878 stories by "Ian Foster"
The show has slimmed down its personnel from four to two, Helena Blackman and Daniel Boys taking up the singing duties, with third generation songwriter Robert J Sherman stepping in once aga…
I'm not one to blow my trumpet too much, honestly, but it was nice to discover that my blog has been named one of Feedspot's Top 50 Drama Blogs and Websites.
As somebody who grew up on the outskirts of a depressed Lancashire town in the 1980s, I wasn't quite sure what to expect from the Royal Court's revival of Jim Cartwright's seminal debut play…
Cradeaux Alexander's Funeral Meats is a more oblique piece than Coming Clean, set in the aftermath of a funeral where the remnants of the wake come together and clash.
It is rare that I feel so completely out of kilter with the general reception for a show to the extent that I did with Groundhog Day.
In terms of recent gay history, Coming Clean is instantly dated as a pre-AIDS play but its emotional world is one that still resonates strongly.
"It's not just about the soundIt's about the eventA radical change in the state of things"Though the quote above is taken from the play boom, it could also be about the epithet 'fag' which i…
"I should warn you that nobody likes me"Truth be told, I resisted seeing Ink for the longest time, mainly because I had zero desire to see a play about Rupert Murdoch. I feel the same way ab…
Not every performer is able to ascend these heady heights, but it gives me enormous pleasure to report that Josefina Gabrielle delivers one of those utterly transcendent moments with a nigh-…
"What's new, Buenos Aires?"As the 'new' is ushered out of the Phoenix, set to tour the UK from next summer, there's a return to the tried and tested, the old if you will, as Evita returns to…
After premiering at the Curve Theatre in 2015, Pippa Cleary and Jake Brunger's musical adaptation of Sue Townsend's tale of Leicester's most famous teenager has undergone its own version of …
You go away for a week, hoping they'll put any exciting news on hold but no, there were headlines aplenty...
Michelle Terry being revealed as Emma Rice's successor as Artistic Director of t…
Set at the turn of the previous century in the unforgiving rural landscape of Cumbria, The Hired Man himself is the hard-working John Tallentire, a man who will turn to any aspect of working…
It's a busy play, packed full of sorrow and soul, rueful realism and tentative hope, and is blessed by a crack cast filled with the likes of Ciarán Hinds, Shirley Henderson, Ron Cook, Deb…
There's certainly the attempt to raise the temperature - Andrews has his leads Jack O'Connell and Sienna Miller in various states of undress for large swathes of the play - but for all the s…
Though my life has long been filled with musicals, Fiddler on the Roof has never been the one. I've only ever seen it the once (2013's touring version) and though I quite enjoyed it then, I …
The House They Grew Up In is a difficult play to watch though, a drama focused on reclusive siblings Daniel and Peppy whose hermit-like existence in their South-East London home sees them su…
Completed shortly before his death in 2014, Kevin Elyot's Twilight Song now belatedly receives its premiere courtesy of the Park Theatre. The play doesn't emerge as one of his strongest thou…
I want to be able to resist anything to do with Alan Ayckbourn but the cast and creatives for Chichester's production of The Norman Conquests is making it very hard indeed. Wunderkind direct…
I only booked for Dessert at the Southwark Playhouse because of the extraordinary Alexandra Gilbreath, one of our finest - and somewhat unheralded - actors.
It feels important to recognise what the NT (and the Old Vic) were trying to achieve, though. Queer Theatre looked "at how theatre has charted the LGBT+ experience through a series of rehear…
Sasha Regan's high-spirited, fun-loving production has a wonderfully playful energy about it, and the cast are clearly having a whale of a time, but it isn't too hard to see why the show has…
Mae West wrote The Drag in 1927 where its frankness about gay lives (and once again, drag ball culture!) scandalised its out-of-town Connecticut and New Jersey audiences so that it never mad…
Harrowing is barely the word to describe this dramatisation of the way in which the Nazis persecuted gay men in Germany before and during World War II.
Following the lives of four gay couples and told predominantly in duologues, it had the slight sense of yet another version of La Ronde as established pairings disintegrate and new ones refo…
