Jean Genet’s fascinating play, The Maids, is botched at Trafalgar Studios
The Maids is a fascinating document. Written in 1947, Jean Genet’s drama portrays a pair of serving girls who enact…
Patriotic Traitor finds dramatic gold in France’s interwar history
Jonathan Lynn, co-author of Yes Minister, has excavated the history of France during the two world wars and discovered dramatic…
Sarah Kane's Cleansed is a thin, vicious pantomime
Big fuss about Cleansed at the Dorfman. Talk of nauseous punters rushing for the gangways may have perversely delighted the…
Kit-car Chekhov: Uncle Vanya at the Almeida reviewed
Director Robert Icke has this to say of Chekhov’s greatest masterpiece: ‘Let the electricity of now flow into the old…
The critics have it all wrong — Matthew Perry’s debut play is smart, stylish and sexy
Here’s how to set yourself up for a fall. You stage the world première of your debut play in the…
A great, weird play to rival Shakespeare: Old Vic's The Master Builder reviewed
The Master Builder, if done properly, can be one of those theatrical experiences that make you wonder if the Greeks…
The Mother is meaningless - I predict great things for it
Florian Zeller has been reading Pinter. And Pinter started out in repertory thrillers where suspense was created by delaying revelations…
Serious, popular art: Peter Shaffer's Five Finger Exercise reviewed
A beautiful crumbling theatre in Notting Hill is under threat. The Coronet, which bills itself as the Print Room, faces…
Is there a difference between being prejudiced and being a connoisseur of prejudice?
Paul Minx ventures boldly into Tennessee Williams country with The Long Road South. It’s 1965 and the Price family are…
Fun, disturbing and ultimately forgettable: Hangmen at Wyndhams reviewed
It begins with a sketch. We’re in a prison in 1963 where Harry Wade, the UK’s second most famous hangman,…
Damon Albarn’s wonder.land will not succeed at the National. It might work in Vegas
Damon Albarn and Rufus Norris present a musical version of Alice in Wonderland. A challenging enterprise even if they’d stuck…
A rare moment of transcendence at the Royal Court
Illness forced Kim Cattrall to withdraw from Linda, the Royal Court’s new show, and Noma Dumezweni scooped up the debris…
Tricycle’s Ben Hur is magnificent in its superficiality - a masterpiece of nothing
It’s the target that makes the satire as well as the satirist. Is the subject powerful, active, relevant and menacing?…
Awards await this mostly terrific new Homecoming
Jamie Lloyd’s production of Pinter’s The Homecoming is a pile of terrific and silly ideas. Mostly terrific. The action takes…
Why is there no one at the National Theatre preventing these duds getting staged?
Wallace Shawn is a lovely old sausage. A stalwart of American theatre, he’s taken cameo roles in classic movies like…
Kenneth Branagh’s The Winter’s Tale is better than any I can recall
Kenneth Branagh opens his West End tenancy with Shakespeare’s inexplicably popular The Winter’s Tale. We start in Sicily where Leontes…
How did this plotless goon-show wind up at the Royal Court?
One of the challenges of art is to know the difference between innovation and error. I wonder sometimes if the…
Glyndebourne caters to the lower-middle classes not past-it toffs
What is Glyndebourne? A middle-aged Bullingdon. That’s a common view: a luxury bun fight for past-it toffs who glug champagne,…
Turning Alzheimer’s into theatre is like building a surfboard out of sawdust
Here are three truths about play-writing. A script without an interval will be structurally flawed. A vague, whimsical title means…
Shakespeare at his freest and most exuberant: The Wars of the Roses reviewed
The RSC’s The Wars of the Roses solves a peculiar literary problem. Shakespeare’s earliest history plays are entitled Henry VI…
The set's better than the characterisation: The Father at the Wyndham's reviewed
The Father, set in a swish Paris apartment, has a beautifully spare and elegant set. The stage is framed by…
It may have a meagre script and no plot but Farinelli and the King is still a major work of art
Philippe V was a Bourbon prince who secured the throne of Spain using his family connections. Claire van Kampen is…
Half-brilliant: Mr Foote’s Other Leg at Hampstead Theatre reviewed
Samuel Foote (1720–77) was a star of the 18th-century stage who avoided the censors by extemporising his performances. Today we’d…
Nicole Kidman is upstaged by everyone - even the set: Photograph 51 at the Noel Coward reviewed
Michael Grandage’s latest show is about an old snap. Geneticists regard the X-ray of the hydrated ‘B’ form of DNA…
The Globe's Oresteia lets Aeschylus speak - the Almeida's muzzles him
To examine an ancient text requires an understanding of the ancient imagination. The Oresteia is set in a primitive world…
