Royal Court
theartsdesk Q&A: Playwright Jez ButterworthTuesday, 02 May 2017
Jez Butterworth is back. Even before the critics have uttered a single word of praise The Ferryman, directed by Sam Mendes and set in rural Derry in 1981 at the height of the IRA hunger strikes, sold out its run at the Royal Court in hours. It... Read more... |
Nuclear War, Royal Court review - ‘deeply felt and haunting’Saturday, 22 April 2017
Text can sometimes be a prison. At its best, post-war British theatre is a writer’s theatre, with the great pensmiths – from Samuel Beckett, John Osborne and Harold Pinter to Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp and Sarah Kane – carving out visions of... Read more... |
The Kid Stays in the Picture, Royal Court, review – ‘sad, bad and sprawling’Friday, 24 March 2017
The beauty of fiction is that its stories have both compelling shape and deep meaning – they are dramas where things feel right and true and real. The trouble with real life is that it’s the opposite: it is messy, frequently shapeless and often... Read more... |
A Profoundly Affectionate, Passionate Devotion to Someone (–noun), Royal Court TheatreTuesday, 07 March 2017
Love, we know, will tear us apart again. And again. And yet again. It will shred our nerves and rip through our guts; it will fill us with anguish, and then douse us in regrets. It will expose our weaknesses, and then make us say what we can never... Read more... |
Wish List, Royal Court TheatreFriday, 13 January 2017
You could call it the Corbynisation of new writing. In the past couple of years, a series of plays have plumbed the lower depths, looking at the subject of good people trapped in zero-hour contracts and terrible working conditions. Like Ken Loach’s... Read more... |
Best of 2016: TheatreTuesday, 27 December 2016
Life threw numerous, possibly irrevocable curveballs at us all during 2016, which in turn made one even more aware of how lucky we were to find ourselves in the midst of so much sustenance by way of art. Time and again throughout the year, one... Read more... |
The PassFriday, 09 December 2016
John Donnelly’s play The Pass scored a slate of five-star reviews when it ran at the Royal Court early last year – theartsdesk called it “scorching” – and plaudits for Russell Tovey’s central performance were practically stellar (“a star performance... Read more... |
The Children, Royal Court TheatreFriday, 25 November 2016
Over the past decade, one new theme in particular has emerged in contemporary British new writing: generational conflict. In several bright new offerings – such as James Graham’s The Whisky Taster (2010) and Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love (2012... Read more... |
The Sewing Group, Royal Court TheatreThursday, 17 November 2016
The beauty of the past is that it’s a foreign country, and you don’t need a visa to visit it. With the free movement of the imagination you can conjure up life as it might have once been experienced. You can even join a re-enactment society. In the... Read more... |
'What would it feel like to watch women sew?'Wednesday, 16 November 2016
It’s a strange time to be alive. Has it always felt like this? When else was there a time when so much felt to be at stake, and the ground moved beneath our feet with the continuous emergence of technologies that affect our everyday lives and our... Read more... |
Harrogate, Royal Court TheatreTuesday, 25 October 2016
What’s incest got to do with a town in North Yorkshire? At first this seems a reasonable question to ask of Al Smith’s brilliantly written, if a little bit tricksy, play, which begins somewhere nearer to Guilford than to Leeds. The central character... Read more... |
Torn, Royal Court TheatreThursday, 15 September 2016
The family is a war zone. Bam, bam, bam. For some people, it can be the most dangerous place on earth. Its weapons include domination and betrayal, blackmail and abuse, and its frontline is memory – what really happened, and who is most to blame? In... Read more... |
