Monthly Archives: November 2016

Glenda Jackson at 80 has returned to the stage after a 25 year absence to play King Lear, one of the most exhausting roles in the theatrical canon. Deborah Warner’s modern dress production lasts three and a half hours including … Continue reading →

Comus, John Milton’s elaborate masque in honour of chastity, temperance, faith and honour, is very rarely performed these days and is exactly the sort of courtly entertainment the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse should be staging. The masque was commissioned by the … Continue reading →

Stephen Daldry’s 1992 legendary National Theatre production is revived. JB Priestley’s old warhorse, which has been given an amazing new lease of life with stunning surreal theatricality, is arguably, the best murder mystery since Sophocles’ Oedipus. The tension comes from … Continue reading →

Ivo van Hove’s over-lauded, in memoriam production of David Bowie’s Off-Broadway jukebox musical, Lazarus, is now in London. Bowie had given the definitive performance of the dying alien who couldn’t die in Nicolas Roeg’s film of Walter Tevis’s The Man … Continue reading →

Humour is a funny thing and it’s not always funny. I think a lot of audiences are going to be surprised at just how serious Terry Johnson’s Dead Funny is. The actors are highly accomplished comedians. I had forgotten just … Continue reading →

I wouldn’t wish Melly Still’s dystopian production of Cymbeline for the RSC on any one. Shakespeare’s implausible, convoluted and interminable romance cries out to be cut. Too much of it is indifferently acted and punishingly boring.

Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus is based on the legend that Antonio Salieri, composer to the court of Emperor Joseph II of Austria, had murdered Mozart. The legend was created by Salieri himself on his death-bed in 1825. Deeply jealous that God … Continue reading →

I should perhaps point out that The Red Barn has nothing to with the sensational murder in the old red barn in Suffolk in 1827 which caught the imagination of the public to such a degree that there were plays … Continue reading →