Like fellow New Yorker, Lee Miller, Lee Krasner changed her given name, the better to be accepted into what she called "The Boys Club" of 20th century Modern Art. Like Miller, she was known more for her working and romantic partnership with a major artist – for Man Ray, read Jackson Pollock. And like Miller, Lee Krasner is now belatedly acknowledged as a major artist in her own right – though she does not have a solo Tate show, as Miller does this Autumn (at least not yet). We open on her working in her Long Island studio, surrounded by her paintings, canvases that you can’t quite place – Read more ...

The Gathered Leaves is set on the tectonic plates of a middle-class family menu reunion, in which three generations grapple with the shifting values of an indifferent world. Adrian Noble’s sensitively observed production investigates what happens when a tyrannical patriarch starts to succumb to dementia, making disorientating demands on a family that till this point has been more concerned with protecting a son suffering from autism.Ten years ago, The Gathered Leaves played at this same venue with a cast that included Jane Asher and her real life daughter Katie Scarfe and Alexander Read more ...

Before Luigi Illica wrote the libretti for Puccini’s Tosca and Madama Butterfly, he had joined the composer as the librettist in a race to stage the first production of La Bohème. The race was against Ruggero Leoncavallo, a composer Illica had once collaborated with on a libretto – for Puccini, his Manon Lescaut.In the snakepit of the Milanese opera business in the late 1800s, these tangled connections were standard, as dozens of young composers fought for prominence to be the new Verdi, whose portrait hangs on Leoncavallo's wall. That there would be rival productions based on Henri Read more ...

In Dublin, a city that has changed more than most in the last 30 years, a young woman, with an English accent that is expensive to acquire, is cycling through sexual partners. We eavesdrop on their conversations, witness the physical intimacy fade as the psychological intimacy hesitantly grows, in that strange vacuum in which you realise that you know everything and nothing about the person in front of you. There’s an awkwardness, both thinking “Sure that was fun, though I’m not sure this is and… what’s next?” Mark O’Halloran’s two-hander won Best New Play at the Irish Times Awards in 2022 Read more ...

When Yasmina Reza’s cerebral play Art arrived in London in 1996, we applauded it as a comedy. Now another French hit, Jean-Philippe Daguerre’s Adieu Monsieur Haffmann, has landed, and the genre confusions could start all over again.This is a story set in Occupied Paris, from May 1942 to VE Day in 1945. In the exodus of French Jews, Joseph Haffmann’s wife and children have reached Geneva. But he has stayed put to wind up his jewellery business and hatch his own escape plan: which is to sign over his shop to his trusted assistant, Pierre (Michael Fox), while he hides in the cellar. Pierre Read more ...

Nick Payne, the writer of Constellations, has created another 90-minute zinger for two actors. This one is much simpler in structure but poses equally potent questions about the nature of love and how it’s moulded by the passage of time.In Park Theatre’s pocket Park90 space, the teeny stage area is just about able to accommodate a double bed; behind it is a curtained window. A radio broadcast tells us we are in the midst of the Second World War and the Japanese are taking over southeast Asia. In the bed are Leonard (Barney White) and Violet (Cassie Bradley). As the slowly unfolding dialogue Read more ...

The misadventures and misbehaviours of the English upper-middle class is catnip for TV executives. All those posh types on which us hoi polloi can sit in delicious self-righteous judgement, as we marvel at their cut glass accents, well-tailored clothes and ostentatious wealth. Meanwhile their worlds are always collapsing due to villainy, venality or misconceived virtue. Lovely stuff! While such tales are seldom far from a screen, they are often far from a stage, the challenge of scaling down just too intimidating for most adaptors. Not so Shaun McKenna and Lion Couglan who took on the Read more ...

Theatre is a strange dish. A recipe can be stacked with delicious ingredients, cooked to exacting standards, taste-test beautifully at the halfway mark, yet leave you not quite full, not exactly satisfied, disappointed that it didn’t come out quite as expected when plated up. Autumn certainly looks good when you lay everything out on the kitchen table. A celebrated source novel from an award-winning writer (Ali Smith) adapted by Harry McDonald, fresh from his critical success, Foam, at the Finborough and Brexit, a hot button topic even eight years on, at its heart. Roll in a stellar cast Read more ...

In 2017, two years after Hir premiered, Taylor Mac was awarded a “Genius Grant” and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for drama. The new production of Hir at the Park demonstrates why. It’s a rich, provocative piece about the ideas that drive us now, thrown into a blender and blitzed.Mac is a Swiss Army knife of a creative force: performer, singer/songwriter, writer, performance artist, director, producer. His preferred pronouns are judy/judy’s – not a reference, he has insisted, to Judy Garland but to the custom of gay men to disguise their boyfriends by calling them Judy or Mary. (That said, Read more ...

“It’s nothing like Christmas,” Rachel (Amy-Leigh Hickman) hisses at her brother David (Kishore Walker). She’s trying to wrangle her family into their first ever Diwali celebration, but everything’s going wrong. Her dad Yash (Bhasker Patel) is getting on far too well with her boyfriend Matt (Jack Flammiger). And to top it off, mum Ruth (Catherine Cusack) has found everything but the most important item on Rachel’s meticulous shopping list: the matches.Passing, Dan Sareen’s new “family comedy-drama” at the Park Theatre, raises some interesting points about identity and belonging. But it goes Read more ...

Journalism is a despised profession. And when you consider the story behind the interview that Diana, Princess of Wales, gave to BBC journo Martin Bashir in 1995 you can see why. As anyone who follows current affairs knows, it has been revealed that Bashir used less than honest methods to get this scoop and the whole sorry process has once again thrown an ugly light on the BBC as an institution.Now writer Jonathan Maitland, who has previously had Dead Sheep, An Audience with Jimmy Savile, and The Last Temptation of Boris Johnson staged at Park Theatre, gives us a documentary account of the Read more ...

Plays chronicling the unscrupulous collision of high finance and big tech seem 10 a penny these days. Some writers, such as Joseph Charlton, seem to have built entire careers around telling glossy tech morality tales (for my money the best in this burgeoning genre is Sarah Burgess's Dry Powder staged at Hampstead Theatre in 2018 starring Hayley Atwell).Disruption, which is receiving its world premiere also in North London at Finsbury’s Park Theatre, is yet another slick tech show. Written by Andrew Stein and directed by Hersh Ellis, Disruption tackles the seemingly unstoppable rise of AI. Read more ...