playwrights
Cost of Living, Hampstead Theatre review - tough but tenderFriday, 01 February 2019
The Off Broadway production of Cost of Living two years ago brought Martyna Majok the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the height of acclaim of which most new writers – Majok, with four plays behind her, has yet to turn 35 – can only dream. High... Read more... |
When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other, Dorfman Theatre review - Cate Blanchett's underwhelming debut at the NationalThursday, 24 January 2019
When it was announced that Cate Blanchett was making her National Theatre debut with Martin's Crimp's new play, When We have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other, its website exploded with people wishing to buy tickets. To those many thousands... Read more... |
Imagine... James Graham, BBC One review - deft analysis of a working lifeTuesday, 22 January 2019
How does an unassuming 36-year-old with a terrifyingly sensible haircut and a mildly flamboyant taste in jumpers become the political playwright par excellence of his generation? That’s the question that Alan Yentob sought to dissect in this first... Read more... |
Approaching Empty, Kiln Theatre review - more minicab than UberTuesday, 15 January 2019
Write what you know, says the adage, and that's exactly what playwright Ishy Din has done with his new play, Approaching Empty, now at the Kiln in Kilburn. The middle-aged Middlesbrough-born writer, who has had a handful of casual jobs (retail,... Read more... |
Macbeth, Shakespeare's Globe review - sexually-charged production draws power from the shadowsThursday, 15 November 2018
Macbeth has rarely seemed quite as metrosexual as in this gorgeous shadow-painted production that marks Globe artistic director Michelle Terry’s first production in the Sam Wanamaker theatre. Even in a play that walks the tightrope between its... Read more... |
A Very Very Very Dark Matter, Bridge Theatre review - black comedy falls flatThursday, 25 October 2018
It's all in the title, isn't it? Martin McDonagh's surreal new play comes with a warning that not only screams its intentions, but echoes them through repetition. Okay, okay, I get it. This is going to be a dark story, a very very very dark story.... Read more... |
Stories, National Theatre review - comic conception capersThursday, 18 October 2018
In 2017, playwright Nina Raine's Consent, an excellent National Theatre play about lawyers and rape victims, was hugely successful, winning a West End transfer, as well as generating a lot of discussion about gender politics. Her follow up, Stories... Read more... |
Parents' Evening, Jermyn Street Theatre - chemistry so negligible it's antisepticThursday, 11 October 2018
The playwright Bathsheba Doran has blazed a stellar trail ever since graduating from Cambridge at the same time as David Mitchell and Robert Webb. After writing for them on the sketch show Bruiser, she earned her spurs as a comedy writer on Smack... Read more... |
The Sweet Science of Bruising, Southwark Playhouse review - boxing cleverSaturday, 06 October 2018
There are not that many plays about sport, but, whether you gamble on results or not, you can bet that most of them are about boxing. And often set in the past. Joy Wilkinson's superb new drama, The Sweet Science of Bruising, comes to the Southwark... Read more... |
Sketching, Wilton's Music Hall, review - less a dynamic babble than a disconsolate babelWednesday, 03 October 2018
It sounds like a marriage made in heaven. Charles Dickens and James Graham – both great chroniclers of the ambitions, hypocrisies, and eccentricities of their respective ages – have been brought together to tell London’s story through... Read more... |
The Outsider, Print Room at the Coronet review - power in restraintThursday, 20 September 2018
As the Syrian conflict enters its final convulsions, renewing memories of how the Sykes-Picot agreement – between an Englishman and a Frenchman – would cause more than a century of political resentment in the Arab world, The Outsider seems... Read more... |
An Adventure, Bush Theatre review - epic but flawedSaturday, 15 September 2018
Director Madani Younis, who since 2011 has transformed the Bush Theatre in West London into one of London's most outstanding Off-West End venues, is leaving in December, on his way to becoming the creative director of the Southbank Centre. For his... Read more... |
