playwrights
'Why we understand each other': Peter Gill on The York RealistMonday, 12 February 2018
Fingers on buzzers… Question: What’s the connection between Days of Wine and Roses, Small Change, Making Noise Quietly and Versailles? Answer: They’re all past Donmar productions directed by Peter Gill.But it’s not just his directing skill – no one... Read more... |
The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk, Kneehigh on tour review - sweetest musical ChagallianaThursday, 25 January 2018
Time flies so much more beguilingly in Daniel Jamieson and Emma Rice's 90-minute musical fantasia than it ever has, for me, in Bock and Harnick's Fiddler on the Roof – and the songs aren't bad, either. The inspiration here – and inspiration's the... Read more... |
The Birthday Party, Harold Pinter Theatre review - starry cast create a stunning masterpieceFriday, 19 January 2018
Is modernism dead and buried? Anyone considering the long haul of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party from resounding flop in 1958 to West End crowd-pleasing classic today might be forgiven for wondering whether self-consciously difficult literary... Read more... |
Best of 2017: TheatreSaturday, 30 December 2017
Year-end wrap-ups function as both remembrances of things past and time capsules, attempts to preserve an experience to which audiences, for the most part, have said farewell. (It's different, of course, for films, which remain available to us... Read more... |
Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle, Wyndham’s Theatre review – paradoxically predictableTuesday, 10 October 2017
Playwright Simon Stephens and director Marianne Elliott are hyped as a winning partnership. Their previous collaborations include The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a massive Olivier award-winning hit, and her sensitive revival of... Read more... |
The Blinding Light, Jermyn Street Theatre, review – Jasper Britton is fascinatingly febrileWednesday, 13 September 2017
Anyone who likes playing “Spot the weirdo” will find themselves instantly at home in Howard Brenton’s new play, which has its world premiere in this West End fringe venue, a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus. Its subject is Swedish playwright and... Read more... |
The 'self-experimenter': Howard Brenton on Strindberg in crisisMonday, 04 September 2017
I wrote The Blinding Light to try to understand the mental and spiritual crisis that August Strindberg suffered in February 1896. Deeply disturbed, plagued by hallucinations, he holed up in various hotel rooms in Paris, most famously in the Hotel... Read more... |
Knives in Hens, Donmar Warehouse review – Yaël Farber not symbolic enoughWednesday, 23 August 2017
Hark, is that the call of the earth I hear? In a frenetic urban world, the myth of rural simplicity exerts a strong pull. Surely a simpler life is possible; a more natural rhythm and a slower pace? Oh yes, I can smell burnt peat, and almost scent... Read more... |
When Sam Shepard was a LondonerMonday, 31 July 2017
Sam Shepard came to live in London in 1971, nursing ambitions to be a rock musician. When he went home three years later, he was soon to be found on the drumstool of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder tour. But in between, not long after he arrived in... Read more... |
'You win in the end!' Deborah Bruce introduces her play 'The House They Grew Up In'Friday, 14 July 2017
My inspiration for The House They Grew Up In, my new play at Chichester Festival Theatre came about five years ago, in the café of an art gallery near my house. This café had a slightly intimidating air, full of its own importance, as if the art in... Read more... |
Bodies, Royal Court review – pregnant with meaningWednesday, 12 July 2017
Surrogacy is an emotionally fraught subject. The arrangement by which one woman gives birth to another’s baby challenges traditional notions of motherhood, and pitches the anguish of the woman who can’t have children herself against the agony of... Read more... |
Hir, Bush Theatre review – transgender home is sub-primeWednesday, 21 June 2017
Donald Trump’s electoral success was, we have been told, fuelled by the anger of the American working class. But how do you show that kind of anger on stage, and how do you criticise its basis in traditional masculinity? One way, and this is the... Read more... |
