; Continental drama is absurdist, abstract and suggests rather tha…
Feel the love as great staging enlivens this well-written monologue about a cross-generational relationship.
Effortlessly and energetically entertaining: Tyrell Williams' debut play about football and gentrification is pitch-perfect.
Florian Zeller's superbly anti-naturalistic play is a philosophical puzzle that dissects our existential solitude.
Bizarre, beautiful and breathtaking - time-travelling fantasia boasts a brilliant staging and a spoof playtext essay.
Peggy Ramsay is a theater legend. Around the time of her death in 1991, the Australian-born agent was honored with a meticulous biography by Colin Chambers and a personal memoir by Simon Cal…
Bizarre. Breathtaking. Beautiful. I leave the Royal Court theatre with these Bs, as well as others such as bewitching and beguiling, buzzing in my mind. Alistair McDowall, whose previous lef…
History is a prison. Often, you can't escape. It imprints its mark on people, environments and language. And nowhere is this more true that in Northern Ireland, where the long history of con…
History is a prison. Often, you can't escape. It imprints its mark on people, environments and language. And nowhere is this more true that in Northern Ireland.
The National Theatre has a good record in staging classic American drama by black playwrights. James Baldwin's The Amen Corner, August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and Lorraine Hansberr…
It's a sign of the times that one of my last trips of the year, to Ella Road's Fair Play at the Bush Theatre, was cancelled because of COVID. Not that much of a surprise really: it's o…
At the end of the 1960s, American soul poet Gil Scott-Heron said that the revolution will not be televised. Maybe that's right, but a lot of other things were being broadcast in that decade,…
A couple of days ago, I watched a live stream of Milk and Gall, an American-based playwright and screenwriter Mathilde Dratwa's new play at Theatre 503. Set in a Brooklyn apartment, the plot…
Is the Bosnian conflict of 1992"95 the war that Europe forgot? Maybe, although most fans of new writing for the British stage will remember its massacres as the inciting incident for Sarah K…
James Graham's latest history play has an eye on the present but a messy staging.
After lockdown, the stage monologue saved British theatre. At venue after venue, cash-strapped companies put single actors into simple playing spaces to deliver good stories for audiences th…