Monthly Archives: November 2014

Shakespeare’s bitter-sweet comedy is famous for its unrequited love and the heartbreak it brings with it. The characters are all victims of their ambiguous romantic fantasies. The way that Jonathan Munby’s interesting production for English Touring Theatre begins and ends, … Continue reading →

A great Norman church, London’s oldest church, founded in 1129, with its vast, dark Romanesque interior, is a good venue to perform the most celebrated of all medieval morality plays. Written in naive rhyming couplets with humour and pathos, and … Continue reading →

The relationship between the public and the police force has come a long way since Sir Robert Peel in 1829 and indeed since Jack Warner and Dixon of Dock Green in 1955. The major difference is that the police no … Continue reading →

Alistair McDowall’s deliberately obscure surreal thriller, full of obscenities, may appeal to those who play video games and board games and flick through YouTube videos at speed; but it is unlikely to appeal to the Orange Tree’s core audience.

The American composer and lyricist Irving Berlin died in 1989 aged 101. He had written songs for 30 Broadway shows and 17 Hollywood films. He had published 3,000 songs. Not bad, as he said, for a poor immigrant boy who … Continue reading →

Premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1982 Stephen MacDonald’s play has had numerous revivals ever since. There are just two characters: Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. The Great War poets met at Craiglockhart Army Hospital in Scotland in mid-August 1917 … Continue reading →

In the Royal Court’s heyday, when Harley Granville Barker ran the theatre between 1904 and 1907, theatregoers could have seen plays by Shaw, Euripides, Hauptmann, Yeats, Schnitzler, Ibsen and Maeterlinck. What can they see today? They can see a play … Continue reading →

In 1968 the female machinists, who were working at the Ford plant at Dagenham, went on strike for equal pay and caused a national crisis. There are two ways you can do a strike on stage and film. You can … Continue reading →