Victoria's Malthouse Theatre and Black Swan Theatre's joint production of Picnic at Hanging Rock does have its moments of scariness and there are fine, spirited performances from its quintet…
Told by an Idiot's stage adaptation of Simon Leys' acclaimed counter to the-great-man-of-history novella The Death of Napoleon though asks the useful question that gels nicely with the commo…
An interesting corrective to those soft-focus romantic images of rural equanimity, in the end, Gundog doesn't quite come off. But, like grandad's homily to his family, Longman too has bravel…
The second of a brace of plays running in rep at the Southwark Playhouse, Russian writing star, Mikhai Durnenkov's The War Has Not Yet Started " featuring Mark Quartley, Sarah Hadland and Ha…
With the demise of the repertory system, it is the fringe and alternative theatre that has stealthily and often in unrecognised ways provided the apprenticeship and forcing house in recent y…
Seiriol Davies's How to Win Against History is not quite like anything I've ever seen before. But then again, it is. A pastiche, a satire, a brilliant piece of aesthetic campery on a par wit…
Something very exciting is happening in small-scale opera. This is the third one I've seen in as many months, all striking in their own ways but Eugene Onegin is by far the most enjoyable.
This was a labour of love, Selina Cadell and Eliza Thompson's inaugural production for their newly formed OperaGlass Works for which they raised all the funds, a cool £145,000.
What with the BBC's Gunpowder Plot and now Anders Lustgarten's spymaster drama, we really seem unable to quite slough off our fascination with those grisly times when terrorism came in Catho…
Stewart Pringle's Harry and Denise fortuitously keep meeting over the trestle table in the local village hall rented out for evening classes and meetings. Harry is one of the backbone-of-the…
Whoever decided to revive Chayefsky's film via a stage production made an astute choice. Network could hardly be more topical or timely in an era that has become infamous for false truths, '…
With Kathy Burke's imprimatur attached as director, my expectations were high for Sam Bain's The Retreat although everything else about the writer was unknown to me.
Coriolanus may not be the most frequently staged of Shakespeare's political Roman dramas although it nearly always gets included when a series of them are run together as here with the lates…
There is something exquisitely philosophical and European about Lot Vekemans' approach, at once logical and precise as she moves her two-hander from a point of unresolved conflict and outrig…
Devil You Know theatre company director Paul Tomlinson describes his setting as 'post apocalyptic' and certainly Peckham's Bussey building lends itself to such a concept.
Some of the most viscerally shattering productions I've seen in recent years have turned up at the tiny Gate Theatre, Notting Hill. Magali Mougel's Suzy Storck is no exception.
What extraordinary actors the Russians produce and what a revelation is this newly filmed version by Moscow's Satirikon Theatre uncomfortable, disturbing, unsettling though it also is.
When I read that Anything that Flies was her debut play by writer, Judith Burnley, I naturally assumed it was a young playwright being given a big chance by Jermyn Street's new artistic dire…
Raizada's dialogue is unflinching in the way she captures speech that symbiotically interweaves between everyday conversations and those portrayed on TV as if both were entwined and feeding …
It's all elegantly if slightly laboriously done in studied anachronistic style, delivered facing out to the audience as if emphasising precisely its decorative home.
Rupert Goold's previous, James Graham's Ink, went on to enjoy its present run in the West End. For sheer entertainment value, I'll be amazed if Mike Bartlett's stirring eulogy for a disappea…
The grounding comes in Kwame Kwei-Armah's decision to transplant the play to 1950s Caribbean and in the casting of Nikki Amuka-Bird as Doctor Wangel's second wife, Ellida giving her racial d…
Simon Stephens' version makes no bones about how an obsession for fame can lead to ruin, hell and damnation or all three. Adelayo Adedayo's Nina is burning to be a 'celebrity', idolising Nic…
Whereas Heisenberg celebrates taking a chance on love, even in one's dotage, Beginning seems, sotto voce, to be saying something interesting about class.
You win some, you lose some. Sometimes 'forgotten gems' are cast aside for good reason. Fashion, sensibilities, history " always changing.