drama
Krapp's Last Tape, Duchess TheatreThursday, 23 September 2010
A play could be written about, or for, Michael Gambon's fingers, and perhaps Beckett's 1958 Krapp's Last Tape is it. I've seen this solo piece many times, most recently in a studio theatre rendition from Harold Pinter that opened a window on to his... Read more... |
The Aliens, Bush TheatreTuesday, 21 September 2010
You can see the appeal of being a slacker. You don’t work, you just sit around like a cool dude and shoot the breeze; you smoke, you drink, you take drugs, er, lots of drugs. You can call people “man”. Hell, you don’t even need to wear your sneakers... Read more... |
Joe Maddison's War, ITV1Sunday, 19 September 2010
Alan Plater wrote to the end. When he died earlier this year, he had completed a final screenplay which found him returning whence he came. Joe Maddison’s War was set in his native North-East, and portrayed the impact of wartime on ordinary... Read more... |
The Road to Coronation Street, BBC FourFriday, 17 September 2010
A drama about Britain’s (and by the time Coronation Street reaches its 50th birthday in December, the world’s) longest-running soap starts with a huge advantage - its producers could just quote lumps of the brilliant original scripts, written by... Read more... |
Blood and Gifts, National TheatreTuesday, 14 September 2010
What is with the National and history plays? On the large stages of this theatre, the main fare is historical accounts of contemporary problems. Maybe the programmers here imagine that their audiences, like T S Eliot’s humankind, “can’t bear very... Read more... |
Mad Men, Series 4, BBC FourWednesday, 08 September 2010
That sobbing musical theme resumes, so does that hospital-white dreamlike cartoon of a male figure tumbling in a Hitchcockian fall from grace past huge ads of poster girls. Actually it’s almost as much Milton as it is Hitchcock. I say that to be... Read more... |
This is England '86, Channel 4Wednesday, 08 September 2010
For hundreds of thousands of people watching Shane Meadows’s TV debut last night, an updating (by three years) of the director’s skinhead movie, This is England (2006), the opening episode may well have been their first experience of a "Shane... Read more... |
Scorched, Old Vic TunnelsMonday, 06 September 2010
Is it an example of our cultural insularity that no one I know has ever heard of Wajdi Mouawad? Born in Lebanon, he’s the most performed contemporary French-language playwright and his 2003 masterpiece, Scorched, has been staged all over the world.... Read more... |
U Be Dead, ITV1Monday, 06 September 2010
The difficulty with fashioning real-life events as drama lies in the temptation to turn the central players into characters that an audience will naturally warm to. But real life isn’t like that. Bad things can happen to people you wouldn’t... Read more... |
Clybourne Park, Royal Court TheatreThursday, 02 September 2010
The American Dream is a great subject for theatre. Not only is it a powerful myth that animates millions, but it is also vulnerable to being subverted by generations of playwrights. Like an aged boxer, it is liable to being floored by a well-aimed... Read more... |
Waterloo Road, BBC OneThursday, 02 September 2010
New viewers begin here: even if you know nothing of the previous five series of Waterloo Road, you could start to enjoy the drama set in a failing comprehensive in Greater Manchester with the opener to series six, as the writers have rather... Read more... |
I Am Slave, Channel 4Tuesday, 31 August 2010
Television seeks out the stories thrown up by real life. On the one hand there is the obsessive interest in the private lives of the great and good (and not so good) from Margot Fonteyn to Tony Blair. Other dramatists eagerly accept the... Read more... |
