Monthly Archives: March 2013

Jeremy Kingston’s jeu d’esprit envisages a meeting between Louis Mountbatten, Agatha Christie and Noel Coward. Hopes that the ensuing comedy might become a pastiche Christie murder mystery, as written by Coward, sadly, never materializes and Kingston’s witty lines are completely … Continue reading →

THE AUDIENCE Gielgud Theatre Peter Morgan’s new play about the Queen, with Helen Mirren repeating the success she had on film, may not have the depth of his award-winning movie, and it is certainly not as well written and as … Continue reading →

August Wilson (1945-2005), the great African-American playwright, is up there with Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. He wrote a cycle of award-winning plays, which chronicled the American-Black man’s experience in the twentieth century, one play for each decade. … Continue reading →

Graham Greene’s sermon on death, sin, guilt and suffering, which premiered in 1953 and made the 23-year-old Dorothy Tutin a star, was hailed by Kenneth Tynan as the best first play of its generation. It gets its first London revival … Continue reading →

Philip Himberg’s unnecessary adaptation of Torner Heymann’s documentary about Filipino transsexuals caring for elderly Orthodox Jews by day and performing at night in a Tel-Aviv club, is crude, clunky and hysterical. The expected clash of cultures never materializes and the … Continue reading →

The most popular cliché in backstage stories is the one in which a girl steps out of the chorus to stand in for the leading lady and becomes a star overnight. This famous musical for grown-up audiences, which premiered on … Continue reading →

Rose Trelawny, an actress at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre in the 1860’s, becomes engaged to a swell and abandons the grease-paint for a rich life in Grosvenor Square, which proves so boring that she quickly returns to the grease-paint. Her … Continue reading →

Few people have been able to make sense of Samuel Beckett’s circuitous novel, which he wrote in 1943 when he was in the French Resistance in World War 2 and in hiding from the Gestapo. Watt, an itinerant, tries hard … Continue reading →