Beckett
Arresting and memorable: Compagnie Maguy Marin’s May B reviewed
Samuel Beckett was notoriously reluctant to let people muck about with his work, so it’s somewhat surprising to learn that…
Every crumb of Kurtag’s music is a feast: Endgame, at the Proms, reviewed
The fun starts early in Beckett’s Endgame. Within minutes of opening his mouth, blind bully Hamm decides to starve his…
Godot Is a Woman will have you laughing all evening and arguing all night
Godot Is a Woman opens with three tramps standing on a bare stage beneath a solitary upright. This isn’t Samuel…
A mesmerising piece of theatre: On Blueberry Hill reviewed
On Blueberry Hill sounds like a musical but it’s a sombre prison drama set in Ireland. Two bunkbeds. Above, an…
One of the last living avant-gardists speaks – Gyorgy Kurtag on his new Beckett opera
Arriving in Budapest, I receive a summons I cannot refuse. Gyorgy Kurtag wants to see me. Famously elusive, the last…
Washed-up junkies, Trump the director and a cash giveaway: Edinburgh Festival round-up
Trump Lear is a chaotically enjoyable one-man show with a complicated premise. David Carl, an American satirist, has arrived on…
Verbal diarrhoea
In Beckett’s Happy Days a prattling Irish granny is buried waist-deep, and later neck-deep, in a refuse tip whose detritus…
Deep learning
Given the brilliance of his career as a fiction-writer, it is easy to forget that J.M. Coetzee has a commensurate…
Patrick Marber’s Red Lion at the Dorfman reviewed: ‘the woman next to me yawned a lot’
For nine years Patrick Marber has grappled with writer’s block (which by some miracle doesn’t affect his screenplay work), but…
