Monthly Archives: January 2014

Stephen Sondheim’s musical review finally gets a belated London premiere. First performed in Oxford in 1992, it did what the highly successful Side by Side by Sondheim had done seventeen years previously on both sides of the Atlantic in large … Continue reading →

The staging of three of Samuel Beckett’s one-act plays within an hour, straight through, without an interval, is a gruelling experience for actor and audience alike. Billie Whitelaw who created all three of these interior monologues brilliantly, has given a … Continue reading →

Three plays of the Spanish Golden Age of Theatre (roughly 1590-1681) have been newly translated and are being presented in repertoire by Bath’s Theatre Royal and Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre. The Golden Age included such theatrical giants as Lope de Vega … Continue reading →

Lord Byron dashed off his epic poem, The Corsaire, in ten days. Published on 1 February, 1811, it sold 10,000 copies on the very first day. The poem inspired Berlioz to write an Overture and Verdi to write what many … Continue reading →

In the next four years there will be many plays, films, operas and ballets remembering the horrors of World War 1. The lost boy is J M Barrie’s Peter Pan, the boy who wouldn’t grow up because he wanted to … Continue reading →

Ann Henning Jocelyn’s ponderous play about bridging the gap between Catholics and Protestants, and between stroppy children and their parents, begins in 1922 with the War of Irish Independence and ends in the present day. The plodding dialogue feels like … Continue reading →

Shakespeare’s last tragedy, the most political of all his plays, was written in 1607, a time of rioting and civil unrest in England. It has rarely been popular with the general theatregoer and usually works best in times of national … Continue reading →

Anybody who was around in 1963 will still remember the great public scandal which brought down Harold Macmillan and the Conservative government. Lewis Morley’s iconic photograph of Christine Keeler sitting astride a chair in the nude, facing the camera, her … Continue reading →