696 stories by "Libby Purves"
A SERIOUS, DARK-TONED MORALITY The court is ancient, formal, superstitious. Hunched and huddled figures, anonymously poor, scuttle aside for the courtiers to assemble. When the…
A RARITY, AND A TOPICAL TREAT It's an American story and a universal one: choose money and status, or idealistic service? Big business or big heart, slick city or smalltown val…
KENNETH BRANAGH IS NO KEN DODD… If you find yourself in an audience of maturer years , flee quickly at the final curtain, or someone will creakingly inform you that they …
MINCHIN MAGIC. Â ONE TO SEE AGAIN. AND AGAIN. The film by Danny Rubin gave us the expression for eternal déja-vu: Bill Murray played Phil the arrogant celebrity weatherman, …
A TREMENDOUS TRINITY Â Â This trilogy, transferred from Chichester is an epic: a thrilling voyage through time to the earliest days of Anton Chekhov. And, if it is not too philis…
A CAUTIONARY TALE FOR ALL TIMES AND NATIONS… "Allow for a three-gin recovery period" advised a tweeter, during the previews of Simon Stone's take on this perennial theme of baby…
GUEST CRITIC LUKE JONES LIKES LOTT A LOT… It's easy to get worked up by celebrities and big names crowding out the talented-but-unknown usuals. 'They're just there to get…
FLASH BANG WALLOP.. This 1963 show – based loosely on H.G.Wells' semiautobiographical KIPPS – was originally a vehicle for Tommy Steele. And there were moments, as …
 JUST WHAT WE WAND-ED? It's not only Henry IV who gets two plays. Cry God for Harry, Hogwarts and St Joanne: the woman who (whether you love the tales or not) admirably got a tell…
THE NEW F-WORD (AND A FAIR FEW OF THE OLD ONE) You can trust Alistair Beaton to keep a cast learning last-minute lines. Here, just as grace-notes alongside the main theme, are jokes a…
ONCE UPON A TIME, WHICH COULD BE NOW… What a marvel is this Sondheim / Lapine classic musical: playful and deep, absurd and earthy, mocking and wise. And what a piece of luck…
AYCKBOURN AT IT AGAIN..OR IS IT There's tennis without a ball (audience requested to do plock-plock sound effects on drums), a mini-farce, thriller and horror story also supported by …
EIGHTY YEARS ON: Â MEN BEWARE WOMEN At a moment when both female leaders and would-be leaders are rampaging across the news – May, Merkel, Leadsom, Eagle – it is pleasan…
FAITH . FAILURE AND THE GENIUS OF FRIEL A veil of rain surrounds the stage where three narrators will appear, each with their own version of a shared life "shabby, bleak, de…
ZELLER ZOOMS UP WEST, SHARP AS EVER The Menier, back in spring, brought grave delight and snorts of laughter with this zinger of a play by Florian Zeller; its rapid transfer up…
IN RANSOME’S WAKE, A NORTH SEA TALE OF TOUGHER DAYS Eastern Angles having a cleaner mind than BBC Films, Titty gets to keeps her name in this faithful, ingenious, charmin…
 VACATION,  EXPLOITATION,  ACCUSATION… I caught up a few days late with this (cheap seats aloft, excitingly closer to the rock-face in Hildegard Bechtler's Mediterranea…
REBELLION AND REALITY IN A SKEWEDÂ WORLD God bless a playwright you can't predict. Mike Bartlett's Charles III was founded on a pretty simple idea, and a frankly rather jejun…
GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES IS CHILLED, THRILLED, DAZZLED Ralph Fiennes is a menace. An utter menace. Other actors beware. He will cheat, stab and simply out-act you right off th…
A hairdo can be eloquent. When Bryan Dick as Willie Mossop first emerges quaking with humility from a trapdoor under old Hobson's shop, above a flapping leather apron and ragged shirt his di…
STRINGS, SWINGS, A SOPRANOÂ SOARING In E.M.Forster's HOWARD'S END, the dreamy Helen Schlegel can't listen to Beethoven without imagining heroes, goblins, dancing elephants an…
A CLASSIC OF THE DESPERATE HEART "We're death to one another, you and I". The great cry from trapped, degraded macho Freddie, struggling to leave the desperate demanding Hester Collye…
A DREAM AND A DISASTER: Â TRIBUTE WORTH PAYING Full disclosure: I really care about the Titanic story, love maritime history, have met one of the last living survivors of the…
INNOCENCE, EXPERIENCE, MEMORY, TRAUMA Around a derelict room and abandoned trunk, Michael Crawford prowls, a tweedy, damaged old man at the heart of this low-key but unforgetta…
THE RSC IN ROMPING MOODÂ Credulity and the con-artist, blinding-with-science and the selling of snake-oil, belong to all human eras. Ben Jonson's play is set in 1610, when a…
