Monthly Archives: April 2016

THE CARETAKER, which premiered in 1961 with Donald Pleasance in the lead, was Harold Pinter’s first commercial success and instantly established him as a major playwright. Since then Davies, the dirty old tramp has been played by such actors as … Continue reading →

David Ireland’s Cyprus Avenue, directed by Vicky Featherstone, is a joint production with Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Irish playwrights have a long tradition of mixing comedy and violence. Eric, a Belfast Loyalist, still living in the past and fighting old battles, … Continue reading →

Alistair McDowall’s X may appeal to Sci-Fi fans but the cinema does this sort of thing so much better. A British crew at a research station in space, orbiting Pluto, has lost contact with Earth. There is nothing for them … Continue reading →

Tennessee Williams’ heyday was the 1950’s and he had been long out of fashion with the public and the critics when he wrote In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, a highly autobiographical piece about the humiliating and unavoidable doom … Continue reading →

The Painkiller is based on Francis Veber’s classic French farce, Le Contrat, which premiered in Paris in 1969 and is probably best known in the UK as A Pain in the Ass, the highly successful 1973 film version with Lino … Continue reading →

Florian Zeller, the multi-award winning French novelist and playwright, is having a big success in Paris and London. Audiences who have enjoyed his plays, The Father and The Mother, can now catch up on one of his earlier works, The … Continue reading →

This American musical written by three Brit, Adam Long, Gabriel Vick and Alex Jackson-Long, could have been a real blast had it been written 60 years ago; but a satire written so long after the event seems a bit odd … Continue reading →

Glenn Close played Norma Desmond on Broadway in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard in 1993 when she was 46 and won a Tony Award. 23 years on she returns to the role in a semi-staged production by Lonny Price and … Continue reading →