94 stories by "Alexandra Coghlan"
The Anatomy of Melancholy (or to give it it's full title - The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Main…
Unlikely subjects can make for great musicals. (Assassins, anyone?) Just as great subjects can make for terrible ones (the Broadway Breakfast at Tiffany's comes to mind). Sadly Andrew Lloyd …
Adapt a Jane Austen novel for the stage and you have a generous handful of characters and a selection of drawing rooms in which to put them. Adapt a George Eliot novel and you're faced with …
"What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?" Surely never before has Benedick's opening quip cut so close to the literal, nor drawn such a laugh from its audience. With a combined age o…
It's a nothing of a line " "Hail mortal" " spoken by nobody important, but in Michael Grandage's A Midsummer Night's Dream it becomes the basis for an entire concept. A trivial bit of lingui…
Over in Southwark you can currently find Rodgers and Hammerstein exploring the seamier side of life among the prostitutes and drop-outs of Pipe Dream, but in the woody amphitheatre of the Re…
Midsummer's Eve may still be a month away and the evenings more bracing than balmy, but despite a serious chill still in the air the Globe Theatre yesterday proved yet again that it exists i…
A thunder sheet booms, a didgeridoo hums distantly, a model ship rears and pitches its way forward through the waves of groundlings and suddenly we find ourselves washed up on the shores of …
Although overwhelmingly remembered now as a novelist, Somerset Maugham was best known during his lifetime as a playwright. "England's Dramatist", as the newspapers christened him, produced m…
His recent film adaptation of Anna Karenina framed the action of Tolstoy's novel in a theatre, so it seems only natural that director Joe Wright should follow it up with a return to the stag…
"I have nothing to say, and I am saying it. And that is poetry." Originally delivered by John Cage at an artists' club in New York in 1949, the composer's Lecture On Nothing went on to becom…
You don't so much watch a Robert Lepage show as surrender to it, and his latest project sees Canada's most innovative theatre-maker in full assault. It's hard to think of another director wh…
There's nothing novel about novel-adaptations on stage. We've seen every classic from Pride and Prejudice to Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Woman in White (and The Woman in Black) get the fu…
"How I do love a steely sting in my fairytale ending" croons Meow Meow, eyes glinting even more brilliantly than her eyeshadow. When she says "sting" a whole army of scorpions couldn't equal…
"You don't put yourself into what you write, you find yourself there." It's a maxim that has guided a writing career that, insect-like, has made itself at home among the lived detritus of au…
There's no ignoring gender in Julius Caesar. Whether it's Portia's "I grant I am a woman" speech, an enfeebled Caesar likened to a "sick girl", or Cassius raging against oppression " "our yo…
Something new is happening in the West End. Just up the road from Thriller and down a bit from Les Misérables a billboard the colour of weak tea (positively consumptive compared to the full…
1866 was a crucial watershed in Henrik Ibsen's writing career. As a man he may have come of age some 20 years earlier, but it was only at almost 40 that his writing attained brooding, bearde…
As long as Simon Callow is around, London's theatre scene will never be short of one-man shows, nor of Shakespeare. A new pretender to the Shakespearian throne, a rival for the hollow crown …
Hedda Gabler " the doomy tragedy, the one with the pistol, the "female Hamlet". We all know the score when it comes to Ibsen. All, that is, except apparently for Sheridan Smith, who recently…
When Complicite conceived their beautiful A Disappearing Number they gave maths energy, drama, and above all watchability, but they never quite brought the heart. In Simon Stephens's new ada…
"Would you enforce me to a world of cares?", croons Rylance's Richard III, lingering tremulously over his question, the picture of world-sick piety and reluctance. As the groundling ch…
"Of all the anti-social vested interests the worst is the vested interest in ill-health." The Preface on Doctors that precedes George Bernard Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma finds the writer at …
Before Ibsen was, well, Ibsen, he had a successful career as a failed playwright. Producing works on a spectrum between unremarkable and outright bad, he muddled his way through to his late …
The front door of Ibsen's A Doll's House may first have slammed shut in 1879, but it's a sound whose echoes and re-echoes continue to resonate. The crash of feminist selfhood, bursting throu…
