322 stories by "John Morrison"
There are some theatre directors who seem to have a better sense of time and space than others. James Macdonald is one of them. He uses the relativity of time and space to conjure exquisite …
Which British theatre director also has a PhD in anthropology and wrote a classic study of spirit mediums and guerrilla fighters in Zimbabwe? The answer is David Lan, for the last 13 years t…
Shakespeare's Globe is a wonderful open air venue for music -- not just the musical accompaniment to Shakespeare's plays which has always been part of the theatrical mix, but potentially for…
When he's good he's very very good. I mean Tennessee Williams, with his soaring dialogue, his larger-than-life characters, and that peculiar recreation of the Old South, a ship of fools fuel…
I can't think of any new play I've enjoyed more this year than this corker by Anya Reiss, the opening work in the National Theatre's all-too-brief Connections festival. My exhilaration after…
Macbeth is the play that introduced me to Shakespeare. I played Fleance, son of Banquo, in a school production 50 years ago. I can't remember very much about it, though one black and white p…
By coincidence I was at Wilton's Music Hall last night, a few hours before they announced a big Heritage Lottery grant to help save their ancient building. Great news for this wonderful atmo…
Finsbury Park is no longer London theatreland's equivalent of Outer Mongolia. The spanking new Park theatre, whose main space seems to be designed to mimic the intimacy of the successful Don…
One of my favourite but rare theatregoing experiences is when an actor incarnates a role so totally that it's impossible to imagine any other actor ever playing the same part. Mark Rylance's…
Does anyone else out there remember Bill Tidy's marvellous northern cartoon strip The Cloggies? It ran for years and years in Private Eye, starting in 1967 -- the year I found myself, a call…
I don't usually blog about plays which are read at Player-Playwrights, the group of actors and writers where I spend my Monday evenings, and of which I'm the current chairman. Most of the ne…
I can't think of an evening I've spent in the theatre where the acting was so good and the play was so terrible. After the 90-minute first half watching Anne-Marie Duff and the other actors …
Lucy Kirkwood's new play at the Almeida is hugely ambitious and well worth seeing. It's had excellent reviews. But for many reasons both the play and the production left me feeling irritated…
This production of an early, little-known Harold Pinter play at Trafalgar Studios is wonderfully funny, brilliantly acted and highlights a strain of comic exuberance that is less prominent i…
My trip last week to see Passion Play at the Duke of York's has set me thinking about the eternal subject of West End ticket prices. I was amazed to see the theatre half empty (okay then, ha…
Peter Nichols' Passion Play is one of three classic plays about adultery among the London intellectual middle classes, dating from the period around 1980. The other two are Tom Stoppard's Th…
When James Graham's play about late 1970s parliamentary shenanigans opened at the Cottesloe last September, I decided to give it a miss. Having finally caught up with it more than six months…
If contemporary artists are going to be arrested for swindling the public by passing off cheap rubbish as art, not many of them are likely to be left at liberty to walk the streets. But luck…
If Nicholas Hytner's decade and a half in charge of the National Theatre is to be remembered by a single show, this is the one to go into the history books. Like Antony and Cleopatra, Othell…
After Tuesday night's Apocalypse Now experience with Beyonce's helicopters drowning out The Tempest, I'm glad to report that on Wednesday there wasn't even a whisper of a helicopter overhead…
Prospero's magic unfortunately doesn't have any effect on helicopters. Last night's performance at Shakespeare's Globe was seriously disrupted by what seemed like a scene from Apocalypse Now…
The National Theatre does lots of different things brilliantly, but pretending to be an edgy innovative fringe venue isn't one of them. A couple of years ago it converted its backstage paint…
This is a classic revival of a classic play by Lindsay Posner, ideally suited to the old-fashioned proscenium arch stage of the Old Vic. I contributed a programme note on the topicality of t…
This was a real curiosity. I'm glad I made the trip to the BFI on the South Bank, where each month they exhume forgotten television programmes of the past half century. At the moment there's…
Declan Donnellan's gift as the veteran director of Cheek By Jowl is usually in subtraction; he shaves down Shakespeare and Chekhov classics to their bare essentials, relying on the actors an…
