playwrights
My Summer Reading: Writer Patrick MarberTuesday, 31 August 2010
Next up in our summer reading series is dramatist Patrick Marber whose shrewd, sometimes excoriating, but always riveting observations of the human condition in plays such as Closer always manage to pull off that rare trick of appealing to critics... Read more... |
Edinburgh Fringe: Tiffany Stevenson/ Fair Trade/ Gutted: A Revenger's MusicalWednesday, 11 August 2010
After making her Edinburgh debut last year, Tiffany Stevenson returns with another cracking show, Dictators. Ostensibly it’s about Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, et al, but in reality she cleverly manages to do a show about the mother-daughter relationship... Read more... |
Edinburgh Fringe: Late Night Gimp Fight!/ While You LieTuesday, 10 August 2010
Going to a late-night comedy show at the Fringe is always taking a risk, not least because every drunken fool in the place, with their oh-so-funny heckles, thinks they’re funnier than the performers. And so it proved at the performance I saw of this... Read more... |
Earthquakes in London, National TheatreWednesday, 04 August 2010
What sound does a screaming foetus make? It’s not the kind of question that most theatre plays provoke you to ask, but Mike Bartlett’s new piece about climate change is not a normal play. At the end of the first half of this rollercoasting epic,... Read more... |
Like a Fishbone, Bush TheatreMonday, 14 June 2010
One of the many absent friends in contemporary British drama is the play that tackles questions of religious belief. At a time when more and more people take their faith more and more seriously, this lacuna at the heart — or should that be soul? —... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Theatre Director Dominic DromgooleSaturday, 22 May 2010
Dominic Dromgoole (b. Oct.1963) had directed professionally precisely one Shakespeare play - Troilus and Cressida for the Oxford Stage Company, with a then little-known Matt Lucas as Thersites - when he was appointed artistic director of Shakespeare... Read more... |
Ditch, Old Vic TunnelsWednesday, 19 May 2010
Dystopia is a genre that works like a rhetorical device. Take a government policy — let’s say the war in Afghanistan — then list the bad effects that this has had on the British people, exaggerate by a factor of ten, or more, add some obscure but... Read more... |
A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky, Lyric HammersmithWednesday, 12 May 2010
During the past week, as the first coalition government for 70 years has been formed in the UK, we were frequently warned that failure to find a solution might be the end of the world. It’s a solid, if usually over-used, metaphor. But what would... Read more... |
Little Gem, Bush TheatreMonday, 19 April 2010
Monologue is a boring word, but in the hands of an Irish pensmith it can create some pretty exciting theatre. From a writer such as Conor McPherson or Mark O’Rowe the monologue can set the night alight with its storytelling brio. Word-drunk on these... Read more... |
Behud (Beyond Belief), Soho TheatreThursday, 15 April 2010
In December 2004, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Behzti (Dishonour) caused riots when it was staged at Birmingham Rep. It concerned the (fictional) story of a child rape in a gurdwara (a Sikh temple) and the theatre, in a well-intentioned but misguided... Read more... |
4.48 Psychosis, Barbican TheatreWednesday, 24 March 2010
Sarah Kane’s last play is the stuff of legend. Since its first production some 18 months after her suicide in 1999, it’s become a favourite with black-attired drama students, nostalgic in-yer-face drama buffs and mainstream theatres all over... Read more... |
Mercury Fur, 3-4 Picton Place, W1Tuesday, 23 February 2010
Imagine a future, a near future, in which gangs of teenage boys roam the deserted streets of the metropolis, selling hallucinatory butterflies and organising parties in squats for rich clients who have extreme tastes in sexual abuse. Imagine. This... Read more... |
