drama
Untitled F*ck M*ss S**gon Play, Young Vic review - committed and important play let down by heavy-handed writingWednesday, 27 September 2023
Seldom can a title have given so much away about the play to follow, not just in terms of the subject matter but also in terms of the sledgehammer approach to driving home its points. Kimber Lee, who won the inaugural Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting... Read more... |
Macbeth, Shakespeare's Globe review - uneven production of intermittent powerFriday, 11 August 2023
That Shakespeare speaks to his audiences anew with every production is a cliché, but, like so many such, the glib blandness of the assertion conceals an insistent truth. The Thane of Glamis has had some success in life, gains preferment from those... Read more... |
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare's Globe review - busy production overflowing with new ideasThursday, 25 May 2023
Two years on from Sean Holmes’ production and seven on from Emma Rice’s (both of which featured diverse casts), Elle While takes a turn with the old warhorse’s lovers and fairies, its sparring couples and its Morecambe and Wise-like shambles of a... Read more... |
A Brief List of Everyone Who Died, Finborough Theatre review - 86 years, punctuated by fun and funeralsSaturday, 20 May 2023
The family pet dies. It’s a problem many parents face, and when Gracie learns from her evasive father that her dog isn’t just gone, but gone forever, her five-year-old brain cannot process it and so begins a lifelong relationship with deaths,... Read more... |
The Circle, Orange Tree Theatre review - acerbic reflections on the price paid for loveFriday, 12 May 2023
Tom Littler opens his account as artistic director of the Orange Tree Theatre with one of the more radical choices one can make in 2023 – directing a 102 year-old play pretty much how it would have been done in 1921.It’s all very period (... Read more... |
The Good Person of Szechwan, Lyric Hammersmith review - wild ride in hyperreality slides byMonday, 24 April 2023
As the UK undergoes yet another political convulsion, this time concerning the threshold for ministers being shitty to fellow workers, it is apt that Bertolt Brecht’s parable about the challenges of being good in a dysfunctional society hits London... Read more... |
Under the Black Rock, Arcola Theatre review - political thriller turns soapySaturday, 11 March 2023
“Darkly comic thrillers” (as they like to say) set in Ireland tracking how families, or quasi-families, fall apart under pressure are very much in vogue just now. Whether The Banshees of Inisherin will garner the Oscars haul it hardly deserves... Read more... |
Grenfell: System Failure, Playground Theatre review - if this doesn't make you angry, nothing willSaturday, 25 February 2023
It’s been five years since 72 people died in the Grenfell Tower fire in West London. Five years and no arrests, as countless placards and posters around the neighbourhood point out.The Grenfell Tower Inquiry into how the tragedy occurred – why it... Read more... |
Smoke, Southwark Playhouse review - dazzling Strindberg updateMonday, 06 February 2023
A play’s title can be an almost arbitrary matter – there’s no streetcar but plenty of desire in that one for example – and it might have crossed Kim Davies’ mind to call her play Ms Julie, since it is a reimagining of August Strindberg’s... Read more... |
A Christmas Carol, RSC, Stratford review - family show eases back the terror and winds up the politicsSaturday, 19 November 2022
Life is full of coincidences and contradictions. As I was walking to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was on his feet in the House of Commons delivering yet another rebalancing of individual and collective resources. On... Read more... |
Here, Southwark Playhouse review - award-winning kitchen sink drama goes down the drainThursday, 17 November 2022
The kitchen sink drama has been a standby of English theatre for 70 years or more, but not always with an actual sink on stage. But there it is, in an everyday home that harbours a secret or two in Clive Judd’s debut play, the winner of the 2022... Read more... |
The Doctor, Duke of York's Theatre review - Juliet Stevenson will see you nowMonday, 10 October 2022
Robert Icke is an expert in corporate tragedy. I don’t mean that in a bad way - just that he has a penchant for taking classics (Hamlet, The Oresteia, Mary Stuart) and transporting them, with the help of designer Hildegard Bechtler, to the frosted-... Read more... |
