2,441 stories by "Michael Billington"
Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, LondonGemma Arterton brings beauty, determination and moral goodness to one of the great female rolesA new theatre is often a challenge. Until weathered and worn by …
Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, LondonAnnie Ryan's production does full justice to the sinewy, aphoristic language in Webster's sinister portrait of corruptionWebster's dark Jacobean tragedies sit …
Theatre 503, LondonMichael McLean gets under the skin of his characters' lives in Skelmersdale but his play skimps on the bigger pictureWhat happened to the social utopias of the 1960s, buil…
The NT usually manages a balance between revivals and new work. Now, classic plays are disappearing from its stages " and from regional reps tooDavid Hare has made the headlines with a damni…
Hurt, who has died aged 77, was a superb, if too infrequent, stage actor. In plays by Beckett, Pinter and Stoppard, he had an intuitive understanding of outsidersI last saw John Hurt six mon…
Arts theatre, LondonRichard Marsh and Katie Bonna's verse romcom is a wry, sweet-natured account of a totally believable relationshipHaving started out as a 10-minute pub poetry duet in 2010…
Dorfman, London Emmet Kirwan stars in his play about rave-addicted Dublin youths, which displays a lust for language but offers little more than a sensory impressionWords, words, words. That…
Young Vic, LondonCarrie Cracknell's production certainly puts a new spin on Ibsen's 1879 classic. As if to remind us that this is a play about domestic revolution, Ian MacNeil's design revol…
Charing Cross theatre, LondonThom Southerland gracefully directs this strange musical, but the delightful songs and touching performances merely decorate a story that lacks biteLove is as st…
Gate theatre, LondonChristopher Haydon ends his Gate reign on a high note with gripping story of a young African woman's conversion to CatholicismChristopher Haydon's final production at the…
Royal Court, LondonAs someone who bemoans the dearth of political drama, I welcome the arrival of Anders Lustgarten's polemical bombshell. But while the play has bags of vigour and offers a …
Orange Tree, LondonA middle-class family accept a stranger for Christmas, but is he what he seems? This radical, transfixing play is about Germany but has universal relevanceThe timing is pe…
Royal Court theatre, LondonTim Crouch's show explores our obsession with artists' lives, but occasionally lets the form get in the way of its message' Playwright Tim Crouch: 'Avoiding the st…
Southwark Playhouse, London A revival of Neil Simon's adaptation of the Billy Wilder classic, with songs by Bacharach and Hal David, is well performed but gratingly anachronisticThis musical…
Arcola, London A cast of 18 bring the Russian writer's drifters and derelicts vividly to life in a production that captures his blend of compassion and crueltyMaxim Gorky's 1902 play is one …
Theatro Technis, LondonTayo Aluko's tribute to Tunji Sowande mixes politics, music and cricket for a tuneful portrait of a legal pioneerTayo Aluko wrote and performed the remarkable Call Mr …
Trafalgar Studios, LondonStuart Slade's play about a survivors' group recalling a horrific incident is a thoughtful, arresting and blackly funny study of how we cope with tragedyHow would we…
Finborough, LondonA Vietnam vet plots to kill the US president in a tense three-hander that trains a spotlight on human rights abuses and ex-soldiers' mental healthDonald Freed's play was la…
Wyndham's, LondonMatthew Spangler's workmanlike adaptation of the bestselling novel about Afghanistan does a decent job but reduces it to a series of chronological eventsIt's an old problem:…
Royal Court, LondonEcstatically received on the Edinburgh fringe, Fiona Evans's play has been expanded here. First, we get a close-up study of a female teacher-boy pupil relationship during …
Hamilton comes to London, Sherlock villain Andrew Scott adds Hamlet to his CV, Damian Lewis falls in love with a goat, and Ivo van Hove directs Jude Law in a tale of lust, greed and murder M…
As Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire opens in the West End, we celebrate a writer with a strong social conscience who saw the human condition " especially his own " as faintly ab…
Finborough, LondonTony Harrison's collision of high and low art fashions a Greek satyr play into a barbed comment on the lack of imagination in contemporary cultureMy abiding memory of Tony …
Old Vic, LondonBilled as a "Victorian thriller", Patrick Hamilton's Gaslight was written in 1938. But it is that rare thing: a re-creation of an old form which works in its own terms. And it…
From the archive: The first night review, published on 16 October 1996, for Yasmina Reza's play at Wyndham's theatre in LondonYasmina Reza's Art, translated from the French by Christopher Ha…
