Polly Teale interview: Cuts are making the theatre ‘a place where you can only survive if you are from a privileged background’
Lloyd Evans talks to the good-natured theatre director Polly Teale
Memo to Nick Payne: filling your plays with cosmic chit-chat doesn’t make you intelligent
How do you write a play? Here’s one theory. Put a guy up a tree, throw rocks at him, get…
From Bletchley Park to Take Your Pick – this baroness’s memoir is a blast
Jean Trumpington’s memoir, published as she closes in on her 92nd birthday, is an absolute blast from the opening page.…
The Silver Tassie: a lavish, experimental muddle that slithers into a coma
The Silver Tassie is the major opening at the Lyttelton this spring. Sean O’Casey’s rarely staged play introduces us to…
Everyone should see this pious anti-war monologue – seriously
Off to the Gate for a special treat: a pious anti-war monologue from the prize-winning American George Brant. Curtain up.…
The Guardian didn’t much like Noel Coward’s Relative Values – but you will
Cripes. How did I get that one wrong? A few issues back I blithely predicted that Harry Hill’s musical I…
The real original kitchen-sink drama
Rewrite the history books! Tradition tells us that kitchen-sink drama began in 1956 with Look Back in Anger. A season…
Another Country could almost be a YouTube advert for Eton
Another Country was an instant response to Anthony Blunt’s exposure in 1979 as a Marxist spy. Julian Mitchell set out…
Beware of Banksy: his art can make you homeless
You may not have heard of Goldie. He’s an actor and singer whose name refers to the bullion with which…
Simon Cowell’s latest attempt at global domination
I Can’t Sing! is a parody of The X Factor, which already parodies itself at every turn. Quite a tough…
Why are Shakespeare’s women so feeble?
Shakespeare did not give his female characters pivotal roles, but some of his contemporaries did, as Lloyd Evans discovers
Where’s a goofy, flat-chested shrew when you need one?
Ray Cooney, the master of farce, is back. These days he’s in the modest Menier rather than the wonderful West…
A gaggle of husbands and a pair of piglets
Here’s a great idea for a play. Turn the polygamy principle upside-down and you get a female egoist presiding over…
If you're going to adapt a bestseller, don't choose the A-Z
What’s the quickest way to create a hit musical? Base it on a bestselling book. The writers of The A-Z…
Rape, porn and Cheesy Wotsits
Interesting times at Soho Theatre. One of its outstanding shows of last year, Fleabag, was an offbeat Gothic love story…
Superior Donuts – a very irritating success
Tracy Letts, of the Chicago company Steppenwolf, has written one of the best plays of the past ten years. August:…
Brave Tommies and dim earls — Oh What a Lovely War is hoity-toity reductionism
Here it is. Fifty years late. Oh What a Lovely War was originally staged at Stratford East in 1964. It…
Putin: ‘Oi, Europe, you’re a bunch of poofs’
Sochi 2014 is the least wintry Winter Olympics ever. Yes, there’s a bit of downhill shimmying going on in the…
A World Elsewhere hints it's about Bill Clinton. But it's about Al Gore
Why, oh why, the producers ask, are the national press so reluctant to cover the London fringe? The snag is…
Sam Mendes's King Lear is a must-see for masochists
Directors appear to have two design options when approaching a Shakespeare tragedy. Woodstock or jackboot. Woodstock means papal robes, shoulder-length…
If you can figure out the mind-boggling plot of Ciphers — join Mensa
Here’s a heartwarming tale from the London fringe. A company named Above the Stag was merrily plying its trade at…
The 'semi-detached' member of Margaret Thatcher's cabinet
John Biffen was mentally ill. This is the outstanding revelation of Semi-Detached, a memoir which has been assembled from his…
The play to watch if your country is breaking up
Of all the West End’s unloved venues the loveliest is the Arts Theatre. It specialises in creaky off-beat plays like…
The Duck House is the best show in the West End
It’s taken me a few months to catch up with the political farce The Duck House. Then again, it’s taken…
Get tickets for Emil and the Detectives, and opera glasses — some of the child actors are tiny
It starts with a brilliant joke. We’re in the Weimar Republic in 1929. Little Emil Tischbein is listening to his…
