Imagine an African duo with the comic skills of The Two Ronnies or Morecambe and Wise taking on Shakespeare, and you will get some idea of how funny this production is. Denton Chikura and To…
Anal rape, blowjobs, fright wigs, bare bums, cocaine snorting, pill popping, vodka swilling and witches miming to 'I will survive'. This production of Macbeth had everything schoolchildren l…
It's not just the recession that makes me combine the three plays I saw yesterday in one post. It would be hard to find a greater contrast between the joyous freewheeling style of actors fro…
Going with my wife to see Mike Bartlett's new play about a baby boomer couple who met at Oxford in the late 1960s when they were 19 was a strange experience. Imagine the Queen watching The K…
After a quarter of a century, the story of the western hostages seized in Lebanon in the 1980s has faded from popular memory. What remains is Frank McGuinness's classic play about three men …
Imagine a notoriously corrupt country where the autocrat hands over to his deputy for a period before suddenly returning to resume his place at the top. No prizes at the front of the class f…
Shakespeare's Globe has started its international multilingual festival with a real sizzler despite the rain. This wonderful production by the South African company that brought Carmen, The …
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2012/apr/20/touts-pushing-theatregoers-out
Summarising this show is tricky; it leaves the audience goggle-eyed, visually and aurally ravished by its theatrical imagination. A one-man show in the cavernous space of the NT's Lyttelton …
This is an interesting revival of a play which came first out of two thousand entries in a new stage writing competition run by The Observer in 1957 and organised by Kenneth Tynan. Set in Tr…
David Suchet is a great actor who has been nominated umpteen times for Olivier Awards Best Actor but has never actually won it. His harrowing performance in a role which Olivier himself once…
The Royal Court Theatre has always shone a sharp light on the English class system, ever since the days of Wesker and Osborne. Laura Wade's excellent drama Posh about the rioting upper class…
I'm still in two minds about Philip Ridley after seeing his new play at Southwark Playhouse. Two weeks ago I really enjoyed the Arcola's revival of The Pitchfork Disney, somewhat against all…
Everyone with any common sense knows that Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita is exactly the kind of magical realist novel it's impossible to put on stage. Which is why Simon McBurney an…
Michael Attenborough's production of this play didn't work for me, and I'm trying to puzzle out why. There's a splendid central performance by Samantha Spiro as Filumena, the Neapolitan ex-p…
Church incense wafts across the stalls and up into the circle as masked and hooded figures wearing crosses and carrying candlesticks pad their way on to the stage. Jamie Lloyd's new producti…
One of the best signs that a production really works is that you leave the theatre thinking the playwright is absolutely brilliant. George Farquhar, who wrote this play just over 300 years a…
Imagine London if things get much, much worse. The streets of central London are a third world crime zone, a bit like Travis Bickle's New York, where visiting American 'grockles' are hustled…
I was a bit mystified by this play when I saw a student production a few years ago but I'm glad I jumped out of my theatrical comfort zone to see this new version of it at the Arcola. Philip…
Having spent a bit of time in the British Library studying the Lord Chamberlain's departmental archive, I am of course opposed to theatrical censorship. But sometimes I am tempted to issue a…
As a play about the fundamental issue of human rights and the importance of ensuring access to justice, Terence Rattigan's classic play about a boy accused of stealing a five shilling postal…
A teenage girl fidgets on a red-sheeted double bed, headphones jammed to her ears, laptop at the ready, her hair covered by a hood. She kicks her bare feet and twitches the duvet in time wit…
This play by the young Finnish writer Sofi Oksanen, drawing on the experience of the Soviet occupation of Estonia, comes to London with a big reputation. As a novel, it won the Prix Femina, …
'She drowned and I was not told!' is the monstrously self-centred response of Shelley on learning of the suicide of his abandoned wife Harriet in Howard Brenton's 1984 play, given a vigorous…
I dropped in to the Donmar box office at a lucky moment last week, just as they released a batch of extra tickets for one of the last performances of Michael Grandage's swansong production, …