142 stories by "David Nice"
Never use one word when you can get away with two: that seems to have been the maxim of Eugene O'Neill even in one of his shorter plays. After all, when is an ape not hairy, and why does sto…
With her strong, often fierce features and her convincing simulations of rage, Kate Fleetwood might have been born to play Medea. Unfortunately this isn't Euripides' Medea but Rachel Cusk's …
No doubt this sophisticated bagatelle worked like a charm in the intimate space and woody resonance of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The Duke of York's Theatre is one of the West End's smalle…
Whose Don Juan " progenitor Tirso de Molina's, Molière's or Pushkin's? None of the above. Unless you have a decent knowledge of Ukrainian culture, you won't have heard of Lesya Ukrainka, bo…
You don't know Homer's Iliad until you've heard it read aloud, all 24 books " well, very nearly all - and 16 hours of it, as the oral tradition would have kept it alive at least until the At…
This is the real Greek, bloody-fantastical thing. After the fascinating but flawed attempt to bring Aeschylus's Oresteia into the 21st century, the Almeida has turned to a more tradition-con…
Stop miking Bryn Terfel. Stop over-miking musicals; the show voices in a hybrid cast don't need much. Too much ruined English National Opera's recent Sweeney Todd, and in this Proms adaptati…
Kafka and Jones, the names above this little shop of horrors, would be a marriage made in off-kilter theatreland if the Czech genius had written any plays. He didn't, so Nick Gill has made a…
There are two fundamental ways to fillet the untranslatable poetry and ritual of Aeschylus, most remote of the three ancient Greek tragedians, for a contemporary audience. One is to find a p…
Judge Judy meets The Only Way is Essex: this endlessly resourceful production of Gilbert and Sullivan's first (mini) masterpiece Trial by Jury is one that cries out to appear on the telly. W…
When does a Gilbert and Sullivan chorus make you laugh, cry and cheer as much as any of the famous set pieces? In this case when Major-General Stanley's daughters "climbing over rocky mounta…
Russia isn't the only country where violations of personal freedoms and censorship seem to be mounting by the day, but it's surely the most confused: ask any of the persecutors what they hop…
Vaudeville is alive and well in the Lilliputian gilded cave which might have been made for it (not that Victorian Savoyards could have had any inkling). If you find yourself, like last night…
A journey into dreams through songs from Dowland to The Kinks; a Swiss director who, Covent Garden's Director of Opera Kasper Holten assures us, is "one of the most important European theatr…
Still they keep coming, 35 years on from the London premiere: Sweeneys above pubs, in pie shops, concert halls and theatres of all sizes, on the big screen, Sweeneys with symphony orchestras…
All Savoyards, whether conservative or liberal towards productions, have been grievously practised upon. They told us to expect the first professional London grappling with Gilbert and Sulli…
How can a feisty village dame duetting "lackaday"s with the mounted head of a long-lost, nay, long-dead love be so deuced affecting? Ascribe it partly to the carefully-applied sentiment of G…
"The fantastical should come so close to the real that you must almost believe it", declared Dostoyevsky on Pushkin's masterly ghost story The Queen of Spades. Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota and his …
Ever been stuck in a claustrophobic space with a group of really unpleasant people? Add mayhem, murder and a razor-sharp wit to be found in only a very few of the nastiest individuals, and y…
All that glisters is not gold in the casino and television game-show world of Rupert Goold's American Shakespeare. Nor are all the accents, though working on them only seems to have made a s…
Heritage Shakespeare for the home counties and the tourists is just about alive but not very well at the Royal Shakespeare Company. If that sounds condescending, both audiences deserve bette…
Strange world, isn't it. Yesterday morning, buoyed up by the Royal Opera's impressive Tristan und Isolde, I was listening on CD to Linda Esther Gray, a Wagnerian soprano for the ages, singin…
Not so much a national hero, more a national disgrace. That seems to be the current consensus as Norway moves forward from canonizing the loose-cannon wanderer of Ibsen's early epic Peer Gyn…
Earlier this year two giant puppets, plus a bottom (lower case, human) on wheels, dominated Shakespeare's dream play at the Barbican. Replace the bottom with an ever-present little dog and y…
Ibsen cast a cruel eye on the characters of his most relentlessly symbolic play, wild ducks wounded or domesticated by fate or character. They speak or act unsympathetically, for the most pa…
