Theatre
National Theatre’s 3 Winters: a hideous Balkans ballyhoo
A masterpiece at the National. A masterpiece of persuasion and bewitchment. Croatian word-athlete Tena Stivicic has miraculously convinced director Howard…
Penelope Lively’s notebook: Coal holes and pub opera
I have been having my vault done over. Not, as you might think, the family strong room, but the place…
The recruitment company to go to if you've got no arms or legs
When to launch? For impresarios, this is the eternal dilemma. Autumn is so crowded with press nights that producers are…
Yanks buy stacks of tickets in the West End. Why is Made in Dagenham so rude to them?
Go slow at Dagenham. The musical based on the film about a pay dispute in the 1960s starts as a…
To call this offering a book is an abuse of language
I picked up this book with real enthusiasm. Who cannot be entranced by those 20 years after the second world…
Russians made the theatre space the most liberating imaginative device ever invented
You have to hand it to the Russians. They beat us into space, beat us to sexual equality, and a…
Neville's Island: a play from the era of Men Behaving Badly - when women were seen as exotic excrescences
Start with a joke. Neville’s Island. Get it? Laughing yet? Are your ribs splitting into pieces? It’s a cracker, isn’t…
Is London's West End Jewish enough for David Baddiel’s musical The Infidel?
David Baddiel has turned his movie, The Infidel, into a musical. The set-up is so contrived and clumsy that it…
Were the cast of the Old Vic’s Electra clothed by Oxfam?
First, a bit of background. Conquering Agamemnon slew his daughter, Iphigenia, in return for a fair wind to Troy. This…
Will Marti Pellow attract enough tipsy hen parties to Evita to flog all 18,000 seats?
Tim and Andy are back. Their monster hit Evita opens the fully refurbed and re-primped Dominion Theatre, which is built…
I’m disappointed this director didn’t plunge the knife into Dustin Hoffman
At the age of 75, the theatre director Michael Rudman has got around to his memoirs, their title taken from…
If you have teenage boys who loathe the very idea of theatre, send them to The Play That Goes Wrong
It’s taken a while but here it is. The Play That Goes Wrong is like Noises Off, but simpler. Michael…
Can the Scots really be as small-minded, mistrustful and chippy as Spoiling suggests?
Referendum fever reaches Stratford East. Spoiling, by John McCann, takes us into the corridors of power in Holyrood shortly after…
Dolts, Doormats and FGM: theatre to make you physically sick
Wow. What an experience. A 1991 movie named Dogfight has spawned a romantic musical. We’re in San Francisco in 1963.…
Alex Salmond has already lost — if the Edinburgh Festival is anything to go by
Lloyd Evans tours the Edinburgh Festival in search of clues about the outcome of the referendum
An innocent graduate of Operation Yewtree, Jim Davidson, dazzles in Edinburgh
Let’s start with a nightmare. Wendy Wason, an Edinburgh comedienne, travelled to LA last year accompanied by her husband, who…
You’re never too old, they say. But I am
For my 49th birthday treat, I went to see Shakespeare in Love at the Noël Coward theatre in London. Expensive…
Lillian Hellman lied her way through life
Lillian Hellman must be a maddening subject for a biographer. The author Mary McCarthy’s remark that ‘every word she writes…
Churchill was as mad as a badger. We should all be thankful
The egotistical Churchill may have viewed the second world war as pure theatre, but that was exactly what was needed at the time, says Sam Leith
The summer of love
I spent it skipping about in tights, imagining women wanted me
Jeffrey Archer’s diary: My personal trainer only smiles when I’m in pain
The week leading up to publication is a strange time for any author. You subject yourself to doing everything from…
Tim Rice’s diary: From Eternity to here
Last October, in these very pages, I wrote with what is now annoying prescience, ‘Like almost everyone else in the…
Any other business: Britain’s chaotic energy policy puts us in Putin’s hands
To have written last month that the headline ‘Kiev in flames’ looked like a black swan on the economic horizon…
Simon Callow’s notebook: What it’s like to lose at an awards ceremony
It was one of those weeks. On Monday, I was in four countries: I woke up at crack of dawn…
Penelope Lively’s diary: My old-age MOT
My surgery has been calling in all those over 75 for a special session with their doctor — a sort…
