Friday, February 22, 2013
Arts theatre, LondonBoy-meets-boy is now a familiar musical theme. What gives this show a certain piquancy is that it deals with a star of the Hollywood silents, William Haine…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:37PM[SHARE]Thursday, February 21, 2013
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 …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:43PM[SHARE]Wednesday, February 20, 2013
London Palladium"Nothing runs for ever," says a character in A Chorus Line. Maybe not; but this show, which started its life at the Public theatre in New York in 1975, enjoyed a record-break…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 09:59AM[SHARE]Sunday, February 17, 2013
Old Rep, BirminghamHow do you celebrate your 100th birthday? It must have been tempting to revive Twelfth Night which opened the much-loved Station Street theatre on February 15, 1913. Inste…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:49AM[SHARE]Thursday, February 14, 2013
Charing Cross theatre, London"There was a time when garbage was a pleasure," they sing in this musical version of Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot, which flopped on Broadway in 1969. Wic…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:03PM[SHARE]Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Swan, Stratford-on-AvonA reactionary pope dies, only to be succeeded by a seeming liberal who soon reverts to institutional conservatism. You could hardly have a more topical play than this.…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 11:52AM[SHARE]Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Albert Finney, Peggy Ashcroft and Laurence Olivier all cut their teeth at the Birmingham Rep. As the curtains go up on its new home, Michael Billington, a punter since the mid-50s, looks at …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:00PM[SHARE]Roundhouse, LondonNo one has ever doubted the visual wizardry of Robert Lepage. When style and content mesh, as in The Far Side of the Moon (2000), the result is theatrical magic. But his am…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:31PM[SHARE]Monday, February 11, 2013
Orange Tree, RichmondIt almost defies belief that Githa Sowerby's 1924 drama is only now receiving its British professional premiere. While it may not quite possess the Ibsenite power o…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:03PM[SHARE]Sunday, February 10, 2013
Jermyn Street Theatre, LondonWritten shortly before his death in 1951, Ivor Novello's last musical earns a footnote in the history books. It shows Novello abandoning Ruritanian operetta to r…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 01:22PM[SHARE]Friday, February 8, 2013
Despite acting rivalries, it's striking how few genuine feuds there have been in the tribe of British actors over the last 100 yearsThe news that Alec Guinness felt a personal distaste for L…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:00PM[SHARE]Trafalgar Studios, LondonIt takes a certain chutzpah to try and cram Ernest Hemingway's novel, with its portrait of Paris and Pamplona in the 1920s and its vivid evocation of bullfighting, o…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:12AM[SHARE]Thursday, February 7, 2013
Somerset House, London"Are we meant to be looking for clues?" a young woman suddenly asked me as we poked about in the underground passages linking Somerset House and King's College. In a wa…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:57AM[SHARE]Wednesday, February 6, 2013
National theatre, LondonWhen Carl Zuckmayer's play was staged by the National at the Old Vic in 1971, it yielded a great comic performance from Paul Scofield. Good as Antony Sher is in the c…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 10:00AM[SHARE]Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Finborough, LondonAfter Priestley's Cornelius, the Finborough brings us another play about office life in the interwar years; and even if John Van Druten's 1931 piece doesn't have the s…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:38PM[SHARE]St James, LondonTwenty-five years after its premiere, Timberlake Wertenbaker's play remains terrifyingly relevant. Based on Thomas Keneally's novel The Playmaker, it deals with a production …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:36AM[SHARE]Monday, February 4, 2013
Young Vic, LondonAfter Benedict Andrews's radical update of Chekhov's Three Sisters , we now have another sibling trio on stage at the Young Vic. This time, the sisters symbolise Yoruba godd…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:52AM[SHARE]Thursday, January 31, 2013
Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-AvonThis is the RSC's fifth revival of this play in the last 15 years. Such over-familiarity may account for the fact that Lucy Bailey's new product…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:14AM[SHARE]Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Nicholas Hytner wants to know what should be included in the NT's anniversary celebrations. From No Man's Land to Stuff Happens, here are my top picksAt his spring press conference on Wednes…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:23PM[SHARE]Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Wyndham's, LondonFor a convivial chap, Simon Gray was oddly preoccupied with loneliness. And in this play, first seen in 1981, he takes his fascination with the English sense of detachment t…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:07PM[SHARE]Lyttelton, LondonSimon Stephens has a way with women. His Harper Regan (2008) was a memorable play about a mother who abandons her family. And in Port, first seen at Manchester's Royal Excha…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:59AM[SHARE]Friday, January 25, 2013
'Where have all the kitchen sinks gone?'Is our theatre now inescapably middle-class? I ask because I recently took part in a debate on Radio 3's Night Waves about the upsurge in working…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 04:00PM[SHARE]Almeida, LondonYou can see Henry James's masterly, much-adapted short novel either as a classic ghost story or as a study in sexual hysteria. But Rebecca Lenkiewicz's overheated new version,…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:40PM[SHARE]Thursday, January 24, 2013
Hampstead, LondonI predict a big success for Amelia Bullmore's comedy, which has moved assuredly from Hampstead's downstairs space to the main stage. It connects emotionally with the audienc…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:46PM[SHARE]Friday, January 18, 2013
Tricycle, LondonDawn Walton has had the bright idea of staging this Eclipse production of Don Evans's 1982 American play as if it were a live TV show. If there are occasional sitcom contriva…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 08:41AM[SHARE]Thursday, January 17, 2013
Royal Court, LondonPolly Stenham is our theatre's expert on dysfunctional families. After 2007's That Face and 2009's Tusk Tusk, she now brings us a third play about sons, mothers and the da…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 07:05AM[SHARE]Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Arts theatre, LondonYou somehow don't expect a play set in a state penitentiary in the American south to come from the pen of a drama teacher from the English north. But Richard Vergette is …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:45PM[SHARE]Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Trafalgar Studios 2, LondonI can see why the 1942 French novella by Vercors, on which this play is based, made a great movie: Philip French called Jean-Pierre Melville's 1949 film a "claustr…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:51PM[SHARE]Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Finborough, LondonIain Finlay Macleod's 70-minute play is a lament for the slow death of the Scottish Gaelic language. It's a rich subject, but Macleod's story is too cryptic to sustain the …
SOURCE: The Guardian at 11:45AM[SHARE]Orange Tree, RichmondIs there anything funnier in the history of farce than the central act of this 1896 Georges Feydeau play, originally entitled Le Dindon? The comic highpoint comes w…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 11:05AM[SHARE]Loading more stories…
