Orange Tree
Play Mas, Orange Tree TheatreSaturday, 14 March 2015
Mustapha Matura's 1974 play is a celebration of liberation, both social and political, and a sly warning about the possible pitfalls of sudden freedom. Mas (or Masquerade) is the Trinidadian version of Carnival, an exotic mixture of Christian and... Read more... |
Little Light, Orange Tree TheatreSunday, 08 February 2015
The Orange Tree’s renaissance continues with this searing piece from playwright of the moment Alice Birch, who will shortly follow up last year’s subversive Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again with an interrogation of the porn industry for Rufus Norris’s... Read more... |
The Distance, Orange Tree TheatreSaturday, 11 October 2014
Are there any real taboos left? I mean, there have been scores of plays about incest, about abuse and about paedophilia. Have all proverbial stones been turned over? According to Deborah Bruce, a director turned playwright, there is one situation... Read more... |
Orange Tree Theatre Festival, Programme 1, Orange Tree TheatreSaturday, 14 June 2014
Sam Walters, Britain's longest-serving artistic director of a theatre (43 years!), looks to the past as well as the future with his Orange Tree swansong. This varied festival features nine plays and six world premieres across two programmes, all of... Read more... |
Squirrels/The After-Dinner Joke, Orange Tree TheatreSaturday, 24 May 2014
In French, when you want to end a digression and get a conversation back on point, you say "revenons à nos moutons". It's a commonly used idiom, meaning literally "let's get back to our sheep", the sheep representing the actual subject under... Read more... |
The School for Scheming, Orange Tree TheatreMonday, 21 April 2014
Usually, to describe a play as "of its time" is a criticism. It is suggestive of drama that hasn't aged well, that doesn't work quite as well for today's audience as it did for the original crowd. First performed in 1847, Dion Boucicault's The... Read more... |
Invincible, Orange Tree TheatreTuesday, 18 March 2014
It's unusual for a play to be political without being preachy, or dull, or both. As obsessed as we are with class distinctions, we aren't as good as we should be at pulling them apart. Invincible is therefore something rare, for it turns social... Read more... |
It Just Stopped, Orange Tree TheatreWednesday, 12 February 2014
Would you be able to tell if the world had ended? For Beth and Franklin, the wannabe intellectuals at the heart of Stephen Sewell's play, it proves quite difficult to ascertain whether life as they know it has come to an end from their privileged... Read more... |
Middlemarch: Dorothea's Story, Orange Tree TheatreSaturday, 26 October 2013
Adapt a Jane Austen novel for the stage and you have a generous handful of characters and a selection of drawing rooms in which to put them. Adapt a George Eliot novel and you’re faced with a whole town of people – figures from grand houses,... Read more... |
Springs Eternal, Orange Tree TheatreMonday, 16 September 2013
The American repertoire has featured big-time on the London stage this year but perhaps nowhere more oddly than courtesy the ever-adventurous Orange Tree's staging of a World War Two play from Susan Glaspell, here receiving its world premiere. Long... Read more... |
The Breadwinner, Orange Tree TheatreSunday, 21 April 2013
Although overwhelmingly remembered now as a novelist, Somerset Maugham was best known during his lifetime as a playwright. “England’s Dramatist”, as the newspapers christened him, produced more than 20 plays spanning the length of his career,... Read more... |
The Man Who Pays the Piper, Orange Tree TheatreMonday, 18 March 2013
Staged in 1931, The Man Who Pays the Piper appealed to women who had gone to work (and become the master of the house) while men were fighting in the First World War, but were subjugated once they returned. The protagonist, Daryll, starts work... Read more... |
