Monthly Archives: October 2011

John Osborne always wrote these big bravura roles for his actors: Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger made Kenneth Haigh; Archie Rice in The Entertainer was a major turning point in Laurence Olivier’s career; Luther was rivetingly performed by … Continue reading →

Who would want to be a teenager again? Who would want to be a parent of a teenager again? April de Angelis’s play is about the ever-widening generation gap. Her heroine is a 50-year-old middle-class mother, liberal, feminist, former Greenham … Continue reading →

Charles Morgan (1894-1958), a once popular novelist and playwright, has long been forgotten. The River Line, which premiered with Paul Scofield in 1952, has not been seen since on the London stage, so Anthony Biggs’s revival is something of a … Continue reading →

The setting for Conor McPherson’s new play is a bankrupted and haunted estate in Ireland in 1822, a time of famine and extreme poverty. A defrocked priest and his companion, a philosopher addicted to laudanum, arrive to escort a 17-year-old … Continue reading →

These two plays by two neglected Irish playwrights are being performed concurrently. St John Ervine’s tragedy, Mixed Marriage, premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1911. Its subject is religious bigotry and rancour and it was very much a propaganda … Continue reading →

Edward Bond these days is more likely to be staged in Europe than in Britain. Saved, which premiered at the Royal Court in 1965, is remembered for a baby in a pram being stoned to death by some youths. The … Continue reading →

The Bush Theatre’s move to a new building, a splendid conversion of the old Shepherds Bush library, is cause for celebration, congratulations, best wishes and not criticism. The inaugural production is responses by 66 contemporary playwrights to the 66 books … Continue reading →

Driving Miss Daisy is probably best known as an Oscar-winning movie which had two splendid performances by Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman. But it actually began as a small-scale one-act play. Lasting only ninety minutes, it opened off-Broadway in 1987, … Continue reading →