107 stories by "Sam Marlowe"
Flying masonry put the Apollo in the headlines late last year when part of the theatre's ceiling collapsed; now an airborne vampire and an impressive refurbishment give it new life. A cyclor…
Come August, the London theatre scene often shivers in the shadow of that north-of-the-border knees-up gargantuan, the Edinburgh Festival.
LONDON — The early months of a new year tend to be something of a frozen tundra for London theater — but 2014 has already seen some green shoots and the spring season looks set t…
A decaying London outpost of the Hollywood movie-making machine, where dreams are spun on celluloid, and reality and fantasy intertwine in a nightmarish danse macabre of desperation and dark…
A joyful noise? Hell, yes. Alice Walker's Pulitzer-winning 1982 feminist novel set in Georgia and spanning more than 30 years is crammed with suffering, injustice and cruelty. But in its cha…
A champagne cocktail with a hefty dash of bitters, Jonathan Kent's production of this exquisite Noël Coward comedy of impossible passions is as wince-inducing as it is delightfully efferv…
It's all stick and no lollipop, a chocolate box stuffed with nothing but empty wrappers: what a walloping letdown this intensely anticipated musical based on Roald Dahl's perennially popular…
A town called St Cloud, a girl named Heavenly and a faded star who feels she's living on the Moon: the imagery of Tennessee Williams' drama is celestial, yet he puts his characters through h…
"My three men," declares the deeply compromised heroine of this 1928 experimental drama by Eugene O'Neill. "I am whole." Nina Leeds " hungry for love, ruthless with her own heart and those o…
It's as dazzling as a neon-lit cityscape and nearly as sprawling: Lucy Kirkwood's epic new drama is rich, riveting and theatrically audacious. A co-production with Headlong, the tirelessly i…
The past: it's etched into the fabric not just of our lives, but of the architecture that surrounds us " the streets we tread, the buildings where we work or make our homes. In this whimsica…
What's the price of betrayal? In Peter Nichols' 1981 play it's a painful splintering of the psyche. The betrayer mentally compartmentalises in order to be both affectionate husband and arden…
It's apt that a drama set among soldiers should be presented with military precision; but corruption, cruelty and perversion can lurk amid the human innards of the machine of war, and in Nic…
A severed toe, a shotgun, copious blood, vomit and snot, and a live snake. Sprinkle it liberally with Shake'n'Vac masquerading as cocaine, dowse it in booze, piss and petrol, set the whole l…
What becomes of children "born out of sadness and loneliness", exiled from Wonderland or Neverland, longing for remembered golden afternoons, but forced to confront the chilly twilight of ad…
It's one of the most anticipated theatrical openings of the year, with tickets allegedly changing hands for astronomical sums and some pundits already rushing to issue dire warnings of the d…
It begins with a tall, thin man walking out of light and into darkness. There is much that remains murky in Barry McGovern's adaptation of this novel by Samuel Beckett, written between 1941 …
It's brash, jolly, stuffed with wildly politically incorrect language, double entendres and spoof-laden song and dance.read more
Cole Porter's musical spin on Shakespeare demands the fluidity, fizz and acidity of champagne. In Trevor Nunn's revival, which transfers to London after a successful run in Chichester, it's …
The Russians are coming next week, when the Moscow company Vakhtangov bring their production of Anton Chekhov's tragedy of dissipated lives and squandered love to the West End.read more
It's not often that the works of 17th-century French classicist playwright Jean Racine make an appearance in the West End, and you can't fault the ambition of the Donmar's artistic director,…
He arrives in a blaze of light and trumpets, but Jonathan Pryce's King Lear seems as much charming, lovable father as imposing monarch as he sets about carving up his kingdom. What follows, …
If you weren't sick when you arrived at Les Cerisiers, the hospital in this satiric early Sixties drama by Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt, you probably would be by the time the insti…
One look at Tom Scutt's meticulous design for Jeremy Herrin's production of this savage Alan Ayckbourn comedy, and you know you're in the 1970s. Wood veneer and faux leather lend a shiny, wi…
An interfering producer, an accountant who keeps trying to cut corners and costs, even a casting couch " making movies was never easy, according to this amiable new play by Nicholas Wright. …
