Monthly Archives: April 2016

Of the 79 plays written by Alan Ayckbourn, How The Other Half Loves is one of his very best. There are three married couples: the airily vague upper middle-class (Nichols Le Prevost and Jenny Seagrove); the stridently vulgar middle-class (Tamzin … Continue reading →

There must surely be better plays for James Norton and Kate Fleetwood to perform than Tracy Letts’ claustrophobic Bug, a bizarre psychodrama, which premiered 20 years ago and which fails to grip in Simon Evans’ production. The most horrific moment … Continue reading →

Quebecois actress Catherine-Anne Toupin’s erotic psychodrama tries to find comedy in a mother suffering from postnatal depression and succeeds only in being crude and irritating.

Neil LaBute’s plays are normally cruel, violent, cynical and misanthropic; but Reasons To Be Happy is a sequel to Reasons To Be Pretty (which was staged at the Almeida by Michael Attenborough in 2011) and is in the same gentle … Continue reading →

Barrie Rutter’s touring production of Shakespeare’s farce is a partnership between Northern Broadsides in Halifax and The New Vic Theatre in Newcastle-under-Lyme. The merry middle-class wives are no longer living in Windsor in the late 1590’s. They have moved to … Continue reading →

Daniel Everett, an evangelical Christian and an academic linguist, spent three decades in the Amazonian forest among the Piraha tribe in the late 1970’s. He learned their unwritten language, a formidable task, and then tried to convert them to Christianity. … Continue reading →