118 stories by "Jasper Rees"
Saying goodbye to the actor famous for saying hello
Leslie Phillips would have known for half a century that at his death, which was announced yesterday, the obituaries would lead with one t…
An interview with the novelist the morning after she won the Man Booker Prize for the first time
Hilary Mantel, who has died at the age of 70, was a maker of literary history. Wolf Hall, …
The theatre troupe created art in secret under the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko but went into exile after their latest encounter with the Belarusian KGB. They talk to Jasper Rees abo…
Remembering the brilliant actor knight who revealed himself both on stage and in pioneering performance diaries
The energy of Antony Sher, who has died at the age of 72, was prodigious. He n…
The school friend who commissioned, directed and acted in Pinter's first play
Henry Woolf's place in the theatre history is small but significant, a bit like Woolf was himself. Until his dea…
Three encounters with the great actor who has died at the age of 52
Each generation is given one actress who can do everything and is loved by all. There was Judi Dench, and then there was I…
A memorial interview with the playwright and scriptwriter who enjoyed a remarkable Indian summer
Ronald Harwood, who has died at the age of 85, was best known for his play about tending to t…
From King Lear to Bilbo Baggins - remembering the great film actor who vanquished stage fright
Ian Holm was once in his local cinema on High Street Kensington, enquiring at the ticket office…
Remembering the AIDS activist who wrote The Normal Heart and the screenplay for Women in Love
Larry Kramer, who has died at the age of 84, was the Solzhenitsyn of AIDS who indomitably report…
The story of Touching the Void has been told and retold. Its author explores its appeal
In Peru in 1985, Joe Simpson - then 25 - and his 21-year-old climbing partner Simon Yates were descend…
Recalling a two-day audience at the home of the great maestro, who has died aged 96
"I am amazed to be still alive. Two hours of medieval torment." Franco Zeffirelli - who has died at the ag…
The RSC's stage version reaches the West End, while Terry Gilliam's film is stuck in a legal vortexIt's a story of a mad old man who imagines himself to be a knight errant. On his …
The vampish comic actress has died at 90 not long after receiving an MBEFenella Fielding - "one of the finest female impersonators in the business," joked Eric Morecambe " has died at the ag…
The great technician of stage comedy, who has died at 91, recalls writing the likes of Sweet Charity and The Odd Couple Asked to nominate the most important playwright in America since the w…
A celebration of the Northern Irish stage craftsman whose play Aristocrats is revived at the Donmar Warehouse Brian Friel, who died in 2015 at the age of 86, was a shy man who shunned interv…
The director staging Brian Friel's Translations at the National talks about Ireland, England and the changing face of theatreIan Rickson's route into theatre was not conventional. Growi…
THEARTSDESK IN MINSK Feasting with the remarkable Belarus Free TheatreThe renowned underground theatre company confronts the past and present at home and abroadBudzma! (Cheers!) At a long, f…
Is Katori Hall (b. 1981) the embodiment of Martin Luther King's dream? She was born in Memphis, the city where King died. The Mountaintop, her play about his last night alive, had its world …
"I've always thought there's nothing worse than coming to the end of your life and realising that you haven't participated in it, and so I write about people who've done that to a certain ex…
Joe Penhall first thwacked his way to the attention of British theatregoers more than 20 years ago with a series of plays about schizos and psychos and wackos. An iconoclastic laureate of li…
In his last minutes as the artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe, Dominic Dromgoole took to the stage to reflect on his years at the helm. Behind him was the cast of Hamlet, home after tw…
Of all the dramas with the name Arnold Wesker attached to them, the most absorbing ran as long as The Mousetrap, but offstage rather than on. It was in the style of a remorselessly black far…
Patrick Barlow's last play was parked in the West End for nine years. The 39 Steps finally closed this autumn, but not before travelling all over the world, most prestigiously to Broadway bu…
It's not easy to see the pattern in Roger Michell's career. More than most British directors, he has zigzagged between the stage and the screen. He was the one who first rehearsed such conte…
Brian Friel, who has died at the age of 86, was a shy man who shunned interviews, keeping his powder dry for the work and shrouding his personal life in mystique. Not that he never opened hi…
