70 stories by "Daniel Harrison"
Disgraced is a hugely academic and content-heavy piece. At times it feels a little like a university seminar, as concepts and theories as far-ranging as Orientalism, Cultural Appropriation, …
Every so often, perhaps once in a generation, an actor can seem to have been born to play a role. Sir Laurence Olivier as Richard III, for instance. In The Hothouse, on now at Trafalgar Stud…
It took me a while to warm to Maria Friedman's production of Merrily We Roll Along. At first I didn't quite get it. I was bemused rather than enthralled, as song after song appeared to fall …
“It smells of hairspray and farts”, snarled the man next to me in the, admittedly airless, basement of the Leicester Square Theatre. This tells you all you need to know about the…
Young theatrical talent is a very delicate thing. Up-and-coming writers, directors and performers need to be nurtured, supported and encouraged by those who have already cut their teeth in t…
Rodney Ackland's Before The Party, a play about a family painfully attempting to maintain their veneer of upper-middle class respectability, was a real hit when it debuted at St. Martin's Th…
Whilst I may never have heard the name Charles Castronovo before last night, the Italian-American tenor is famous in the world of opera, and so it is a real coup for the intimate King's Head…
There are many off-West End venues that do their upmost to support and nurture up-and-coming theatrical and artistic talent. See the work of the Young Vic or Unicorn theatres, or Battersea A…
Being a student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama is a very prestigious thing indeed. The seemingly endless roll-call of talent that has graduated from Silk Street and gone on to ma…
I recently wrote an article entitled In Defence of The Arts, in which I set out to deconstruct the fundamentally flawed logic behind the idea that cutting back arts funding would be a “…
Old Saw at the Little Angel Theatre as part of Firsts Festival
It's not easy to describe or review immersive theatre pieces, such as this one currently being offered by StampCollective at the Theatre Delicatessen, Marylebone. Comparisons to previous wor…
The first time I saw Barrie Keeffe's excellent play SUS was in the Young Vic's Clare Studio space in 2010. I was immediately struck by the power and poignancy of Keeffe's seminal work; this …
It's not often that I venture into the commercial West End. I prefer to seek solace in London's diverse 'Offies', where you don't have to remortgage your house in order to pay for a programm…
Police interrogation room-based theatre pieces are always going to be tense and gripping affairs. Think SUS, Barrie Keeffe's excellent play based on racist stop-and-search laws in 1980s Brit…
It is inevitable that Coalition will be compared to political comedy powerhouse The Thick Of It. This, unfortunately, does Coalition no favours. Where TTOI is strident and brutal in its deco…
In this age of austerity, it is very easy to take a sniffy and dismissive attitude to the arts. “Why save a theatre when you can save a hospital?” appears to be the popular disco…
Sometimes, not often, it is the duty of a theatre reviewer to sit back and say little more than, “That was incredible”. Paper Cinema's Odyssey is a piece of sheer beauty; at time…
Is Mark Giesser the Joan Littlewood of our time? Certainly, if his new play Good Morning, Alamo! is anything to go by. Even the use of an exclamation mark in the title suggests that this is …
I went in to Cross Purpose embarrassingly unfamiliar with the work of French playwright and philosopher Albert Camus, and came out understanding even less. This production is possibly unique…
