Gary Naylor
Bio

I turned down The Beatles. Well, not exactly, but on seeing Blood Brothers in 1982, I said it would never sell outside Liverpool - too sentimental, thought I.

Obviously, I grew up to be a theatre reviewer, writing here and for BroadwayWorld since 2009. I also write a weekly cricket column for The Guardian and I podcast about old football at Nessun Dorma. 

I'm a member of the Critics' Circle and the Cricket Media Club and I serve on the committee of the Society for Theatre Research in my capacity as Joint Administrator for the Theatre Book of the Year Award. I have a particular interest in initiatives that address Impostor Syndrome's deleterious effect on young people accessing culture. 

If I'm not watching or writing about a play, an opera, a movie, the cricket or the football, I'm probably asleep - but do check my pulse, just to be sure...

articles by Gary Naylor

latest in today

We are bowled over! We knew that theartsdesk.com had plenty of supporters out there – we’ve always had a loyal readership of arts…
Post-Covid British theatre has a crush on adaptations, especially those with a star actor. So it’s easy to see why National Theatre chief…
Sweating in my lair, there’s no trip to the mecca this year. If the festival was on, I'd be there right now, but it’s a fallow year and…
The erotic life of puppets – we discover in this show – is filled with intriguing possibilities that are denied to mere flesh and blood…
French playwright Florian Zeller’s 2011 four-hander about infidelity and the deceptions it entails, translated by Christopher Hampton,…
It’s the summer vacation and eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven) and her three brothers have moved into a new house on Vancouver Island with…
I got my contract to write Season of The Witch: The Book of Goth just as the first Covid lockdown began in March 2020. During that time of…
Shadows opens with “The Lone West,” a short, desolate instrumental featuring a simple keyboard refrain with a flute-like quality and what…
During the calm evening before an apocalyptic London storm, trumpet virtuoso Håkan Hardenberger delighted the Barbican audience with not…
King Charles I famously declared that Much Ado About Nothing should be renamed the "Beatrice and Benedick play". So it’s not difficult to…