Theatre
Hold on, should we actors really be speaking for trans people?
Should actors be speaking for trans people?
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?…
Nottingham resuscitates a classic of the 60s literary avant-garde
Peter Robins reports from Nottingham on a unique adaptation of a novel by the literary innovator B.S. Johnson
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…
Theatre and transgression in Europe’s last dictatorship
Juan Holzmann goes underground in Minsk with the Belarus Free Theatre
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…
The Old Vic’s Pit Bar has fallen to the hipsters – Penny reviewed
Penny is an all-day café in the former Pit Bar in the basement of the Old Vic, a famous and…
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…
Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet is far too nice
You can’t play the part of Hamlet, only parts of Hamlet. And the bits Benedict Cumberbatch offers us are of…
Theatre, gossip and Guinness: the craic of Dublin
What a delight it is to toy with a wooden newspaper-holder rather than a smartphone, tucked away in the cosy…
Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses is being staged without a single black actor. So what?
Trevor Nunn is staging Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses without a single black actor. So what, says Robert Gore-Langton
The Magic Flute has never made more cartoonish sense - an Edinburgh Festival roundup
London may cry foul over Hamlet’s misplaced to-be-ing and not-to-be-ing but Edinburgh is in raptures over a Magic Flute which…
Our Country’s Good prizes the concerns of the actors over the audience
Australia, 1788. A transport ship arrives in Port Jackson (later Sydney harbour) carrying hundreds of convicts and a detachment of…
The Heckler: the disingenuous custom of the ‘press night’ should be scrapped
Sam Mendes once said there is no such thing as the history of British theatre, only the history of British…
How common is adultery? Much more common than getting caught
How many cheats? More data on members of extramarital dating site Ashley Madison were put online. How widespread is adultery?…
Edinburgh Fringe highlights: world-class improv, Bible study and an hour with a gentle genius
Showstopper! The Improvised Musical offers a brand new song-and-dance spectacular at every performance. It opens with a brilliantly chaotic piece…
‘People are interested in what I’m doing again’: Robert Lepage interviewed
The visionary theatremaker Robert Lepage is back in Edinburgh after a 20-year absence. Matt Trueman talks to him about trends and legacies
Feels like Chekhov scripted by a Chekhov app: Three Days in the Country at the Lyttleton reviewed
Chekhov so dominates 19th-century Russian drama that Turgenev doesn’t get much of a look-in. His best known play, A Month…
