Monthly Archives: October 2015

Director Joe Hill-Gibbins, with an abridged text and much use of video and rock music, gives Shakespeare’s mordant satire on the tyranny of the flesh, a radical rehaul, which will amuse and irritate in equal (er) measure. It opens with … Continue reading →

Anthony Biggs, artistic director of Jermyn Street Theatre, stages the UK premiere of Eugene O’Neill’s The First Man. The play’s failure in 1922 is, perhaps, not surprising. The leading character, an anthropologist (Adam Jackson-Smith) is totally unsympathetic and indulges in … Continue reading →

An American college student commits suicide. Did he commit suicide because he is gay? Is homophobia rife at university and what can be done to change the culture? American playwright Christopher Shinn’s polemic is based on a true incident. Teddy … Continue reading →

THE WARS OF THE ROSES, adapted by Peter Hall and John Barton from the three parts of Shakespeare’s Henry VI and Richard III, was premiered by the RSC in 1963 and has not been seen since then. Trevor Nunn’s fluid … Continue reading →

Rule Number One is you don’t mess around with Medea, especially if you are her ex. She’s liable to kill your new wife and murder your children. I am not sure why Euripides’s name is billed first . Sure, he … Continue reading →

There was a time in the 1960s and 1970s when Marguerite Duras’s intellectual plays were all the rage in France. English audiences tended to be bored stiff by them. In this her one-act two-hander Emily Barclay and Sam Troughton, cast … Continue reading →

One of the very first things King Charles II did when he returned from exile in 1660 was to reopen the theatres. Following his father’s execution, they had been officially closed by the Puritans since 1642. Actresses appeared on the … Continue reading →

Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, published in 1847, is based on her own passions, dreams, frustrations and rebellion against a lonely and monotonous life. It remains one of the most popular novels of the 19th century. First staged in 1848, there … Continue reading →