Monthly Archives: April 2011

Ella Hickson is an interesting new writer and her latest play, which was a big success at the Edinburgh Festival, has arrived in town. A 23-year-old English law graduate, a victim of the recession and unable to find work, decides … Continue reading →

Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two rich, sophisticated, intelligent college boys, killed a 14-year-old boy in Chicago in 1924 merely to prove they were Nietzschean übermensch. Loeb, who had already persuaded Leopold, to carry out petty crimes and arson with … Continue reading →

Alan Bennett’s film, A Private Function, is an odd thing to turn into a musical. It doesn’t work. I am surprised Bennett allowed it. Reece Shearsmith and Sarah Lancashire and are cast in the Michael Palin and Maggie Smith roles … Continue reading →

A former civil servant is dying. His sons refuse to visit him. Harold Pinter’s tone-poem, written when his mother was dying, feels very autobiographical. He, too, was estranged from his son. The actors who play the sons fail to do … Continue reading →

Seven ballets by Les Ballets Russes sounds like bliss for balletomanes. Impresario Serge Diaghilev (1872-1929) played a major role in reinventing ballet for 20th century audiences. His seasons in Paris between 1909 and 1912 were a sensation. The radical choreography … Continue reading →

I cannot remember having ever enjoyed The Tempest quite so much. Declan Donnellan’s production for Cheek by Jowl is acted by Russian actors in Russian and is a major theatrical event and not to be missed. It is so lucid, … Continue reading →

Clifford Odets (1906-1963) is the ultimate 1930s American radical playwright who famously sold-out and went to Hollywood and would later name names during the Senator McCarthy communist witch-hunt. Odets became famous over-night with his one act play about a cab … Continue reading →

Mark O’Rowe’s odyssey from Dublin to Hell, is not for the faint-hearted and the illiterate and was absolute Purgatory for some members of the audience, who punch drunk from the verbiage and violence, came out of the theatre, reeling. Terminus, … Continue reading →