Those nostalgic for a time when the Haymarket offered big names in well-upholstered plays will have a field day at Grace Pervades, in which David Hare furthers his relationship with Ralph Fiennes. Their partnership includes Straight Line Crazy here and in New York and the solo play Beat the Devil, in which Fiennes actually played the dramatist (15 years his senior) in the tale of Hare's battle with COVID. This play inhabits notionally less troubled times in its story of two titans of the Victorian era, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, the latter of whom was the great-aunt of the legendary Read more ...

I’m a latecomer to John Robins and Elis James’s hugely popular podcast, having only started to listen during a period of illness last year, when I quickly became hooked. The two (plus producer Dave) have an appealing chemistry that makes them a pleasure to spend time with. Prior to that I was aware of Robins as champion of series 17 of Taskmaster – a perennial favourite in my household – but had not seen his stand-up. Although his stage and podcast persona is of an obsessive neurotic driven mad by the petty obstacles in the path of everyday life, this new memoir narrates the more significant Read more ...

The USA was still months short of Pearl Harbour’s shove into World War II when Bertholt Brecht wrote The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. It was many years into a Cold War by the time it was first staged in 1958. It will need a historian of the future to draft the next sentence, the one that heralds its revival at the RSC in 2026. But we were all thinking, and worrying about what exactly it would say – as Brecht intended.After a prologue and some banners (the more intrusive Brechtian stylings mercifully largely left behind after that) we’re introduced to the fat cats of the Chicago cauliflower Read more ...

David Pearson’s debut play, Firewing, part of Hampstead Theatre’s INSPIRE project for emerging writers, is a heartfelt two-hander about the importance of passing stuff on.“Stuff” is a key word in the dialogue, the portmanteau word with which a young man called Marcus (Charlie Beck, pictured below right) pads out his sentences, a sign of his unfinished education. He has now found a mentor, Tim (Gerard Horan, pictured below left), an older man who is steadily filling in some of the gaps. Marcus, we learn, is a son devoted to a mother who loves to paint but seems to have been felled by Read more ...

How do you adapt a book like The Waves? A terrifying idea, and one I could not get out of my brain, from the moment the director Jùlia Levai asked if I had ever considered doing it.For those who haven’t had the joy of reading it yet (and I would highly recommend doing so!), Virginia Woolf's experimental 1931 novel follows six friends from childhood to middle age, in as many stream of consciousness monologues covering the events of their lives, and also their musings on the cosmos, on past lives, on making art, trying to find purpose, surviving grief. These are all combined with huge, Woolfian Read more ...

Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius is generally discussed and judged – and judgment, of course, stands at the heart of the work – by those who love, indeed revere, without any caveats this journey of the soul through death. For a long time, this reviewer could not. Even now, I can understand some Anglican bishops’ reluctance to have the work played in their cathedrals in the 1900s. Perhaps that revealed not simply small-minded anti-Catholic prejudice (the default critical position) but a credible resistance to the cruel doctrine of Purgatory. God has forgiven you, has already assured Read more ...

One of the most resonant contemporary slogans is “Build bridges not walls”. Because it applies to the personal as well the political, it has the force of simplicity and directness. The way that building walls can be psychologically destructive, cutting a person off from emotional connection, is exemplified in Mancunian playwright Kit Withington’s new family play, Heart Wall, currently on the main stage at the Bush Theatre. Once part of this venue’s Emerging Writers’ Group, Withington now returns with a distinctly Northern voice – and a work which has power and subtlety, but also some problems Read more ...

The new version of Ibsen’s classic by Anya Reiss at the Almeida prompted me to wonder at times whether wrenching a play out of its era and transposing it to a contemporary setting is worth doing.The Almeida has fielded a strong cast for this updating, directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins, in a set by Hyemi Shin that cleverly uses the theatre’s unadorned brick walls as a contemporary design feature, along with a giant square skylight overhead like a James Turrell light sculpture. The place reeks of an empty kind of affluence – partly because the Helmers have just moved in and haven’t finished Read more ...

Stories about slavery tend to be simplistic: white perpetrators are bad, black victims good. One of the more striking features of Winsome Pinnock’s new play, The Authenticator, is her insistence that reality is always more complicated. Staged in the Dorfman space of the National Theatre, this production signals the playwright’s return here after her success with Rockets and Blue Lights in 2021, and reunites her with its director Miranda Cromwell. But does the complexity of real life undermine the inherent drama of this fictional tale?Well, the situation is simple: Fenella Harford is an Read more ...

The baldness of the titles the writer-director Stefan Golaszewski gives his TV series — Him & Her, Mum, Marriage and now Babies — is a misleading guide to the subtlety of their contents. These are, admittedly, Marmite dramas; but for those who love them, they are also finely crafted forays into the everyday existence of most humans today.Marmite actually features in Babies, in a scene midway through its six hour-long episodes in which Stephen (Paapa Essiedu) is munching one of the many slices of toast he gets through, this one smeared with Marmite. Which his wife Lisa (Siobhàn Cullen) Read more ...

It’s hard to describe this hot mess of a film without divulging the entire plot. And even if you did, you’d struggle to convey the scabrous psychosexual atmosphere, or summarise the thematic currents that swirl beneath the surface. As director Peter Medak says in one of the interviews on this typically well-stocked BFI disc, “It's too complicated to explain."The basic setup is simple, though: Theo (Peter McEnery, pictured below right) and Vivien (Glenda Jackson) live above Theo’s father’s antiques shop in a down-at-heel corner of West London. They pass the time by indulging in what today Read more ...

In its heyday, Rodney Ackland’s 1935 play The Old Ladies, adapted from a 1924 novel by Hugh Walpole, was a favourite with doyennes of the theatre world including Edith Evans, Flora Robson and Miriam Karlin. But it has languished unstaged in London for more than 30 years.The Finborough is to be congratulated for giving it another go-round as a stage play, though it's a piece that deserves to be filmed. It also makes a spooky radio play, as you can hear in the BBC Radio adaptation of the novel with Edith Evans as Agatha (available online). In the small confines of the Finborough it builds up a Read more ...