new writing
Venus in Fur, Theatre Royal Haymarket review - pain and pleasure in a starry two-handerWednesday, 18 October 2017
A hit on Broadway, David Ives’s steamy two-hander now boasts Natalie Dormer and David Oakes, well-known for their screen work, in its West End cast, with Patrick Marber on directing duties. That plus the tabloid panting over Dormer’s skimpy S&M... Read more... |
Albion, Almeida Theatre, review – Victoria Hamilton’s epic performanceWednesday, 18 October 2017
Prolific writer Mike Bartlett is the most impressive penman to have emerged in British theatre in the past decade. The trouble is that his work is so uneven. Although he wrote the amazingly imaginative play, Earthquakes in London, and the... Read more... |
Beginning, National Theatre review - assured, intimate, but short of surprisesSaturday, 14 October 2017
Loneliness: in the age of the digital hook-up and the flaunting narcissism of social media, it’s become a strange sort of taboo – a secret shame, the unsexy side of singledom. So it’s good to see playwright David Eldridge putting it centre-stage in... Read more... |
The Busy World Is Hushed, Finborough Theatre review - new play puts the G-word centre stageFriday, 13 October 2017
God makes few appearances at the modern playhouse – so few that the Finborough Theatre saw fit to print a glossary in the programme for its latest production. What begins with Agnostic, Annunciation and Aramaic runs all the way to Spirit Guide,... Read more... |
Saint George and the Dragon, National Theatre review – a modern folk tale in the OlivierThursday, 12 October 2017
Bold and fearless are adjectives that might describe playwright Rory Mullarkey as accurately as any chivalrous knight. He made his name in 2013 when, at the age of 25, his play Cannibals, part of which was in Russian, took to the main stage at the... Read more... |
'I come from there': how the Royal Court brought home plays from Ukraine, Chile and SyriaWednesday, 11 October 2017
The autumn season of plays at the Royal Court leads with international work. B by Guillermo Calderón (from Chile), Bad Roads by Natal'ya Vorozhbit (from Ukraine) and Goats by Liwaa Yazji (from Syria) have a long history with our international... Read more... |
Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle, Wyndham’s Theatre review – paradoxically predictableTuesday, 10 October 2017
Playwright Simon Stephens and director Marianne Elliott are hyped as a winning partnership. Their previous collaborations include The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a massive Olivier award-winning hit, and her sensitive revival of... Read more... |
Victory Condition, Royal Court review - Ballardian vision of the contemporaryTuesday, 10 October 2017
What does it mean to feel contemporary? Feel. Contemporary. According to theatre-maker Chris Thorpe, whose new play Victory Condition has just opened at the Royal Court in tandem with Guillermo Calderón’s B, being contemporary is a really disturbing... Read more... |
The Lie, Menier Chocolate Factory review - fake news, real feelingMonday, 09 October 2017
A year after premiering acclaimed French playwright Florian Zeller’s The Truth, the Menier Chocolate Factory now hosts The Lie – which, as the name suggests, acts as a companion piece of sorts. Once again, we’re in a slippery Pinteresque realm... Read more... |
Labour of Love, Noël Coward Theatre, review - Martin Freeman and Tamsin Greig labour in vainWednesday, 04 October 2017
Prolific playwright James Graham aspires to be nothing if not timely. His latest, a play about the Labour Party, was originally due to open during the week of that party’s conference, when our ears were once again ringing to the chant of “Oh, Jeremy... Read more... |
B, Royal Court review - intriguing, ironical, but flawedTuesday, 03 October 2017
In the 1960s, we had the theatre of commitment; today we have an attitude of non-committal. Once, political playwrights could be guaranteed to tell you what to think, to describe what was wrong with society – and what to do about it. Now, as Chilean... Read more... |
'I’d never written a play as a single action before': David Eldridge on 'Beginning'Saturday, 30 September 2017
My friend, the playwright Robert Holman, says that the writing of a play is always “the product of a moment”. Of course, he’s right, but sometimes you have to pick your moment.In autumn 2015 a TV writing gig hadn’t worked out in the way that I’d... Read more... |
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