13 stories by "Fred Maynard"
Robert Icke is a clever-clogs, a smarty-pants, a boffin. His Stakhanovite work ethic has established him as the wunderkind of London theatre, churning out his self-penned adaptations of clas…
The radio drama: a form almost entirely lost to history but which at one time commanded audiences of millions, glued to the wireless to listen to whatever classic literary adaptation Welles …
"This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper," reads TS Eliot's line projected onto the wall behind singer Heloïse Werner during this ambitious one-woman meditation…
Good genre parody is harder to get right than it looks. It has to have an intimate familiarity with (and more often than not, palpable affection for) its source conventions, it has to know e…
"I always love it when you hear a siren go by" says father-to-be Kurt as he lies in bed with his pregnant wife, "You always think, 'it's not me'". Yet in this perfectly-pitched domestic dram…
If ever there was a play which adhered to the dictum "show not tell", it is Amadeus, the story of the patron saint of mediocrities, Antonio Salieri, and his battle with God over the unjust d…
Václav Havel was probably the most powerful playwright who ever lived, having the distinction of being the first President of the Czech Republic as well as a heroic dissident and author o…
What a frustrating show. Perhaps frustration is a suitable theme for an opera about the dangers of seeking to satisfy your every desire, but this version of Mozart and Da Ponte's classic is …
This production of Harold Pinter's drawing-room puzzler returns to its spiritual home in the West End after a long time traversing America (originally in rep with Waiting for Godot in 2013) …
In terms of nautical drama the perils of EU fishing quotas are hardly up there with perfect storms or doomed lovers colliding with icebergs, but Smoking Apples have nevertheless carried off …
The intentions in this new musical, a retelling of the Orpheus legend in the form of an 80s rock opera, are no doubt good. The title derives from the age at which Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain …
In 1974 Polish journalist Ryszard KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski travelled to Ethiopia to interview the surviving household of the recently deposed emperor Haile Selassie. His portrait of these ghosts …
Vladimir Putin's intelligence agencies may be trying to influence the American presidential elections, but it must be said that the information war against him has a little more class " if s…
