204 stories by "Carole Woddis"
It's a strange and perplexing fact that the number of plays about or engaging in some way with the Spanish Civil War could still be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Schizophrenia remains one of the great mental health taboos. With nearly one in five likely to be affected by mental health issues in the UK, schizophrenia is still the one that can cause th…
Searching the soul is what prison allows/forces/impels from some and Oscar Wilde with his talent and genius proceeded to turn his personal suffering into a searing work of art during his inc…
I warmly recommend the upcoming documentary celebrating 50 years of the Roundhouse, and my own audio podcast for the venue's website, recalling my own time working there in the 1970s. Fond m…
Music can move mountains, although for Malcolm X it wasn't moving fast enough. In Kemp Powers pulsating, extraordinarily topical account of four African-American legends meeting one night in…
You begin to run out of superlatives when it comes to Thom Southerland and Danielle Tarento's touch with small scale musicals. Having seen three of their previous ones at Southwark Playhouse…
Told partly in text but also sung through accompanied by marimbas, drums and any other vocal sound required made by the 25 piece ensemble, A Man of Good Hope is a model of economy yet full b…
Her music roots stretch back a long way, not just through a female line that touches hands with Billie Holliday and before her, Bessie Smith Continue reading...
Oh, how the mighty are fallen. Margaret Alexander (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is a storefront pastor in Harlem who leads her flock with absolutist conviction. No drinking, no smoking - the way …
What kind of legacy will the Blair years lave on ordinary people? Some predictable answers but also some unexpected, haunting personal accounts emerge in a drama inspired by the spectacularl…
What must it be like to lose a child to random violence? The great Irish dramatist Frank McGuinness, who has tackled mythic violence on a number of occasions in previous work, has now delive…
"And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind." So speaks King Lear towards the end of his monumental journey of self-knowledge that has taken the mad monarch from the highest to…
"Half-caste" and "mixed race" are terms that excite strong emotions. Are you black, are you white? Where do you belong? To whom do you owe your loyalties when the chips are down?read more
The walls of the staircase to the Finborough Theatre off the Earls Court Road are lined with framed awards. Downstairs for the umpteenth time, the café/restaurant has gone bust. But no othe…
It's like waiting for a number 19 bus. You hang around for half an hour then two come along at once. So it is just now with plays either written by women or featuring women's lives. While Am…
If you have any young siblings, friends or relatives in need of burning off a little energy, send them directly to BAC. With their open-hearted style of rough, circusy-type theatre, Kneehigh…
Given the present Middle East uproar, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that contemporary versions of The 1001 Arabian Nights are sprouting everywhere. With their variety of storie…
Banking and the financial world may have gone into free-fall, but there are still killings to be made. Particularly personal ones. Nicholas Pierpan's You Can Still Make a Killing is a faintl…
"Our Country's Good, a play that proclaimed the power and enduring worth of theatre and that celebrated its centrality to our lives, was of importance in the third term of a government which…
It's brave to take Shakespeare into the West End in midsummer " and in this of all summers. Greg Doran's all-black, African Caesar certainly doesn't lack for impact, colour, zest, urgency. I…
At the end of The Riots, the Tricycle Theatre's verbatim response to last year's upheavals edited by Gillian Slovo and Cressida Brown, a local Muslim whose home was burnt down in Tottenham w…
Four people walked out of Filter's A Midsummer Night's Dream last night. The rest stayed to cheer an hour and 20 minutes of fast and furious filleted Shakespeare from a company which has mad…
The Old Vic Tunnels would seem to be the perfect place to set three of Eugene O'Neill's three earliest plays about the sea, drenched as they are in the stench of life in the heavy engine roo…
Nick Payne has already made quite a mark. In 2009 he won the George Devine award for Most Promising Playwright with the intriguingly entitled If There Is I Haven't Found it Yet at the Bush. …
W. C. Fields once famously cautioned against working with children or animals. He might very well have gone crazy had he been involved with the RSC's hit musical production, Matilda, which s…
