Monthly Archives: May 2016

FLICK National Theatre Annie Baker’s award-winning play arrives in London with two of the original American actors, Matthew Maher and Louisa Krause, and their American director, Sam Gold. The setting is highly original: a bijou cinema with seven rows of … Continue reading →

ELEGY Donmar Theatre Globally, it is thought over 6 million are affected by dementia. Imagine what it would be like to be married to somebody for 25 years and then they no longer remember you at all. Nick Payne, author … Continue reading →

Christopher Marlowe’s classic enactment of sin and damnation, seen through the cynical eyes of an atheist, was written in an era when audiences would have taken Hell very seriously. Many years ago I saw a production in which Hell caught … Continue reading →

Funny Girl, the 1963 Broadway musical, with music by Julie Styne and lyrics by Bob Merrill, tells the story of Fanny Brice, a Yiddish burlesque comedienne and singer, who starred in 14 consecutive Ziegfeld Follies, the American equivalent of the … Continue reading →

Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s impressive touring epic, a conflation of Shakespeare’s Henry V, Henry VI and Richard III, directed by Ivo van Hove and acted in Dutch with English sur-titles is performed in modern dress. The action remains in the same spacious … Continue reading →

Written and performed by the team who staged The Play That Goes Wrong, it is often very funny; but it’s still very much in the workshop stage and needs some ruthless editing.

Jean Genet, delinquent, thief, poet, spent much of his life in reformatories and prison. So it isn’t surprising that the very first play he wrote should have a prison setting. Genet’s hallucinatory fantasies are fiendishly difficult to get right and … Continue reading →

Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin’ in the Sun and the first black and the youngest American to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play in 1949, was only 34 when she died in 1965. She … Continue reading →