Here comes Dad — and he’s muttering a mantra: “My name is Winston Smith and only good things happen to me.” With a name shared with the everyman protagonist of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and a compulsive intoning of this self-affirmation, the start of Nancy Farino’s Fatherland signals the fact that family stuff, and daddy issues, will dominate its emotional landscape. As a graduate of Hampstead Theatre’s Inspire writers programme, the actor-playwright enjoys not only an entertaining production of her 100-minute debut piece in this venue’s studio space, but also plays one of the two Read more ...

On paper, this RSC revival of Ella Hickson’s 2013 adaptation sounds just the ticket: a feminist spin on the familiar JM Barrie story, with a gorgeous set, lots of wire work and all graced with the orotund tones of Toby Stephens as Captain Hook. In action, this mix doesn’t work as well as you want it to.I decided fairly quickly that I didn’t really know who the piece was for. The RSC gave us Matilda so it has previous in devising superior entertainment that older children can enjoy, their accompanying adults too. But here the younger part of the audience seem to be the prime concern, with a Read more ...

Perspectives on Shakespeare's tragedy have changed over the decades. As Nonso Anozie said when playing the title role for Cheek by Jowl in 2004, white actors once "concentrated on their perception of what a black man is". Laurence Olivier, whose 1964 performance in polished ebony make-up was once the gold standard for the part, famously observed black dock workers to learn their gait and mannerisms.Since the 1980s, as numerous actors of colour have tackled the role, the importance of Othello's race has shifted further from the centre of productions. At the National Theatre in 2013, Adrian Read more ...

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what’s so very different about Belfast and Glasgow, both of which I have visited in the last few weeks, compared to, say, Manchester or Birmingham. Sure, there’s the architecture and the accents, but it’s more than that. To find Glasgow's Citizen’s Theatre, I typed "Gorbals Street" into Google Maps. I looked down for a minute on a bus in Belfast, and when I looked up, the Falls Road had become the Shankhill Road, the (in)famous murals rather contrasting. For an Englishman, these places come freighted with a history of transgression, even insurrection, and, Read more ...

Alan Hollinghurst's 2004 novel The Line of Beauty finds a distinct beauty all its own in this long-awaited Almeida Theatre premiere, the play's linearity a decided jolt after the more jagged new writing in which this venue has specialised of late.Returning to the Almeida for the first time in over 25 years, the director Michael Grandage brings a shimmering melancholy to a theatrical bildungsroman that plunges us headlong into the often terrifying hedonism of the 1980s. Jack Holden's astute adaptation keeps pace with the societal savagery of the novel, but not before reminding us that Read more ...

Hedda Gabler is a Hollywood star of The Golden Age – or rather, she was. She walked off the set of two movies into a five-film deal and didn’t come back. Millions watched her, but only a very select few saw her, and that paradox became insupportable. Those in the know were privy to a secret that would, in 1948 under the USA's racist Hays Code and its British mimicking, ruin her, professionally and personally. She knows that her Sword of Damocles swung closer every day, even behind drawn curtains.Tanika Gupta’s spectacularly successful reimagining of Ibsen’s classic is more than an "After…" Read more ...

There’s a line in the late Richard Greenberg’s 2013 play that refers to a recently elected showbiz type turned politician who sports puffed up hair – but it’s not the current incumbent of what’s left of the White House but Ronald Reagan. For the first half of this well-made play, we are in 1980, the election has just returned the former governor of California, and the Bascov tribe is gathering for Christmas lunch (these are liberal Jews) at the vast Upper West Side apartment of Ben (Daniel Abelson) and Julie (American actress Jennifer Westveldt, in her UK debut). An outsize Christmas Read more ...

I came late to the Old Vic's shimmering production of Mary Page Marlowe, Tracy Letts's Off Broadway play from 2018 which has arrived in London with Andrea Riseborough and Susan Sarandon leading a sizable and uniformly excellent cast. And I hope theatregoers will catch this too-short run while they can. Amidst ongoing chat – sometimes justified – about screen stars not being able to hold their own stage, Matthew Warchus's keenly attuned staging proves that just as often they very much can.Sarandon (pictured below with Hugh Quarshie), the Oscar winner an agelessly commanding 79, has Read more ...

Niall is unwell. Very unwell. Very, very. There’s a lot going on in his head. He can’t really hold things together. Evidence? Well, he’s lost his job and his girlfriend Natalie has left him. So, as desperation increases, he decides to phone his big sister Brigid – the trouble is, it’s 3 o’clock in the morning.When he wakes her up he’s a bit tongue-tied, and things go badly. Very badly. He’s not very good at small talk and she’s upset about being disturbed (someone is staying the night with her). They hang up, and the next thing he does is set fire to his hand. The consequences of this Read more ...

Change, we're often told, is the engine of drama: people end up somewhere markedly different from where they began. So the first thing to be said about Nick Payne's blistering new play The Unbelievers is that its concept is as brave as leading lady Nicola Walker's take-no-prisoners performance. Playing a mum who can't stop obsessing about the disappearance of her son (as who could given such a situation), Walker makes something ferocious out of human fixation, grabbing Payne's narrative by the throat and allowing Marianne Elliott's correspondingly unflinching production to strike boldly at Read more ...

Jean Genet’s 1947 play has been quite a clothes-horse over the years, at times a glamorous confection dressed by designers, and regularly shape-shifting and gender-fluid. Cards on the table: I have disliked most productions of it for this odd vacuity, which allows it to become unmoored so radically from its source, the real-life case of a mistress and her daughter murdered by their two maids.It pokes at you from the off with its sense of itself as an anti-play; it's more an arch ritual, there to provoke and mystify its audience, especially the average bourgeois. Its latest incarnation Read more ...

Oh yes, I actually do remember Patty Hearst. She was the American publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst’s granddaughter, who, at the age of 19, was kidnapped by the ultra-left Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974. Some months after her abduction, a bank’s surveillance video showed her participating in a robbery.She seemed to have embraced the urban terror group, and was eventually captured and sentenced to jail. But what really happened to her in captivity? This is the question and the story which has inspired Katherine Moar’s Ragdoll, the follow up to her very successful debut play, Farm Read more ...