Monthly Archives: April 2014

Mike Bartlett’s clever future history play is the best and wittiest British play about a constitutional crisis since the premiere of Bernard Shaw’s The Applecart in 1928. The surprise is that it is written in blank verse. The dialogue is … Continue reading →

Arthur Miller’s great play, which premiered in 1956, is in the tragic Greek classical mould, even to a Chorus; but the drama is firmly rooted in a 20th century American immigrant working class reality. Belgian director Ivo van Hove’s production … Continue reading →

Noel Coward’s comedy was never that good. It felt dreadfully old-fashioned, even at its premiere in 1951. It was, as Coward himself acknowledges, the sort of comedy of manners which Somerset Maugham might have written in the 1920’s. It feels … Continue reading →

The Russian choreographer Boris Eifman’s psychological two-act ballet is about the life and work of the great French sculptor and his disciple, mistress and muse, Camille Claude, a sculptress in her own right, who was never given the recognition and … Continue reading →

Julian Mitchell quotes Cyril Connelly’s Enemies of the People at the beginning of his published text: “The greater part of the ruling class, remain adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowards, sentimental and, in the last analysis, homosexual.” Another Country premiered in 1987 … Continue reading →

Alan Ayckbourn’s modern morality play, which satirized the materialism of Thatcher’s Britain, returns to the Olivier Theatre where it premiered in 1987. Everybody steals. Everybody bends the rules. Shop-lifting, swindling, bribing, blackmailing, industrial espionage, large-scale fraud; you name it, these … Continue reading →

Everybody is in love with the wrong person. Anton Chekhov’s great play is a bitter tirade against life’s injustices, its unrealized dreams and its opportunities missed: “What is to become of us? Life is slipping by and it will never … Continue reading →

To mark the centenary of the outbreak of World War 1 Tamara Rojo, artistic director of English National Ballet, commissioned three choreographers, Liam Scarlett, Russell Malaphant and Akram Khan, to create three ballets. Her aim, she said, was to challenge … Continue reading →