Wednesday, March 21, 2012
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…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 02:36PM[SHARE]Friday, March 16, 2012
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…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 12:12PM[SHARE]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…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 06:43AM[SHARE]Friday, March 9, 2012
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…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 06:46PM[SHARE]Sunday, March 4, 2012
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…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 11:47AM[SHARE]Friday, March 2, 2012
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…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 11:44AM[SHARE]Saturday, February 25, 2012
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, …
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:32AM[SHARE]Thursday, February 16, 2012
'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…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 11:15AM[SHARE]Friday, February 3, 2012
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, …
SOURCE: John Morrison at 03:09PM[SHARE]Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Oy vay. The Lyttelton stage in the National Theatre may have seen more weakly written plays than Nicholas Wright's schmaltzy fantasy about the origins of Hollywood, but I can't think of one.…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 11:43AM[SHARE]Friday, January 27, 2012
Directing your first classic English 18th century comedy in the unforgivingly vast surroundings of the Olivier theatre is a high hurdle to jump for a young director like Jamie Lloyd; and it'…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:03AM[SHARE]Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Four burly stokers, their shoulders streaked with sweat and dust, are shovelling coal against the flickering orange light of a furnace. A ship's crew battles against a raging sea, twisting a…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:34AM[SHARE]Thursday, January 19, 2012
Nobody much under 40 will ever have heard of the Swiss dramatist Max Frisch, although he was one of the big beasts of post-war German-language theatre and died only 20 years ago. So it's hea…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 01:37PM[SHARE]Wednesday, January 11, 2012
The tiny Jermyn Street Theatre is unusual among London's studio theatres in its location a few steps from Picadilly Circus, and because of its atmosphere, which owes more to old-fashioned We…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 11:25AM[SHARE]Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Foxes, like them or loathe them, are plentiful. Exciting new plays are harder to find, though the tiny Finborough Theatre in Earls Court is always a good place to start looking. Foxfinder by…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:54AM[SHARE]Friday, December 9, 2011
Forget Copenhagen. Come to that, you can forget Hamlet and King Lear as well. Noises Off is not just Michael Frayn's masterpiece but possibly the best play ever written. It is the Mount Ever…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 10:12AM[SHARE]Friday, November 25, 2011
Dear Friend My name is Antipholus of Syracuse. I am the manager of Syracuse Commercial Bank, with private business interest in the following sectors: Real Estate, Tobacco, Gold Dust, Oil and…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:11AM[SHARE]Wednesday, November 23, 2011
This new play by Lizzie Nunnery at Theatre 503 in Battersea is a taut 80-minute two-hander about a Zimbabwean refugee and his female caseworker, which was first produced at the Liverpool Pla…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 07:46AM[SHARE]Sunday, November 13, 2011
Coming face to face with Racine four decades after writing essays about his plays is like bumping into a difficult old acquaintance from university and being pleasantly surprised. The man tu…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 11:09AM[SHARE]Saturday, November 12, 2011
I was really looking forward to this, after enjoying Earthquakes in London by the same author on the National Theatre's Cottesloe stage. But I left at the interval -- something I rarely do -…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 09:10AM[SHARE]Wednesday, November 9, 2011
One of my many recurring nightmares when I was Reuters chief correspondent in Paris in the early 1980s was about getting beaten by the opposition on the death of the elderly Duchess of Winds…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 07:13AM[SHARE]Sunday, November 6, 2011
You know the feeling when you turn up at a restaurant looking for a meal just before the kitchen is about to close? You smile ingratiatingly and the waiter gives you a table anyway. You feel…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 12:56PM[SHARE]Saturday, November 5, 2011
A vintage Underwood typewriter with Cyrillic keyboard weighs as much as a crate of vodka and makes a lethal weapon if one can raise it to shoulder height. We had one in the Reuters office in…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 07:42AM[SHARE]Thursday, November 3, 2011
Last night I think I saw the most exciting Hamlet production of my life. On the Antiques Roadshow they show you three teapots and ask you to judge between Good, Better and Best. That's easy …
SOURCE: John Morrison at 08:25AM[SHARE]Wednesday, November 2, 2011
In the bad old Brezhnev days when I lived in Moscow, there were two things that seemed equally unlikely to ever happen; a rock concert in Red Square, and a performance of a Tom Stoppard play…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:37AM[SHARE]Saturday, September 17, 2011
There's lots to enjoy in this supremely ambitious revival at the Young Vic of an opera created in 1947 by composer Kurt Weill, lyricist Langston Hughes and playwright Elmer Rice. If it doesn…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 10:58AM[SHARE]Wednesday, September 14, 2011
After seeing the RSC's direly unfunny The City Madam in Stratford last week, I'm thinking of hiring a charabanc to bring all those involved to Southwark Playhouse for a lesson on how to play…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 06:35AM[SHARE]Thursday, September 8, 2011
David Farr's revival of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming at the RSC's Swan theatre in Stratford has the same spine-chilling precision as his 50th anniversary production of The Birthday Party t…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:09AM[SHARE]Sunday, September 4, 2011
All Rupert Goold's productions are like a high wire act. Mostly they reach the other side unscathed amid deafening applause, and occasionally they plunge to earth. This site-specific work, b…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 10:13AM[SHARE]There are some nights in the theatre which are the equivalent of a lavish three-course meal while others are like tasty inexpensive snacks; this play set in a Chinese restaurant, however, ha…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:50AM[SHARE]Thursday, August 25, 2011
Here are my short reviews of the one per cent of the Edinburgh fringe theatre programme that I saw over the past week. Apologies to the other five hundred shows that I missed. THE WHEEL by Z…
SOURCE: John Morrison at 05:42PM[SHARE]Loading more stories…
