94 stories by "Alexandra Coghlan"
Pericles is a play of voyages. Lands and landscapes crowd in, one after the other " Tyre, Tarsus, Ephesus, Antioch, Mitylene " until our dramatic sea-legs are decidedly unsteady. The d…
Jessica Swale's Thomas Tallis is the first new play commissioned for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse " the beginning, hopefully, of the same relationship the Globe itself has always had with new…
Rosalind's "working-day world" takes an unexpectedly literal turn in Polly Findlay's sparky new As You Like It for the National Theatre. An opening sequence, set in a windowless trading floo…
Remember back when David Hare was left-wing? I'm not sure that he does.read more
It's a pleasing serendipity that while Martin McDonagh's clamorously anticipated Hangmen opened at the Royal Court last night, just a little further west TS Eliot's The Cocktail Party should…
Last February, director Sally Cookson shrunk Charlotte Brontë's 400-page novel Jane Eyre down to a four-and-a-half-hour play spread across two nights at the Bristol Old Vic. Now, as this …
The political wheel has turned full-circle. When Our Country's Good was premiered in 1988, it was a barely-veiled protest against Thatcher's slash-and-burn approach to the arts in general an…
If Simon McBurney's Measure for Measure for the National Theatre and Declan Donnellan's recent Cheek By Jowl production mined deep for darkness, Dominic Dromgoole's for the Globe is content …
Geoffrey Rush has done it, Gyles Brandreth has done it, Stephen Fry came close to doing it, and now David Suchet is giving it a go " donning drag and a perpetually disgusted expression to pl…
Between Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and Everyman It was beginning to look like we were never going to get a proper, uncomplicated laugh in Rufus Norris's National Theatre. Thank goodnes…
There's a certainty, a reassurance that comes with attending a Globe show. You know that however bad things get, however bloodied the stage at final curtain, however bruised the relationship…
How do you take your rom-coms? Full-fat Hollywood schmaltz, Shakespearean, or lean and elegant " a Stoppard perhaps, or Noël Coward? If your answer did not include "With lashings of socia…
Farinelli and The King is pretty much a perfect piece of theatre. More importantly, though, it's perfectly timed. In a month when English National Opera's troubles have made the front page, …
When the Orange Tree Theatre lost all its Arts Council Funding earlier this year it was hard to get too outraged. An institution that has made a niche in giving the good folk of Richmond exa…
British theatre company 1927 celebrate their 10th birthday next year. Over this nearly-decade they have produced just three shows (plus a reimagining of The Magic Flute for Berlin's Komische…
Is the Rose Playhouse London theatre's best-kept secret? Or simply its worst-publicised? Either way, this gem of a space, tucked away behind the Globe in Bankside, needs and deserves a great…
So TFL have banned the Globe's posters for 'Tis Pity She's A Whore for being too racy. What a gift. They couldn't have given the production a better advertising boost if they'd covered every…
It's hard to believe that almost two years have passed since Phyllida Lloyd's Julius Caesar at the Donmar Warehouse. Harriet Walter's stricken face as the play ended is still burningly fresh…
"Comedy, and a bit with a dog". That's what audiences really want according to the hapless would-be-impresario Mr Henslowe, and that's certainly what they get in Lee Hall's new stage adaptat…
The posters all over the Underground scream Richard Armitage. As far as they are concerned The Crucible is the finest one-man-show since Clarence Darrow. But what we get in performance is so…
"If we go to the theatre, it's because we want to be surprised, even amazed." Peter Brook's programme note for The Valley of Astonishment stresses emotion and sensation above all things. How…
Lucy Bailey's Titus Andronicus doesn't pull any punches (or stabbings, smotherings and throat-slittings, for that matter). Bursting into a Globe smoky with incense with shouts and drums, for…
Plotted on the Nunn Curve of Fatal Attraction to Flare Path, Sir Trevor's latest West End outing " Noël Coward's post-war comedy Relative Values " lands solidly in the upper-middle reache…
I hadn't heard the term "cultural cringe" until I went to live in Australia. Holiday encounters had been so full of sunshine, art, water and music that it hadn't occurred to me to doubt the …
A candlelit theatre is one thing. A theatre when those candles are so close you could lean in and blow them out, where a good line sets them flickering in gusts of audience laughter is quite…
