94 stories by "Alexandra Coghlan"
The RSC's Twelfth Night dumps its audience unceremoniously onto the shores of Ilyria in the thump and beat of waves. While Viola struggles from the (very deep and very real) water, asking "W…
A comedy of alienation, estrangement, and magical metamorphosis " if ever there was a Shakespeare play made for the linguistic transfigurations of the Globe to Globe season it's A Midsummer …
"It's easy for me to talk to you; we don't know each other". Robert Holman's Making Noise Quietly is a work that, like its title, lives in the delicate push-pull of contradiction: intimate s…
A play of boundaries, limitations, barriers, one that gazes outwards while never crossing the threshold, Uncle Vanya is often betrayed by the physical space of major stagings. In a new produ…
Since their launch just two years ago, National Theatre Wales has staged plays on a firing range, in a miner's institute, and " most memorably " claimed the whole town of Port Talbot as thei…
"Winsome" isn't a word you hear very often these days. The taint of coy, simpering campery already hung about it in the 1920s when Noel Coward gave it a starring role in the after-dinner wor…
Another week, another tragedy, and another wedding dance routine set to a thumping soundtrack. But while The Changeling buckled under the pressure Joe Hill-Gibbins applied at the Young Vic a…
Half-term may be nearly over for many, but there is no shortage of children's theatre on offer in London at the moment. Long-running family favourites including Shrek the Musical and The Lio…
Drum rolls, fiddles and flutes were all in action last night at the Donmar Warehouse to herald the beginning of an era. After ten successful years under the direction of Michael Grandage, it…
The murder drama is a staple of television schedules. And for every Miss Marple or Rosemary and Thyme there are many more trickling from the Lynda La Plante vein, whose currency of gore, hor…
Alan Bennett's The Madness of George III has enjoyed something of a royal progress around England over the past year. Touring in Christopher Luscombe's slick production for the Peter Hall Co…
Of all the 20th century's literary dystopias George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four has proved most tenacious, epitomised by its sinister promise: "Big Brother is watching you". But what happe…
That a tale confronting society's most pernicious evils, giving poverty a human face and desperation a voice, should become a cornerstone of the British festive experience is perhaps unexpec…
A recent newspaper article championed the topicality of Richard II, laboriously rewriting it from camp conservatism to a politically current meditation on the "sad stories" we still tell of …
There comes a point in a writer's life when he " it's usually a he " stops writing about life and starts writing about writing. With Ibsen this stage arrived in the self-reflexive rage and u…
Many dramatists have taken their turn putting faces to Thoreau's lives of "quiet desperation". But the challenge in what Thoreau goes on to conclude " that it is therefore a mark of wisdom a…
The short story is a virtuoso form " the guest at the literary party who drops in for the merest of moments, scintillating and fascinating all before withdrawing with calculated aplomb, leav…
It's not like we're short of operas. Thousands of works spanning over 400 years make up the western operatic repertoire. Of these maybe 100 get a regular airing in contemporary opera houses,…
It's not every evening one is invited to take A Dish of Tea with Dr Johnson, and the 90 minutes spent in the company of England's greatest wit and original lexicographer pass in a whirl of a…
