It was the worst of theatre, it was the best of theatre. This cycle of Chekhov’s first three plays (Platonov — heavily edited and adapted; Ivanov; and The Seagull), in new “…
I’ve spent a good deal of time and energy writing about why Brian Vickers’s The One King Lear is such a terribly misguided book — both in an almost endless string of tweets…
I wasn’t too impressed with Maria Aberg’s production of Webster’s The White Devil at the RSC two years ago, and I went into this Faustus expecting more of the same: a moder…
A quick one, in between shows: Compared to the theatre I’ve seen in London over the past two or three years, the four shows I saw in Stratford this week have been seriously, depressing…
This will be short. You walk into the Swan. It might as well be the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. There’s smoke in the air and lots of candles, and soon a bunch of people in Jacobean outfit…
I’ll be seeing a lot of theatre over the next two weeks, and I’m badly out of practice in writing about shows — it’s been almost a year since I last did a proper revi…
Three weeks ago I had what seemed like a fun idea at the time: I’d live-tweet a steady stream of my responses to Brian Vickers’s — sorry: Sir Brian Vickers’s &…
I suspect that my generation of theatre historians will look back on this day as a game changing moment: the Curtain has been dug up in Shoreditch, and it’s nothing like what we expect…
I wrote this rather grumpy short paper for a roundtable on “Pedagogical Shakespeare: Text, Performance, and Digitalization,” organized by Bradin Cormack and Elizabeth Harvey at t…
This autumn, I directed a show. It’s something I’ve wanted to do again for a long time — there was a period in my life when I thought I wanted to be a director, and when I …
I saw the second preview of this, so held off posting until after it had opened (and what follows are my off-the-cuff responses jotted down right after I saw the show and not really reconsid…
I should have hated this Medea. After all, I was massively annoyed by the National Theatre production last year, not just because of Ben Power’s pedestrian adaptation, but mostly becau…
A set reminiscent of the dilapidated stately home that Alex Eales designed for Katie Mitchell’s Alles Weitere Kennen Sie aus den Kino in Hamburg, except more vast: its wide stretch fil…
Very quick & short off-the-cuff review. Patrick Marber’s adaptation of Turgenev’s play (directed by Marber himself) is slick, smooth, professional, superficial, and extremel…
You have the best arts coverage of all our Canadian newspapers. You have some excellent reporters. During this election campaign, you published a number of serious, well-considered, forceful…
I was born in West Germany. In my late teens, after the collapse of the GDR and the reunification of the two Germanies I’d grown up with, I spent much of my spare time organizing prote…
Tim Carroll has been appointed as the new Artistic Director of the Shaw Festival. When the news was announced last week, my instant reaction was that “this may be the weirdest and most…
This is the most self-serving of posts. This week, the new third edition of the Norton Shakespeare finally came out. It’s a total overhaul of this widely used text: unlike the first t…
Things that don’t happen as often as I would like: seeing shows in Toronto that assure me that theatre remains a vital art form here; seeing shows that only make sense as theatre, and …
I have been trying to figure out and describe what exactly is so special about German theatre. In some ways, especially from the perspective of the English-speaking theatre world, it may see…
Jette Steckel’s production of Arthur Schnitzler’s Das Weite Land at the Deutsche Theater makes no efforts to reinvent much of anything. It’s a very well done, moderately in…
An empty stage, sliced diagonally in half by dolly tracks running from downstage right to upstage left; on those tracks, a grand piano on a cart, equipped with a microphone for the player. T…
I should be writing about the two Woyzecks I've seen this week, and about Karin Henkel's fantastic John Gabriel Borkmann. But the other thing I've been watching, other than plays, is Q&…
(Off the cuff and short.) My evening in the Volksbuehne: Frank Castorf directing The Master Builder. 4 hours of Ibsen. Well. 4 hours of Ibsen and a lot of other stuff. 4 hours of nine life-s…
Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater, under the new artistic leadership that took charge last season, has quite aggressively redefined itself as what they call a post-migrant theatre — b…