Royal Court
Death and the Maiden, Harold Pinter TheatreTuesday, 25 October 2011
At the newly renamed Harold Pinter Theatre (formerly the Comedy), the inaugural show is a special tribute to the Nobel Prize-winning playwright, who died in 2008. The subject matter of Ariel Dorfman’s play, which won an Olivier Award on its first... Read more... |
Jumpy, Royal Court TheatreThursday, 20 October 2011
“Why does anyone ever have kids?” By the time a character in April De Angelis’s new comedy utters this exasperated exclamation, there are many in the audience - whether parents or children, or both - who must have had the same thought. And more than... Read more... |
Bang Bang Bang, Royal Court TheatreSunday, 16 October 2011
“Go home. This is not your business. This is not your war.” So a Congolese warlord tells Sadhbh, an Irish human-rights defender, in Stella Feehily’s new drama for Out of Joint. Has the arrogance and exploitation of colonialism been replaced by the... Read more... |
Truth and Reconciliation, Royal Court TheatreMonday, 05 September 2011
Can an ordinary wooden chair be an instrument of torture? Of course, every brute investigation makes use of such furniture, whether as a place to tie the victim down, or as a weapon to attack them with. But, as Debbie Tucker Green’s new play so... Read more... |
The Faith Machine, Royal Court TheatreThursday, 01 September 2011
A monolithic slab, like a giant incarnation of a Biblical tablet of stone, dominates Mark Thompson’s set for Jamie Lloyd's production of the third play by Alexi Kaye Campbell. Nothing else is so solid in this big, weighty work, which wrestles... Read more... |
The Village Bike, Royal Court TheatreSaturday, 02 July 2011
For a couple of years now British theatre has been harvesting a new crop of young female talent. Market leaders such as Lucy Prebble (Enron) and Polly Stenham (That Face) have made a splash in the West End, and where they led many others have... Read more... |
Chicken Soup With Barley, Royal Court TheatreWednesday, 08 June 2011
"Love comes now. You have to start with love," urges Sarah Kahn (Samantha Spiro) early in Chicken Soup With Barley, and it's inconceivable that Dominic Cooke's knockout production of Arnold Wesker's 1958 play could have sprung from any other... Read more... |
The Acid Test, Royal Court TheatreMonday, 23 May 2011
Anya Reiss must be the most precocious playwright in London. Her 2010 debut, Spur of the Moment, written while she was just 17 and still studying for her A levels, won two Most Promising Playwright awards, from the London Evening Standard and the... Read more... |
Wastwater, Royal Court TheatreTuesday, 05 April 2011
Wastwater is the deepest lake in England, overshadowed by rugged Cumbrian screes and described by Wordsworth as “long, stern and desolate”. In this new play by Simon Stephens, directed by Katie Mitchell, it becomes a central metaphor: terrors may... Read more... |
Remembrance Day, Royal Court TheatreWednesday, 23 March 2011
The political background is vital to the play, so pay attention: during the Second World War, the small Baltic state of Latvia was threatened by its two big neighbours, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. In fact, when these countries signed the Molotov... Read more... |
DVD: The ArborSunday, 13 March 2011
Andrea Dunbar’s story was extremely grim when first told in her 1980 play The Arbor (I’m unable to explain why, for a leafy retreat in so English a context - however decimated - the American spelling is used) and it remains so: a medieval catalogue... Read more... |
The Heretic, Royal Court TheatreThursday, 10 February 2011
The story revolves around the character played by Stevenson, Dr Diane Cassell, an academic who specialises in sea-level rises, and works at an Earth Sciences university department. Although she is seen by some as a climate change sceptic, a heretic... Read more... |
