playwrights
aleks.sierz
Sabrina Mahfouz is a British-Egyptian writer who has explored issues of Muslim and British identity in various formats. Her work includes poetry, fiction, anthologies and performances, as well as plays. And she's pretty prolific. Since her Dry Ice was staged at the Bush in 2011, she has written some 18 other plays, of various lengths. Now she makes her debut at the Royal Court, the capital's premiere new writing theatre, with a short play that boasts an intriguing title, A History of Water in the Middle East, and which features Mahfouz in the cast. It is also part of the recent trend for gig Read more ...
aleks.sierz
True stories, even in a fictional form, have the power to grip you by the throat, furiously shake your body and then give you a parting kick in the arse. This is certainly true of stand-up comedian Richard Gadd's Baby Reindeer, a blistering monologue which was first seen in Edinburgh this summer, and is now at the Bush Theatre in West London. Apparently based on his true experience with a female stalker, this is an obsessive story about about obsession, and one which asks pertinent questions about what it means to be a victim, complicit or not, and how difficult it is to recover from trauma. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Peter Nichols died aged 92 last month, just before the opening of this starry West End revival of his most celebrated masterpiece. A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1967) is based on his own family experience of bringing up his disabled daughter in the 1960s, and it has the reputation of being one of the most ground-breaking plays of its generation. This revival stars Toby Stephens and Claire Skinner as the parents, Patricia Hodge as the mother-in-law, and Storme Toolis, who has cerebral palsy and is familiar from New Tricks, playing the daughter Joe. As a campaigner for the rights of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
At the age of 81, Caryl Churchill, Britain's greatest living playwright, is still going strong. Her latest is a typically imaginative quartet of short plays. Each of them is vividly distinct, being linguistically agile, theatrically pleasurable and emotionally dark, yet all are also united by the common theme of folk tales and strongly archetypal stories. As one of the Royal Court's most characteristic writers, it is fitting that her newest work enjoys a superbly high-definition production, complete with actors of the caliber of Toby Jones, Deborah Findlay and Tom Mothersdale. It's as if Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Are first ladies second-class citizens? Do they always have to stand behind their husbands? What are they really like as people? Questions such as these have inspired Irish playwright Nancy Harris to explore the relationship between two fictional first ladies, each of which bears an uncanny resemblance to a real-life figure. One is clearly based on Melania Trump, the other on Brigitte Trogneux, better known as Mrs Macron. As usual at the Bridge Theatre, the show is impeccably cast, with national treasure Zoë Wanamaker making her Bridge debut, and Zrinka Cvitešić, who returns to the London Read more ...
aleks.sierz
New artistic directors are popping up all over British theatre. Every week seems to usher in a refreshingly versatile talent taking the reins of a major theatre. Tonight, veteran new writing advocate Roxana Silbert, the new head of Hampstead Theatre, opens her first season, as well as the celebration of the venue's 60-year anniversary, with American writer Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig's The King of Hell's Palace, a revelatory story about corruption in China in the 1990s, here given a tremendously vivid production by Michael Boyd. But while it is great to be able to witness theatre about this super- Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“I don’t think I have the right to influence her,” says an older character of her daughter in For Services Rendered, W Somerset Maugham’s 1932 anti-war drama. If only all elder statesmen and women felt the same about the youth. Tom Littler’s revival at the Jermyn Street Theatre makes great use of an intimate space, but the first half is a slog and only a few of the large cast make their mark. The setting is appropriately idyllic: a garden in rural Kent (the village’s name is Ramblestone, naturally), late summer 1932, the gentle thwocks of a game of tennis drifting over the fence. Eden Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright and performer Tim Crouch is one of Britain's most innovative creatives, with a big back catalogue of challenging and stimulating stage work. Typically he tells stories about profound loss, while simultaneously questioning the basis of theatrical representation: how is what we see on stage true? In what way is it real? And how can you tell? His latest, which comes hotfoot from the Edinburgh Festival to London's Royal Court – in an already much praised production from the National Theatre of Scotland – is, as its title archly suggests, about a messianic cult.As the audience files Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You can’t fail to feel the ghosts in Appropriate at the Donmar Warehouse: they are there in the very timbers of the ancient Southern plantation house that is the setting for Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s fraught – and often very funny – family drama. In the best traditions of that genre, when the three children of the Lafayette clan come together following their father’s death for the auction of their old Arkansas home, the experience proves difficult on all fronts – before it’s catapulted to new extremes when they discover an album of old photographs that depict horrifyingly Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Theatre legends die hard. Playwright Philip King, who passed away in 1979, was once hailed as the monarch of the farceurs, and his best-know play, See How They Run (1944), features the immortal line: "Sergeant, arrest most of these vicars!". Like so many legendary lines, this one is not in original text, which actually says: "Sergeant, arrest most of these people!" But never mind, the remarkable thing about his 1970 drama, Go Bang Your Tambourine, is that it has never been seen in London, until now that is, thanks to the advocacy of Two's Company and this fringe venue.The play's title does Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
When he gave Martin Dysart, the troubled psychiatrist protagonist of Equus, a line in which he speaks about “moments of experience” being “magnetised”, Peter Shaffer might almost have been talking about theatre itself. It’s a phrase that comes close to catching what we feel when we're transfixed by the hard-to-predict coming-together of play, performance and production that marks the highpoints of drama. And “magnetic” is as good a word as any to describe the impact of Ned Bennett’s remarkable revival of Shaffer’s 1973 play for Theatre Royal Stratford East and English Touring Theatre, which Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The intense relationship between a single parent and a single child is ramped up to its highest level when it involves a mother whose daughter has learning disabilities. From that dynamic, writer Ben Weatherill has crafted a warm, engaging and moving play about Kelly and her mum Agnes. We meet them on their daily walk along the beach in Skegness, poking at a dead crab and discussing what to wear to work. When Kelly (Sarah Gordy) takes too long fussing with her trainers, Agnes (Penny Layden) goes to help her and is met with "I’m 27-years-old, I can put my own shoes on", but she can’ Read more ...