St James theatre, LondonAn attempt to adapt the Oscar-winning film for the stage cannot disguise its origins sufficiently enough to work as theatreIgnoring the biblical warning against putti…
Criterion, LondonThis thrillingly inventive piece about bed-hopping gem thieves is a slapstick delightThe financial prospects of young actors are probably only studied by economists as a hor…
Revivals from Arnold Wesker's heyday prove the enduring quality of his work, where autobiographical detail went hand in hand with experimental stagecraftCelebrated playwrights often seem to …
With a sexually confused Putin and a Bond villain Blair, Corbyn the Musical has some pretty broad caricatures " but it's even-handed in its politics. And it's not the first musical to take o…
Victoria Palace Theatre, London Director Stephen Daldry made amusing artistic virtue of legal necessity and Sir Elton John savoured the show's success Even before sampling the refreshments a…
Dench deserved to break records for her psychologically probing in turn The Winter's Tale, and Rufus Norris saw his vision for the National Theatre validated. But the Oliviers still need to …
On May 8 1956, John Osborne's Look Back in Anger premiered at the Royal Court in London. It shocked the theatre world, some acclaiming it as the voice of a new generation, others damning it …
The storyline is contrived around a string of pop hits in this homage to the photo-stories and problem pages of the classic teenage girls' magazine Aimed at a largely female audience with o…
Moving The Maids from France to the US adds a powerful racial subtext to Genet's original, while Anouilh's Welcome Home, Captain Fox! fares less well when set in America. Not all plays benef…
In 400 years since his death, only a few playwrights " including George Bernard Shaw and Edward Bond " have turned the Bard into a characterThe 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death is be…
Denise Gough has been horrifying audiences " and scoring rave reviews " for her portrayal of an addict in People, Places and Things. The Irish actor talks about being one of 11 siblings, sno…
David Peace's modern classic The Damned United is being staged in Leeds, a city with no great love for its subject: charismatic, alcoholic football manager Brian Clough. Mark Lawson on the f…
Best actor nomination for Farinelli and the King comes hours after winning Academy Award for best supporting actorThe "double O" category in Britain has traditionally been associated with Ja…
Between them, two current stagings of Ibsen and Chekhov classics offer audiences five intermissions. While some see an art form reasserting itself, the move comes with a number of hitchesA r…
HG Wells' prose is the hero of Jeff Wayne's full-blown musical revival, which has enough bombast to drown out any ringtones in the audienceThere was always an overlap between the concept dou…
Debut plays can be instant classics and false starts. From Ibsen's Catilina to Shaffer's Five Finger Exercise, they often contain thrilling hints of where a dramatist is headingImagine that …
First Direct Arena, LeedsA greatest hits show made more poignant after Mortimer's recent heart bypass meandered even more than usualEvery performance of Reeves and Mortimer's new stage tour …
A previously unperformed 1900 play about a proto-feminist painter has received a rehearsed reading at the National Theatre. Is a full revival now in order?It is both the dream and the nightm…
Sharon D Clarke studied to be a social worker before becoming a doctor … on Holby City. Now she's an Olivier award-winning stage star, singing the blues in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. She ta…
From new writing at the Royal Court to revivals at the NT, theatre schedules suggest that plays by women are finally getting better representation " but there's still cause for concern On 13…
Complex writing, leftfield family shows and thoroughly bleak dramas make theatre stages far from jolly this Christmas. Praise be, then, for the new wave of pseudo-pantoThe theatrical form mo…
The year brought radical rethinkings of Chekhov and Beckett, superior Shakespeares and new plays that were daring, engaging and powerfulChekhov wrote so few plays, which are revived so often…
A lost work is often buried for a reason, but the recent rediscovery of a seminal Miller play, No Villain, confirms his brilliance and anticipates later masterpiecesThe biggest dream of all …
Recent openings present theatregoers with a choice between interval-free one-acters such as Here We Go and epics including Henry VIt struck me recently how useful it would be if theatre tick…
Mixing spy thriller with quantum physics, Stoppard's play Hapgood received rude and confused reviews in 1988. Will a rare revival reverse its fortunes?In March 1988, Tom Stoppard gave an int…