As part of an ongoing series, I’ve chaired post-show talks with various Mischief Theatre casts this year, all of whom waxed lyrical about the brilliance of the company founders. Last night, I had a chance to pose questions to those original mischief-makers themselves.
Co-writers Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields and fellow founding members […]
I feel like I’ve known writer Sarah Rutherford for years… that’s one of the positives of social media. (We follow each other on Twitter.) The irony is it’s her new play, The Girl Who Fell, about some of the negatives of social media that finally precipitated my meeting her in person.
And what a great […]
A philosophising cat, a famished dog and a family of mites all make appearances – and strong impressions – in Mites, a new play by up-and-coming young British playwright James Mannion, written in the best traditions of the Theatre of the Absurd.
Ruth, a lonely woman abandoned by her husband, lives in isolation with her beloved cat […]
I was back at Trafalgar Studios last night for this much-anticipated revival of Peter Nichols’ 1967 masterpiece A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. And there was so much to discuss with this production, making history for a number of reasons.
Along with Passion Play and Privates on Parade, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg remains […]
I was lucky enough to see the original Out of Joint production of The Permanent Way at the National Theatre in 2003. I remember being horrified by David Hare’s verbatim play about railway privatisation, based on first-hand accounts, including the people behind the body counts of the four major rail disasters between 1997 and 2002.
With Alexander […]
Can you be a racist if you don’t think you are? Is there a difference between racism and ‘racist attitudes’? How do you find sympathy for white supremacists? By finding sympathy are we making excuses? Peter Hamilton’s new updated staging of his 2005 play Danelaw prompted some serious discussion at my post-show Q&A at […]
What fun to return to the Criterion Theatre to see a brand-new cast put their stamp on Mischief Theatre’s The Comedy About A Bank Robbery, as the first in a series of monthly post-show Q&As with the comic geniuses.
In fact, while new to London, many of them recent drama school graduates making their West End […]
At this year’s annual HighTide Festival in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, I was privileged to chair an hour-long “In Conversation With” platform discussion with legendary director Deborah Warner, reflecting on nearly 40 years in the business.
Since launching her career at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1980, Warner has gone on to direct plays and operas at […]
A middle-aged businesswoman hires a blind man to spend an hour with her in a hotel room. Why are they really there? Will she be able to experience the darkness in order to see the light?
The Eyes of the Night, written by one of Spain’s leading playwrights Paloma Pedrero, headlines the second Contemporary Spanish […]
Are you worried about the state of politics and society in the UK today? That’s the question I asked at the start of last night’s post-show Q&A at London’s Lion & Unicorn Theatre. The hands of all my panellists and nearly everyone sitting across from them in the audience shot up.
Proforca Theatre’s new play At […]
Arrows & Traps’ 18th production in its five-year history is also its tenth at London’s Brockley Jack Theatre, where it is now an associate company, and its third in a Gothic trilogy. And it’s a corker.
Following versions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Arrows & Traps founder, writer and director Ross McGregor, […]
We were all madly checking our phones for news in the bars afterwards, but while much of last night’s Westminster drama was going on, at Wilton’s Music Hall, we were getting to glorious grip with the (affectionate) comedy potential of the monarchy with The Crown Dual.
In Dan Clarkson’s new comedy The Crown Dual, transferred for […]
Michael John LaChiusa was on his way back to the States by the time I chaired my post-show Q&A at the West End (and UK) premiere of his musical Queen Of The Mist – but I wonder if his ears were burning badly en route?
A central part of my discussion – with director Dom O’Hanlon, musical […]
Can we ever really know what happened between two people behind closed doors? That’s the question at the heart of Anna Zeigler’s provocative new two-hander Actually, and one the company, audience and I grappled with after Friday’s performance.
One night. Two people. Three truths.
Actually revolves around Amber and Tom, two newly arrived freshmen at American Ivy […]
After last week’s runaway success with The Girl on the Train post-show Q&A, director Anthony Banks and I had to squeeze in another one together to his second current hit, Games for Lovers – which also meant I got to return to The Vaults for producer James Seabright’s third offering this summer.
What a giggle this […]
A quick show of hands at last night’s Q&A at the Park Theatre bore out my suspicion: most people, even left-leaning people, have not heard of Howard Zinn. Like those in the audience, before this show, I counted myself amongst them. So by that measure alone, Bianca Bagatourian’s The Time Of Our Lies is a […]
I had just enough time to wipe away my tears – I was sobbing – at the end of The View Upstairs before jumping up after the curtain call to announce this post-show Q&A at Soho Theatre.
My family are from Louisiana and I’ve been to New Orleans countless times, but it’s thanks to London theatre […]
What is it about a great whodunnit thriller? What makes us keep turning the page? How does that inquisitive excitement translate onstage?
As modern thrillers go, they don’t get much more successful than Paula Hawkins’ The Girl On the Train. First published in 2015, it quickly became an international publishing phenomenon and has sold more […]
I’m a firm believer that one of the best means of ensuring a long career is an ability to create your own work. Patrick Bayele has honed this skill very early on… and, after seeing what he’s accomplished with his triple-threat professional debut – actor, director and producer (not to mention co-deviser), I feel confident we’ll […]
After chairing events for London transfers of Creation Theatre’s The Pit and The Pendulum and Dracula, I was chuffed to be invited to see them on their ‘home turf’ in Oxford and host a post-show Q&A for their new gaming take on Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
I’ve seen a few productions of The Tempest – including earlier this […]
How many different ways can one play be interpreted? The company of Equus were very keen not to impose their opinions but the audience at last night’s post-show Q&A at Trafalgar Studios had plenty of their own. Which were right? All of them!
And what a knowledgeable audience it was. Many had seen this or other previous […]
How did New Old Friends come to adapt Anthony Horowitz’s 1986 children’s novel The Falcon’s Malteser into a hit family stage show? How has a new gender-equal, four-strong cast brought it to life for its London premiere? And what do the kids – and parents – in the audience think?
I had such a giggle […]
How much do you know about Nina Simone? Guaranteed: after you see Black Is the Color Of My Voice, the one-woman play with music written by and starring young American theatremaker Apphia Campbell, you will be inspired to learn more.
The “High Priestess of Soul” Nina Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North […]
Dylan Coburn Gray’s Citysong won the 2017 Verity Bargate Award for new and emerging playwrights and now receives its world premiere in this acclaimed co-production between Dublin’s Abbey Theatre and London’s Soho Theatre.
I was mesmerised by this time-hopping, Dublin-set urban poem – originally commissioned for a spoken word festival – which, over the course of […]
How fitting to hold a post-show Q&A for The Starry Messenger during Loneliness Awareness Week. Kenneth Lonergan’s beautifully delicate play considers the torment of, as New York Times’ critic Ben Brantley puts it:
“fallible, contradictory, lonely souls who can never quite articulate what’s missing in their lives but always feel the void”
In the play, set in the […]
Philip Ridley’s Vincent River was premiered at Hampstead Theatre in 2000 and has been revived fairly regularly in the intervening years, including this production which was first seen at the Park Theatre last year and has now transferred to the West End’s Trafalgar Studios, where an earlier production ran in 2007. How worried should we […]
Remember D:Ream’s “Things Can Only Get Better”? I was bopping along in my seat to that New Labour anthem and so many other chart-topping hits from my youth before curtain up at Education Education Education last night at Trafalgar Studios.
The music from the 1990s forms a backbone to this love-letter to the decade and the […]
I closed out #MischiefMay, celebrating the world-dominating achievements of the comedy masters at Mischief Theatre, with my second of two post-show Q&As to the company’s two current West End hits.
The Comedy About a Bank Robbery was the third West End offering from Mischief, following The Play That Goes Wrong (still running at the Duchess Theatre) […]
#MischiefMay is all about celebrating the world-dominating success of the comedy genius of Mischief Theatre onstage (running on all continents except Antarctica) and, increasingly, onscreen. I’m delighted to play a small part of this month’s mischievous activities with back-to-back post-show Q&As to Mischief’s two current West End hits, starting last night with The Play […]
After The Tempest and Lord of the Flies, my last of three post-show Q&As with Lazarus Theatre company for their 2019 season at Greenwich Theatre was last night to their new version of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, adapted and directed (and designed!) by artistic director Ricky Dukes. Ending on a (messy!) high.
“Salomé, Salomé, dance for me.
I pray […]
I’m in love with love… or more precisely with Amour, as in the lushly romantic Michel Legrand musical fantasy now receiving its UK professional premiere at Charing Cross Theatre.
Amour is set in 1950 in post-war Paris where shy civil servant Dusoleil (Gary Tushaw) lives alone and works diligently in a dreary office. To pass […]
Visits to the Coronet Theatre, until last week known as The Print Room at the Coronet, make me miss the days when I lived in Notting Hill (or rather, near enough, Ladbroke Grove). Last week, I went to attend the venue’s relaunch and season announcement under its new-old name; last night, I returned to […]
Ahead of Mental Health Awareness Week next week, Rachel Tookey’s award-winning new play Bromley Bedlam Bethlehem receives its full-length premiere this week at the Old Red Lion Theatre. I got to speak to Rachel and her producer-sister Hannah about how their own family inspired this story exploring how trauma and mental illness can be […]
The Cervantes Theatre’s headlines its third New Spanish Playwriting season with the full UK and English-language premiere of Denise Despeyroux’s one-woman show The Reality, which had a dramatised reading at the theatre last year.
Can you love the living like you like the dead?
Is darkness hindered by light?
In this haunting new play, written by Denise Despeyroux and […]
Are you a David Bowie fan? What first turned you on? Was it seeing his Top of the Pops debut as Ziggy Stardust? Was it your parents taking you to your first Bowie concert when you were still a baby? Was it memorising the album liner notes in your bedroom?
Bebe Barry inherited her love of […]
I had a fabulous time last week in Stratford-upon-Avon seeing Justin Audibert’s new re-gendered production of Shakespeare’s early “battle of the sexes” comedy The Taming of the Shrew (1591), set in a parallel Elizabethan universe where women are in charge.
Afterwards, I had the privilege of chairing a discussion about the play as part of the “Society […]
I’ve spent quite a lot of my Easter weekend thinking about Donald Trump. As a thankful respite from trying to read the 448 pages of the Mueller Report, it was for positive reasons on Good Friday night at Southwark Playhouse.
‘They can pass all the laws they want. All they do is change the rules – […]
What does theatre mean to you? How do actors marry up the dual emotional demands of their chosen profession? How many ‘characters’ or versions of ourselves to the rest of us play in our own lives?
Those are some of the questions which are raised in Alexis Michalik’s fascinating play Intra Muros and which we […]
How lucky am I? Last night I got to spend a second night in a row with lovely Olivier Awards nominee Marc Antolin.
After sitting behind him at the ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall on Sunday night, when he was nominated for Best Actor in a Musical for Little Shop of Horrors at the Open Air […]
I was thrilled to attend last night’s Olivier Awards with the Songs for Nobodies team – and also with my old friend Richard Gresham in tow. Richard and I decided to run a competition. Who could get the most selfies with lovely theatre friends – industry professionals of all types including producers, publicists, journalists, […]
This past Wednesday (3 April 2019) would have been Tony Benn’s 94th birthday. Great celebratory timing for the return of Tony’s Last Tape, the one-man play celebrating the Labour firebrand, who died in 2014. And last night, I was delighted to return to the play myself and to chair a warm and celebratory post-show discussion.
Many in the […]
Did seeing fascist Tommy Robinson denouncing Muslims and immigrants on a big screen in Whitehall terrify you? What are the long-term consequences of today’s political rhetoric in Trump’s America and Brexit Britain? How much does it fuel hate crimes against minority groups? How worried should we be? What can we do about it?
Debut playwright […]
Last night I chaired my second of three post-show Q&As with Lazarus Theatre Company as part of their 2019 residency at Greenwich Theatre – their highly acclaimed return production of Lord of the Flies.
William Golding’s novel was published in 1954 and was highly influenced by the wartime experiences he’d lived through. “Anyone who moved […]
Why is intimacy so hard? In the bedroom, when can drugs be a help and when a hindrance? How much should we reveal to a new partner? What new demons do today’s young gay men carry with them into relationships?
After the fun we had last month with My Dad’s Gap Year at the Park Theatre, […]
How can a 60-seat black box studio above a pub stand out amongst nearly 100 Off-West End and fringe theatres in London? THIS is how.
There was palpable excitement in the room on last night at Proforca Theatre Company’s industry relaunch of the Lion & Unicorn Theatre, with a very warm reciprocal embrace for the company’s […]
How often do you ask yourself this question: Do you love this planet? No, but seriously, do you really love this planet? How much? And how much are you willing to sacrifice to prove it in the face of impending Armageddon? What are you actually doing?
What philosopher and life-long nuclear disarmament activist Alexander Matthews […]
It was a great big family affair for my post-show Q&A at Call Me Vicky at the Pleasance Theatre this weekend. The new one-act comedy-drama marks the playwriting debut for sisters Stacey and Nicola Bland, who also perform in the cast, and their mum, dad and nan were in proud attendance.
Call Me Vicky is […]
A lot has been said about All in a Row online (especially on Twitter around #puppetgate) – about the play itself, its depiction of autism and its use of a puppet in portraying the non-verbal autistic 11-year-old character. Last night we were able to take the conversation offline.
I felt a great responsibility in chairing what I view as […]
“It’s so rare these days to see a play about optimism,” the wonderful actor Malcolm Sinclair told me after Wednesday night’s performance of Gently Down the Stream at the Park Theatre. Malcolm had attended the press night two days earlier and loved Martin Sherman’s new play so much that he returned with his partner […]
In my first of three post-show Q&As this year with Lazarus Theatre, I was at Greenwich Theatre for this pioneering ensemble company’s exciting re-examination of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Sure, we’ve had Prospero played by a woman before – not least Vanessa Redgrave, Helen Mirren and Harriet Walter – but what happens when you take […]
The bookworm in me adores everything about libraries and they don’t get much more atmospheric, or historic, than The London Library, the world’s oldest independent lending library – and now a highly unconventional theatrical venue for Creation Theatre Company’s latest offering.
Dubbed by Stephen Fry as a “gym of the mind”, The London Library, with its […]
The Park Theatre was absolutely buzzing last night with two sell-out shows, including in Park 90, Tom Wright’s debut play My Dad’s Gap Year, which has nearly sold out the rest of its run too. What’s the secret alchemy between Wright and his director Rikki Beadle-Blair?
I suspect that a key element is their mutual […]
It’s only a matter of days until the UK is scheduled to depart the European Union. As anyone who follows me knows, Brexit is an outcome I’ve been fighting, marching and campaigning against since David Cameron first announced the date for the 2016 referendum.
So to be invited to chair Counting Sheep, in a new co-production with Belarus Free […]
One of the reasons I love chairing post-show Q&As so much is the chance I get to learn new things from incredibly talented and knowledgeable panellists. Last night’s event for Jean Anouilh’s play The Orchestra at Omnibus Theatre was a special treat as the expert on hand was also an old friend of mine: award-winning director, […]
Charming, delectable, delicious. And those are just the custard creams… It’s not often I get offered biscuits at the post-show Q&As I chair, but at a show called The Ministry of Biscuits, it would have seemed remiss not to.
Since its 1998 premiere, this delightful musical has been scaled down to a bijou four-hander performed by […]
I’ve been following the insanely talented improv geniuses of The Showstoppers for most of their eleven years. How do they do it? I still can’t really fathom it, but I was pleased to gain a few more insights – and a new well of admiration – after chairing a post-show Q&A with them this […]
I started this past weekend in a room full of wonderful, talented and inspiring women (and some great male allies) at London’s Tristan Bates Theatre chairing a BOSSY all-female panel after a performance of Robert Luxford’s Nuns.
Thanks to the Dutch Dame Productions’ co-founders Cecile Sinclair and Natalya Wolter-Ferguson, She’s Diverse co-producer Valerie Isaiah-Sadoh and their company […]
In the second of my back-to-back post-show Q&As at the King’s Head Theatre this past week, I was at the Off West End powerhouse’s original home in Islington for Atticist’s first London revival of David Greig’s 2002 play Outlying Islands.
Outlying Islands is only the third production from Atticist, but the company has already earned […]
In the first of my two back-to-back King’s Head Theatre post-show Q&As, I was at Trafalgar Studios for the West End premiere of Kevin Elyot’s first play, Coming Clean, 37 years after the actor-turned-writer made his playwriting debut with it at London’s Bush Theatre.
Artistic director Adam Spreadbury-Maher’s acclaimed revival was first seen at the […]
There’s a staggering amount of up-and-coming talent on display with the world premiere of “post-Weinstein, post-Spacey drama” Anomaly, now running at London’s Old Red Lion Theatre.
In the young Wild Child Productions company, there are no fewer than three debuts: for playwright Liv Warden for two of the three-hander’s actors, Alice Handoll and Katherine Samuelson. Even […]
How does it feel to have a one-woman show written especially for you by one of your country’s leading writers? Pretty damn good, according to Songs for Nobodies’ Bernadette Robinson – though, to be clear, there was nothing passive about this privilege in her case.
In the post-show Q&A I chaired with Robinson at the West End’s Ambassadors Theatre […]
My final post-show Q&A of the year, to the stage premiere of Chasing Bono, was an absolute Irish corker! After a revealing discussion about the fine line between success and failure and the perils of fame, it ended with an impromptu song performance. Could someone in stage management get us a guitar at Soho Theatre? They could and […]
Author Jacky Ivimy was inspired to start writing Dialektikon after coming across film and transcripts from the Liberation of Dialectics Congress.
At this two-week event, held at London’s Roundhouse in 1967, some of the late 20th century’s leading thinkers convened – including Trinidadian-born civil rights activist and Black Panther Stokely Carmichael, English scientist Gregory Bateson, […]
You know you’re at a different type of theatre experience when you find yourself singing along – loudly – about how much we all love looking at cocks in the locker room. (Even when you’ve never been in a cocker-room.)
The party spirit for Hot Gay Time Machine starts before the performance as co-stars Toby […]
Populism, patriotism, political theatre, predictions for Brexit and the fast-paced nature of life-imitating-art-imitating-life were amongst the topics covered in an incredibly good-natured discussion across a wide partisan spectrum at the post-show debate I chaired on Wednesday night at the premiere of An Honourable Man.
Michael McManus’ play had a sell-out, try-out week in June, which attracted […]
One of my favourite reviews of Fanatical, the new British musical currently receiving its world premiere season at London’s Playground Theatre, opines: “It will remind you why you love whatever it is that you’re a fan of”.
This warm, big-hearted, unashamedly geeky show is indeed “a love letter to fandom”, and at last night’s post-show […]
The Acting Gymnasium, founded by Gavin McAlinden, runs weekly creative performance workshops that help individuals develop their acting skills, build confidence, exercise their imagination, improve vocal techniques and… perform in a professional show.
You can see the product of their work in a season of French comedies running now at London’s Theatro Technis. On Friday, […]
How much do you know about the British tradition of drag? British drag artists are the “punks of performance”, according to Ginger Johnson, who has written, directed, designed and performs in a show that brilliantly illustrates and celebrates this tradition.
How to Catch a Krampus is the latest offering from Sink the Pink. After a decade of […]
Edgar Allan Poe wrote the short story The Pit & the Pendulum in 1842, inspired by the idea of a political prisoner tormented during the Spanish Inquisition.
In this new version, written and directed by Christopher York for Oxford-based site-specific specialists Creation Theatre Company, the inmate is a woman from Tehran (played by Iranian-British actress Afsaneh […]
Swift but swinging! We had less than twenty minutes for last night’s post-show Q&A for new musical Looking for Gatsby but – taking a leaf out of this incredible company’s book – we made the most of it. It’s amazing how much you can ground you can cover when you’re up against the clock!
What happens […]
Federico Garcia Lorca spent three months in Cuba in 1930 – six years before he was assassinated (aged just 38) by Franco nationalists in his native Spain. He fell in love with the Caribbean island nation and it with him. And it’s this association that inspired Jorge de Juan in his new adaptation of Lorca […]
Does a soldier ever stop being a soldier? “No!” shouted several from the audience at last night’s post-show discussion for Soldier On at The Other Palace.
The play, dubbed “The Full Military Monty”, was developed and workshopped with real soldiers and their families and shows how all are affected by PTSD. It’s performed by a […]
The night after they faced the press, the team behind the European premiere production of A Guide for the Homesick faced a packed audience, most of whom stayed on to take part enthusiastically in our post-show discussion.
Ken Urban’s play was commissioned in 2011 and had its world premiere last year in Boston. This new production […]
The Wider Earth is billed as one of the theatre events of the year – and, on this occasion, that’s no exaggeration. What a privilege for me to play a small part in helping to launch this spectacular and historic production, which tells the story of a young Charles Darwin and is staged in […]
This weekend, I got to enter the boxing ring at London’s Southwark Playhouse to chair a post-show Q&A at Troupe Theatre’s world premiere production of Joy Wilkinson’s The Sweet Science of Bruising.
London, 1869. Four very different Victorian women are drawn into the dark underground world of female boxing by the eccentric Professor Sharp. Controlled by men […]
When a show has as many twists and turns as Glenn Chandler’s KIDS PLAY, there are special challenges in live-streaming and live-tweeting a post-show discussion. Last night, Chander, his London stars David Mullen and Joseph Clarke, myself and the audience at Above the Stag did our best to avoid spoilers. Though it was difficult at points!
What […]
How much do you know about the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)? Who fought on the side of the Republicans and who for the Nationalists? What happened to those who got caught in the middle, such as Paulino and Carmelo in Jose Sanchis Sinisterra’s Ay, Carmela!?
In the 1986 stage play, famously made into a 1990 Spanish […]
Should country of birth define your identity or determine where you end up?
Set in the near-future, Stand and Be Counted Theatre’s highly political new play Where We Began imagines a world where a new universal law mandates that everyone must return to where they were born and stay there. Borders are built everywhere and strictly enforced: […]
So often with the news these days, parallels are drawn with our turbulent political times and the fascism that swept across Europe in the 1930s, and the question is asked: what would you do if…?
Last night, I and the audience at the Union Theatre travelled back to the 1930s care of Midnight, in which […]
The pub beneath the Finborough Theatre, where Proud Haddock’s revival of Tony Harrison’s Square Rounds, is currently closed for refurbishment. So what does Proud Haddock artistic director Jimmy Walters do on the night of our post-show Q&A? Bring in drinks from the off-licence for everyone, both onstage and in the audience. I’ll drink to that!
The […]
Can musical theatre help us find common ground with those with whom we disagree? If so, Unexpected Joy is undoubtedly the musical to do it.
Set in Provincetown, Cape Cod, Unexpected Joy is the story of three generations of female singers, long-held family tensions and a week together where change is in the air. Joy, a baby boomer […]
What a reminder that live theatre is LIVE, that things can go wrong and that that’s all part of the excitement.
At the Omnibus Theatre last night, Blood Wedding’s 7.30pm start time was delayed as one of the actors was trapped on a broken down overground train. I was already there to chair a post-show Q&A […]
Adrenaline still pumping as I type this! SIX The Musical was the undisputed hit of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe and it’s now transferred back to the West End’s Arts Theatre for an extended run at the Arts Theatre, where it had a handful of showcase performances over the Christmas/New Year period.
I first saw the show […]
Are we really talking about mental ill health? Or just talking about talking about it? Are we listening – actively listening – to those in need? What stops someone from committing suicide? How much do you know about Samaritans, the world’s first-ever 24-hour helpline after 999?
Milly Thomas wrote Dust after feeling frustrated at not […]
How do you buy drugs online? What was Silk Road? Could the libertarians on it actually be steering us towards a more humane drug policy? Or is a play about this dark-web marketplace glamourising drugs? What do you do with a bitcoin production donation? Who’s actually read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island?
Not the usual questions […]
What is an intimacy director? How do they change the power dynamic on a production? Why have we had to wait for the #MeToo backlash to get them?
Vicky Jones’ debut play The One, about a toxic and violent modern relationship, won the Verity Bargate Award in 2013 and received its world premiere at Soho […]
On Wednesday afternoon, Jennifer Caldwell was working in the box office at the Arts Theatre, where new musical Knights of the Rose is currently playing. That night, with less than three hours’ rehearsal and having never even seen the show all the way through, she was onstage playing one of the female leads. As […]
Are women punished in drama for liking sex and drink? What has modern classic The Rise and Fall of Little Voice got in common with Greek drama? What’s the secret to vocal impressions?
I was delighted to return to Cirencester this weekend to chair my third consecutive post-show discussion at the pioneering Barn Theatre. For this […]
Andrew Lloyd Webber came up twice in conversation at last night’s post-show for It Happened in Key West. The second pertained to the title of the show which, many years ago, when Jeremiah James was first inspired by a late-night television documentary about Carl von Cosel. James had originally wanted to call this musical Love Never Dies… […]
If you had to choose just three Hollywood legends to build a theatre show around, who would you choose? For Sirens of the Silver Screen, Beth Burrows selected Judy Garland, Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe. At last night’s post-show discussion at the Tabard Theatre, she explained why she did, how much fun she had researching […]
If you’d never heard of the James Stagg before David Haig’s latest play Pressure, don’t feel bad: neither had he. Haig was approached by director John Dove and Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre who wanted to create a play about an unsung Scottish hero. They drew up a list of possible candidates and Stagg caught […]
A warning to start: Beirut is not for the prudish. In this two-hander, Robert Rees’ Torch starts the evening buck naked (doing pull-ups) and he and co-star Louisa Connolly-Burnham, as his lustily willing-to-risk-anything girlfriend Blue, spend the next 65 minutes in various stages of undress, tumbling in and out of bed (well, a single mattress on […]
Audience member Jessica McClellan at the Omnibus Theatre tweeted that last night’s post-show discussion for The Yellow Wallpaper was “deep AF” (I’ll assume you know what the AF stands for in social media speak…). It was pretty deep, in keeping with the extraordinary performance we’d just witnessed of Gemma Yates-Round as Alice, a woman suffering from […]
Before the performance at Tristan Bates Theatre, the 16-strong company of San Domino entertain theatregoers in the bar with some jaunty patriotic songs, with which they lead them into the auditorium. It’s somewhat akin to the chilling scene in Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret when the Hitler Youth sings “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”.
Inside the auditorium, we […]
Two scratch-your-head stats shared during my post-show Q&A for Schism last night at London’s Park Theatre: one, less than five percent of the UK population has dated someone with a disability, and two – wait for it – only one in four have even had a conversation with a disabled person.
Is it any wonder that diverse […]
When I first saw the Barn Theatre revival of Simon Stephens’ 2003 play One Minute, the things that struck me most were, in no particular order: the ground-breaking video projection design (by PJ McEvoy, film sequences by Ben Collins), the delicate performances of the five-strong cast, the seamless-but-sinister weaving of social media into a […]
A keen audience of Anthony Horowitz fans and super sleuthers last night at Mindgame made for a highly revealing post-show Q&A. How many set secrets did we correctly identify? And which character, plot and research twists?
Warning: if you want to be surprised when you see this mind-bending thriller, absolutely DON’T listen to the podcast beforehand. But rise to the […]
So much laughter at last night’s post-show Q&A for Katy Brand’s debut play 3Women, now running at the West End’s Trafalgar Studios 2 until 9 June 2018!
Brand’s 80-minute comedy-drama explores what it means to be a woman in the 21st century and the consequences of the generational gap on attitudes, cultural expectations and family dynamics. It’s set […]
Another post-show Q&A first for me. Due to a last-minute scheduling conflict, Spanish playwright Guillem Clua had to cancel his flight to London to attend last night’s performance of his acclaimed two-hander THE SWALLOW at the Cervantes Theatre, but he desperately wanted to take part in the post-show discussion – so the game team at […]
The Big Things, currently running at Barons Court Theatre, brings us into the world of Grace who, after meeting and falling in love with Malcolm and becoming a parent, is diagnosed with autism.
The London premiere is presented by Kibo Productions, who selected it from some 200 scripts received after an open submissions call. It’s […]
What a provocative play and post-show discussion! Are we all racist? How different are racial relations in 21st-century America versus Britain? How do we get more unheard voices onstage? Can white men tell valid stories about minority groups? Should they?
Joel Drake Johnson’s four-hander Rasheeda Speaking caused a stir when it was first seen in Chicago and New […]
I won’t name and shame but will admit that some of my trickiest moments over my many years hosting post-show discussions have been at plays set in the United States when audience members have, sometimes very unkindly, faulted the English actors for their American accents.
Quite the opposite happened this weekend at The Gulf. The matinee audience included a large group […]
I missed a trick with my questions last night at the world premiere of DAMES, the surreal comedy about six millennial women who meet in a nightclub loo, which marks the playwriting debut of Charlotte Merriam and the producing debut of Siberian Lights, the company she co-founded with three of her peers at Royal Welsh College […]
The Barn Theatre’s inaugural production of The Secret Garden extended by a fortnight – which very helpfully allowed me to fit another trip to Cirencester and a post-show Q&A into the diary. And I’m so glad.
Three weeks on, it was wonderful to revisit this beautiful, new, 200-seat theatre and this stunning, folk-influenced production in […]
When I chaired my first post-show Q&A at Miss Nightingale a year ago, I thought its home then was ideal: The Vaults, in its labyrinth beneath Waterloo Station, so like an air raid shelter, seemed to perfectly fit the setting of London during the Blitz. But now that it’s moved to the London Hippodrome, it’s […]
I’ve always been squeamish about needles. And I’m not much better with graphic drug-taking by any other method either. I first saw Harry Gibson’s stage adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting in the 1990s when I was a recently-arrived-from-America twenty-something in London. My memory of the experience involves nausea and confusion (I wasn’t able to understand much of what the […]
I’m pretty certain that my event last night at SOLDIER ON was my largest-ever panel for a post-show Q&A: in total, there were 19 of us, including me. Thank goodness the Playground Theatre had plenty of chairs and just enough room to arrange them in arc across the stage (I chose to stand and rove!).
Such enthusiasm for the piece […]
When you hold a post-show Q&A on Mothering Sunday, it’s awfully helpful to have a mother of one of the show’s stars in the cast. (Though I do hope After the Ball cast member Emily Tucker treated her mum to a slap-up meal afterwards in the buzzing bar and restaurant at the Gatehouse!)
Inevitably, we […]
If an elderly relative in enormous physical pain begged you to help them to die, would you? Would you ever ask the same of someone else? What is a ‘decent death’? Should we all have the right to one? Or, put another way, should euthanasia be legalised in the UK?
Those are some of the […]
I’ve been raving about Julius Caesar to everyone over the past few weeks, and particularly the experience of seeing it in the pit of the staggeringly versatile Bridge Theatre. This second production in the new 900-seater founded by former National Theatre Nicks Hytner and Starr really flaunts its wide-ranging ambition with this modern-dress Shakespeare.
Okay, […]
Updated 8 March 2018 following third event: This post has been updated with podcasts, photos and other content from all three post-show Q&As in the ANGRY series.
In November 2016, a week after the election of Donald Trump, I chaired a post-show Q&A at Philip Ridley’s Tonight with Donny Stixx. That one-man show, which follows a would-be magician […]
What’s the point of philosophy? According to Ludwig Wittgenstein, as portrayed in Ron Elisha’s moving and thought-provoking two-hander The Soul of Wittgenstein now running at Clapham Omnibus:
“It creates the illusion of knowledge. Which gives one a sense of order. Which, in turn, suggests a measure of control. Which rolls back the waves of raw fear.”
That […]
The Jewish story must continue to be told, Sheldon Harnick told me and a packed house at London’s Park Theatre after Tuesday night’s performance of Rothschild & Sons, for which he wrote the lyrics to the music by late collaborator Jerry Bock.
My post-show Q&A with Sheldon, and the UK premiere of Rothschild & Sons the night […]
What an incredibly brave, brilliant and inspiring woman Iris Chang was. What an unimaginably horrific atrocity the Nanking Massacre was. How ashamed I am to have known next to nothing about either before INTO THE NUMBERS.
Last night – thanks to a mesmerising performance followed by a thought-provoking post-show discussion with director Georgie Staight and […]
I feel incredibly privileged to have been “in the room where it happens” to see the European premiere of HAMILTON last night at the West End’s Victoria Palace Theatre.
There is so much to love about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s blockbuster hip-hop musical about one of my homeland’s founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, not least a glorious British cast, under the assured stewardship of […]
Does this count as a vlogmas? Probably not, but here’s my attempt at a theatre diary vlog in any case, which includes two Christmas shows!
The emphasis is on Off-West End musicals I’ve seen recently, all of which have things to recommend them – Miracle on 34th Street and The Little Match Girl to […]
Another fascinating rediscovery from Troupe Theatre. J.M. Barrie is best known, of course, for Peter Pan (and there are no shortage of revivals and spin-offs of that around Theatreland at the moment), but he also authored myriad novels and numerous other stage works, including The Admirable Crichton, Quality Street, Echoes of War, the opera […]
Three Off-West End musicals I’ve seen in the past few weeks – well, two musicals and a play with music – have served up slices of modern history to entertaining effect.
The end of The End of History is nigh – and I don’t mean North Korean nuclear threats, though perhaps Kim Jung-un will feature in […]
It was a packed house – including many therapy professionals – for last night’s performance of Matthew Campling’s new play The Secondary Victim at the Park Theatre. Which made for some very knowledgeable comments and insights at the post-show Q&A, for which I was joined by Campling, director Matthew Gould and the entire cast.
The […]
A cheeky Twitter follower (yes, I’m talking about you Johnny Fox) requested that I ask the three stars of Patrick Marber’s locker room drama The Red Lion – Stephen Tompkinson, John Bowler and Dean Bone – to explain the off-side rule at the post-show Q&A I chaired at Trafalgar Studios 2 last night. I threatened […]
Understandably, as theatremakers and audiences try to make sense of our turbulent times, political plays are de rigueur – and it’s not just ones written by James Graham either. And even productions that you wouldn’t categorise as such, inevitably take on political overtones when filtered through our consumption of daily headlines. I’m not sure if every […]
Can we love someone whose belief system we fundamentally disagree with? If we love someone, can we denounce what we believe just to please them? Family and faith compete in thoughtful three-hander The Busy World Is Hushed, showing both sides of a tormented mother-son relationship.
At a seminary in New York, Hannah (Kazia Pelka), a widowed Episcopalian minister […]
How much can a landscape shape a person’s identity? How much can a landscape shape a play’s plot? In answer to the latter question, in the case of Elizabeth Kuti’s Fishskin Trousers, the answer is certainly quite a lot.
Inspired in part by the local folk tale of the Wild Man of Orford, found by fisherman, the […]
I can’t get out of my mind the idea of touring two new, one-act plays I’ve seen recently – Jane Upton’s All The Little Lights and Kieran Knowles’ 31 Hours – as a double bill. It’s something that would absolutely warrant generous funding for tackling important and urgent social issues, and you could map out the tour […]
In the past month, two musicals have got me up on my feet and dancing all the way out to the bar. At Five Guys Named Moe, I joined a conga line at the interval after attempting to singalong Calypso-style to “Push Ka Pi Shi Pie”. At Hair, I flailed around at the finale to […]
How do we talk to those that we hate? How do we speak across the anger that divides us? Those are the opening lines in Chris Hannan’s provocative new play, What Shadows – and they were also amongst the questions raised in the Q&A I chaired with the cast after last night’s packed performance at London’s Park […]
I’ve had a rich few weeks for playgoing. In addition to productions I’ve already written about elsewhere – including, of those still running, Arrows and Traps’ Frankenstein at Brockley Jack and Stephen Clark’s Le Grand Mort at Trafalgar Studios 2 – here’s a quick round-up of some other smart plays I’ve seen recently and […]
Living in SE1 in London, I’m absolutely spoilt for theatres. The South Bank powerhouses of the National Theatre, Old Vic and Young Vic, Shakespeare’s Globe, and, as of later this month, the new Bridge Theatre under the auspices of former NT uber-duo Nicks Hytner and Starr, are all within ten minutes’ walking distance. But […]
It has been so fascinating to see Arrows and Traps’ startlingly fresh adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, just opened at Brockley Jack Theatre, and Ian Dixon Potter’s one-act drama The Test, finishing this weekend at the White Bear Theatre, in the same week on the London fringe.
Both stories centre on Promethean ambitions: scientists who, like […]
There are only a few days left to catch Che Walker’s new in-the-round production of John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, which finishes at London’s Southwark Playhouse this Saturday (30 September 2017).
While catching up with friends last night, including the show’s producer Darren Murphy, a group of us started arguing anew over the central question in the […]
There was a moment I’ll never forget from the Q&A I hosted after last night’s performance of Stephen Clark’s Le Grand Mort at Trafalgar Studios. Julian Clary, who is of course best known as a much-loved comedian and cabaret artist, had commented that it wasn’t really up to him whether he did more straight […]
Sales of George Orwell’s 1984 surged by a staggering 9,500% after the election of Donald Trump to become Amazon’s biggest seller. Orwell himself died, at the age of 46, in January 1950, just seven months after 1984 was published. What might he have written after 1984, and his earlier hit novel Animal Farm (published in 1945), if he’d lived […]
I had my own Godotesque moment to start last night’s Waiting for Godot Q&A. The stage was bare. Where were the chairs? Was anyone bringing chairs? How long would we be waiting for chairs? Did such things as chairs exist? In the end, five chairs did materialise – just enough for the show’s director and […]
What do you need to know about Dominic Cooke’s revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies at the National Theatre? It’s a great big, sumptuous, stellar hit.
I was lucky enough to see a preview myself this past weekend – standing ovation – and give a surprisingly alert-looking Dominic a hug afterwards. Any nerves he may have […]
Did you get lucky in the ticket ballot for #RADAHamlet, which on Twitter has also gained the predictable #HiddleHamlet hashtag thanks to its title star, Tom Hiddleston? The fundraising production, directed by none other than Kenneth Branagh (who previously directed Hiddleson onstage in Ivanov and onscreen in Thor and has long wanted to direct […]
The plays may have been written 420-odd years apart, but I was really struck by how many parallels there were between the discussion I hosted last week, to the European premiere of Jordan Tannahill’s Late Company at Trafalgar Studios, and the one I hosted last night, to Christopher Marlowe’s 16th-century classic Edward II.
Late Company, set […]
Having heard so many of My Theatre Mates raving about Late Company following its European premiere earlier this year at the Finborough, I was really looking forward to seeing it at Trafalgar Studios. And yet, I still came under-prepared: I didn’t bring enough tissues. It’s not giving away too many spoilers to say that, if […]
It’s not just umbrella festival programmes, as I blogged earlier, that keep myself and other London theatregoers busy in August. Here’s a round-up of some of the other plays and musicals I’ve seen recently that are worth a look. Get booking if any tickle your fancy – all are limited seasons finishing in the […]
I’m in the slightly odd position this month of working on an Edinburgh show while not being in Edinburgh at all. (Mind you, I have seen the show, in China in May, so can knowledgeably recommend it – so, if you’re in Edinburgh, by all means, do! It’s China Goes Pop!, a great East […]
Two years ago, I chaired the opening night discussion at the third annual From Page to Stage festival of new musicals founded by Aria Entertainment’s Katy Lipson. The central question on that occasion was “are we doing enough to nurture new musicals?” And the central answer was no. Amongst the suggestions made by the audience […]
Most of nights last week was devoted to just one play, Preethi Nair’s Sari: The Whole Five Yards, which I’m trying to help find a future life. But I have managed a few memorable evenings over the past fortnight that I can also recommend: Bob Dylan-inspired Girl from the North Country at the Old Vic, […]
My plays diary this week isn’t terribly varied. I’m spending most nights at the Tristan Bates Theatre, all in aid of one production: Preethi Nair’s Sari: The Whole Five Yards. That said, I’ll be lucky if I say the play once – demand for tickets is so high that I can’t get in any night […]
The King’s Head Theatre attracted widespread coverage this week for its announcement that it is moving out of the King’s Head pub on Upper Street in Islington, north London, its home for the past 47 years, and into a purpose-built, two-auditoria space in the new £400million Islington Square complex.
We covered the announcement – including […]
I’ve had issues with sleep – or rather lack of sleep – since I was a teenager. I won’t be an insomnia bore and tell you ALL of the so-called remedies I’ve tried over the years, including several sessions with a private, and very expensive, sleep therapist.
(Touch wood, the problem isn’t so bad at […]
Is Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew inherently misogynistic? Particularly with its treatment of spirited Kate, the Shrew of the title, who is starved and mentally tormented (gaslighting long before Patrick Hamilton, Ingrid Bergman or Donald Trump: “I say it is the moon [not the sun] that shines so bright”) into the role of […]
It’s always a real privilege to have the playwright involved when you’re chairing a post-show Q&A. But when the play is also based on the playwright’s own best-selling memoir… When the memoir recounts his relationship with a legend like Lucille Ball… Well, that’s extra special.
Add to the presence of I Loved Lucy author Lee Tannen the show’s […]
Before I attended King Kong, Daniel Clarkson’s bonkers stage parody of the 1933 film classic, last week at The Vaults, I never knew there was such a thing as a nose flute.
Now I will never forget! A diva nose flautist is one of the hundreds (?) of characters portrayed by King Kong’s multi-roling cast of […]
How many creatives does it take to make a one-man musical? The answer can be “quite a few”. And that it is in the case of SUPERHERO, the British one-man – or rather “one-dad” – musical now receiving its world premiere at London’s Southwark Playhouse.
At a post-show Q&A I chaired after last night’s performance, I was joined […]
My theatre week last week started and ended with musicals.
My partner Peter and I rushed back from our – rather too work-filled – fortnight in Mallorca just in time for West End Live. It’s incredible how much this free, two-day event has grown in its 13-year history. Having started out with a handful of […]
Just 11 months after I chaired my first post-show talk for Jon Brittain’s Rotterdam – then at Trafalgar Studios for its West End premiere – and so much has changed. The play went on to win an Olivier Award and transfer to New York before now returning for its second West End run, this […]
What’s the most important lesson in a prison ‘education’? HELD is a hard-hitting new British prison drama exploring the broken lives of five inmates, including two young offenders (both played by Jack Brett Anderson) incarcerated for the first time and learning fast that there’s a price to pay for everything…
Originally two interlinked one-act plays, […]
I was recently hired by the producer of Waiting for God to interview the show’s stars and writer as it embarks on a major UK tour. Here’s the first in a three-part series. Waiting for God continues touring until 8 July 2017. Visit the show website for full dates and tickets.
Jeffrey Holland stars in the new stage […]
I had a hunch that this would be an especially amusing post-show Q&A and the company and audience of American hillbilly comedy Out There on Fried Meat Ridge Rd., now transferred to the West End’s Trafalgar Studios 2 for a limited season, did not disappoint.
After a sell-out performance last night, I was joined by […]
I was recently hired by the producer of Waiting for God to interview the show’s stars and writer as it embarks on a major UK tour. Here’s the first in a three-part series. Waiting for God continues touring until 8 July 2017. Visit the show website for full dates and tickets.
Nichola McAuliffe stars in the new stage […]
I was recently hired by the producer of Waiting for God to interview the show’s stars and writer as it embarks on a major UK tour. Here’s the first in a three-part series. Waiting for God continues touring until 8 July 2017. Visit the show website for full dates and tickets.
Michael Aitkens conceived and created the […]
A string of hits, a cast of two, ‘Forever Plaid’ meets ‘I Do, I Do’. James Hindman’s 2000 Off-Broadway musical two-hander Pete ‘n’ Keely gets its European premiere at Tristan Bates Theatre, where it’s now runs to 20 May 2017. The production, directed by Matthew Gould, stars David Bardsley and Katie Kerr as the […]
James Shirley’s 1641 tragic masterpiece THE CARDINAL, one of the last plays staged in England before Oliver Cromwell’s ban on theatre, this month receives its first major production since the 17th century. This critically lauded rediscovery is directed by Justin Audibert for Troupe Theatre in a limited season now running at London’s Southwark Playhouse […]
Here’s a round-up of productions I’ve seen it recent weeks which I haven’t already covered in Press Passes (do please dance your way as soon as you can into seeing both An American in Paris and 42nd Street in the West End) or other blogs. What do all four of these have in common? […]
As a Twitter geek, one of the things I enjoyed most about David Baddiel’s latest one-man show My Family: Not the Sitcom, which is now enjoying its second West End run at the Playhouse Theatre after premiering last year at the Menier Chocolate Factory, is how he so successfully employs social media in his […]
One little postcode in New York City has been attracting a lot of stage real estate in London in recent years: the blocks around Times Square. The area is, of course, well known to theatre lovers around the globe as Broadway – both the physical street and the wider showbiz environment it encapsulates – […]
What a great way to get the Bank Holiday weekend off with a swing. Last night, I hosted a post-show Q&A at MISS NIGHTINGALE. This original British musical is now in its sixth iteration – musicals, as Sondheim says, aren’t written but re-written – since starting life as a short piece in Ipswich and […]
After successes with Sunset Boulevard and Sweeney Todd, English National Opera continues its annual headline-grabbing foray into musical theatre with Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel.
As with the previous ENO musicals of the past two years, this production is produced by Michael Linnit and Michael Grade (who are also behind the current big-budget production of another Broadway classic, […]
The second massive New York import in less than a month, 42nd Street brought its lullaby of Broadway to the Theatre Royal Drury Lane last night. In addition to their transatlantic journeys, An American in Paris and 42nd Street are both dance-based shows – with big budgets (£8 million is the word on the latter), huge casts […]
If you’re seeking life affirmation, celebrations of female solidarity (of a quintessentially British variety) and general uplift, my two current West End recommendations that tick all three boxes are The Girls, Tim Firth and Gary Barlow’s new musical adaptation of the story of the Calendar Girls from Yorkshire, and Maria Friedman’s revival of Richard […]
What would Bertolt Brecht have made of Donald Trump? Brecht’s “epic theatre” was sparked by the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany. Many pundits have likened the political period we’ve now entered – with Trump in the Oval Office, Brexit under way and hard-right populism on the rise across Europe – with that dark […]
I’m pleased that the Old Vic has added a week to the run of its 50th anniversary production of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, now booking until 6 May – it gives me another chance to tell you to go see it.
There’s a special thrill seeing Stoppard’s breakthrough play back on the same […]
Here’s what London is crying out for: an escape to Paris. And not the Paris of Marine Le Pen or any other modern foes and woes, but the sumptuous Hollywood Golden Age version now bursting into technicolour life onstage at the West End’s Dominion Theatre via New York and, yes, appropriately, Paris.
It’s a slew […]
Steve Waters’ Limehouse is as much a rallying call as a play: a rallying call for those of us left politically homeless by Jeremy Corbyn’s failed Labour Party.
It takes its name from the east London district where the “Gang of Four” – then-Labour politicians Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, Bill Rodgers and David Owen (played respectively […]
I’ve never voted Conserative. Indeed, the morning after the 2015 General Election, I was so horrified that, after five years of austerity, the Tories had not only got back in but had done so with a majority, that I immediately joined the Labour Party and vowed to get the Tories out at the next election. […]
Two Off-West End plays have recently inspired my other half Peter Jones to compile Spotify playlists of his youth – terribly convenient as I’ve tasked him with providing background music for a milestone birthday party this weekend (shhh… he’s celebrating the big 5-0).
In Matthew Seager’s debut play In Other Words, at the Hope Theatre, music […]
The American gothic rock musical LIZZIE, which is now receiving its UK premiere in a limited season at London’s Greenwich Theatre, opens and closes with a nursery rhyme I memorised in my own American youth about the real-life 19th century crime:
“Lizzie Borden took an axe,
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she […]
In his review this morning, Michael Billington has – to borrow a phrase from Meat Loaf – taken the words right out of mouth. At last night’s West End premiere of The Girls, I was telling anyone within listening distance that, after already remarkable success as a film and a stage play (both also […]
A few thoughts on musical productions I’ve seen recently, with my on-the-night tweet thoughts further below.
Promises, Promises
Less than a week left to see this rarely seen Broadway musical – the first London production, in fact, since its 1969 West End premiere. I have fond memories of the Oscar-winning 1960 film The Apartment, which starred […]
This week the president of the United States Donald Trump said (or rather tweeted) that those who participated in protests against his administration fell into one of three categories: “professional anarchists, thugs or paid protestors”.
His White House Secretary Sean Spicer reiterated the last in a television interview, insisting that protestors are definitely paid, that protest has […]
A year ago when blogging about the annual Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards, my headline was “Critics’ Circle Award winners: Are they the only ones that make sense anymore?”
I didn’t know then that Critics’ Circle Drama Section Chair Mark Shenton would go on to ask me to produce these awards, nor that, in a moment […]
The best antidote to hopelessness has got to be action. That’s what I have kept reminding myself over the past few months, and what I recited almost mantra-like on Friday afternoon as I watched Donald J Trump be sworn in as the 45th US president and then deliver a dystopian, divisive inaugural speech that painted the rest of […]
Stage shows based on Joseph Moncure March’s 1928 narrative poem The Wild Party are like buses. Ahead of next month’s much-anticipated UK premiere of the Michael John LaChiusa’s musical version, directed by Drew McOnie and starring Frances Ruffelle at the re-branded Other Palace (currently the St James Theatre), comes this month’s two-hander performance care […]
Last week I was more on schedule with rounding up lists of critics’ tips for the best theatre coming up this year. But in truth, as I’ve been organising the Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards ceremony on 31 January, as well as working with My Theatre Mates’ to announce the Also Recognised shortlists soon after that, […]
What are the hottest shows coming up this year? Based on the ones that are most likely to appear on top picks’ lists in my round-up of commentators’ round-ups, they are:
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Trump-tweeted hit Hamilton;
Ivo van Hove’s production of Obsession, starring Jude Law at the Barbican;
the New York transfer of The Glass Menagerie, directed by Harry […]
Ahead of rounding up various publications #theatre2016 highlights, I’m taking a moment to reflect on my own theatregoing year and my favourite plays, musicals, performances and other events.
My lists are not in the least bit definitive: they represent only my personal opinions on the shows I’ve managed to see. There are two shows not […]
The National Theatre used to be one of my favourite theatregoing destinations, but I’ve only been a handful of times in recent years. This hasn’t been an intentional omission on my part. When I left WhatsOnStage, I dropped off the NT’s opening night list (which is understandable), and with other commitments and financial restraints […]
What’s most absurd about absurdist comedy LUV? That it’s virtually unknown in this country – despite an incredible pedigree.
Long before he wrote the screenplay for the hit 1982 film Tootsie starring Dustin Hoffman, American Murray Schisgal made a name for himself in New York with this 1964 stage play, which is a riotous celebration of the […]
It’s taken 35 years, but Broadway hit Dreamgirls, inspired by the story of The Supremes, finally received its West End premiere last night (14 December) at the Savoy Theatre. Was it worth the wait? Based on most overnight reviews, the answer is a – very very loud (possibly over-amplified) – YES!
And as for Glee […]
I have become even more spoilt for choice for theatre on my doorstep with the arrival of my SE1 neighborhood’s newest venue, The Bunker. This subterranean black box is so close to another one of my locals – the Menier Chocolate Factory – that it shares the same full postcode; it’s converted from an […]
I saw two two-hander musical gems this past weekend: Her Aching Heart at the Hope Theatre in Islington and, on the opposite side of town, Another Night Before Christmas at the Bridge House Theatre in Penge. Though they’re on different ends of London’s north-south axis, these two lovely pub theatres have a lot in common, […]
What does Sam Shepard’s 1978 play Buried Child have to tell us about America after the presidential election of Donald Trump? The West End transfer of the New Group’s production, first seen in New York this past February, was announced in September, when the likelihood of a Trump presidency was still being dismissed by […]
A new musical – especially one not based on a film and/or arrived from Broadway trailing Tony Awards – is always a risky proposition. One received way of establishing a level of recognition and excitement for a piece before it opens is to “get the music out there” first.
Technologically speaking, getting the music out […]
What a treat to pay my first visit to London’s newest venue – The Bunker, carved out of a carpark beneath the Menier Chocolate Factory – to host this post-show Q&A for Tonight with Donny Stixx.
I’m a little in awe of playwright Philip Ridley, whose myriad plays over the years have, in addition to Tonight […]
There’s something in the water with The Beggar’s Opera at the moment. Lazarus Theatre’s new, modern-dress, 80-minute version at Brockley Jack Studio Theatre is the third major London presentation of the story of womanising highwayman Macheath this year.
Dougal Irvine’s musical The Buskers Opera, set in post-Olympics London with a Boris Johnson-like mayor (premiered on the day […]
Here’s everything you need to know about last night’s West End premiere of School of Rock: The Musical in a nutshell: Andrew Lloyd Webber has a monster hit on his hands; the show is both a return to hit factory form for the Lord and also not at all what you’d expect from a Lord; […]
In the days before this year’s US presidential election, Donald Trump predicted that the result would be “Brexit-plus-plus-plus”. For me personally, “Brexit-plus-plus-plus” is a fair description of my personal reaction to the news: as an American who has lived in London most of her adult life, someone who has dual nationality, someone who campaigned hard in […]
Everyone’s on drugs at the Park Theatre, I tweeted last Monday night. For a theatre that consistently impresses with the diversity of its received productions, it’s interesting that it should be hosting premieres in both of its houses, opened within days of each other, that both concern drug abuse. Admittedly, abuse of a very […]
Update: Since first tweeting this morning, the response to this piece has been fantastic, and I’ve been alerted to more pairings. I’ve added one into the main list (taking my original 9 to 10) and am trying to include all others in the tweet list below as they come in. Tweet me @TerriPaddock if […]
The (new) Union Theatre and Southwark Playhouse are always a pleasure to visit – not least because both venues are practically on my doorstep, within a ten-minute walk. At the moment, they’re both showing quirky, seldom-seen musical revivals.
Moby Dick!
I lost track of the number of times that people told me Moby Dick! is “bonkers” on […]
My first gut response to yesterday’s news that Emma Rice was leaving Shakespeare’s Globe, announced after less than a year – and only one summer season in post – was simply “Oh my God!”. In my years of commenting on theatre, I have never been as shocked by the news of someone’s leaving a job […]
What an astonishing way to make your playwriting debut. Theresa Ikoko’s first full-length play GIRLS was a Verity Bargate finalist and winner of both the Alfred Fagon Award (for Black British playwrights) and the George Devine Award (for new writers). The premiere production – co-produced by Talawa Theatre, HighTide Festival and Soho Theatre and directed by […]
Two rarely seen short plays by Steven Berkoff are professionally performed together for the first time in this much-anticipated West End premiere. LUNCH and, written 20 years later, its sequel THE BOW OF ULYSSES are both set at the seaside where a couple first passionately collide and, decades later, sit reflecting on their wasted […]
If you have to work on your birthday, this is just the kind of work you want. After watching the wonderful Amanda Muggleton rip through her 90-minute one-woman comedy The Book Club on Friday night, I joined her one-on-one on the onstage sofa for more hilarity.
In The Book Club, Amanda plays suburban housewife Deb, whose […]
I’m delighted to be able to deputise for my friend and My Theatre Mates co-founder Mark Shenton for two dates of his weekly West End chat show in October. Coq-Tales and Conversations takes place each Thursday or Friday afternoon as part of the Live at Zedel season, programmed by renowned American composer Scott Alan, […]
As a vehicle for the combined – and considerable talents – of Kerry Ellis, Ramin Karimloo, Victoria Hamilton-Barritt and Norman Bowman, Murder Ballad is made to order.
In this sung-through rock musical, Hamilton-Barritt plays the jaded narrator (and some key ancillary characters) to the story of Ellis’ New Yorker Sara caught between her muscly and menacing ex-boyfriend […]
UPDATED: The Boys in the Band transfers to the West End’s Vaudeville Theatre for a strictly limited season from 7 to 18 February 2017. Buy tickets here.
Mart Crowley’s seminal play, The Boys in the Band, premiered in New York in 1968, just 14 months before the Stonewall riots that ignited the gay rights movement. […]
I experienced frequent flashbacks while watching The Libertine last night at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. Here’s another Restoration-set comedy to hit the West End in which much of the action (and myriad in-jokes) takes place in and around a London theatre. The Libertine even shares characters with Jessica Swales’ Nell Gwynn (though Nell herself is only referred to) […]
Critic Matt Trueman described Elinor Cook’s Pilgrims, about a pair of young mountain climbers, as the “peak of playwriting”. I got to talk mountain climbing, metaphors and much more with this whipsmart George Devine Award-winning playwright at last night’s Q&A after the performance of Pilgrims at London’s Yard Theatre.
For the Q&A, we were also joined by […]
Are you in a happy relationship? An unhappy one? Or just a normal one with standard-fare ups and downs? Ever thought about cheating on your partner?
Owen McCafferty’s play Unfaithful, now in its London premiere run at Found111 in Charing Cross Road, could either be viewed as either a cautionary tale or a call to […]
That Man musical had two performances only at London’s Hippodrome Casino yesterday (20 September 2016) and, after the first one, I chaired a post-show discussion in front of an audience of industry guests to talk about the show’s journey to date and where it might go from here.
Yesterday’s presentation – though cast to the […]
After a run in New York and a short UK regional tour, Sean Mathias’ much-anticipated production of Harold Pinter’s 1975 play No Man’s Land officially opened in the West End last night (20 September 2016).
The production reunites Mathias with his two leading men, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, who starred in his award-winning 2009 […]
Is it pure coincidence that many of the plays I’ve seen recently feature actors as characters? And, consequently, a range of views on the life of actors and the nature of acting, which got my quote-taking pen twitching. For any actors or FFOAs (friends or family of actors) reading, please tell me which most closely […]
What if everything you’re ever known was thrown into question? And everything you ever trusted was subjected to doubt? When San Diego housewife Karen Ruiz’s husband is accused of being a terrorist, she endeavours to clear his name. Can she maintain her faith in her husband, her marriage and her government? Or will she […]
I made my HighTide Festival debut this weekend and what a privilege. Over the course of the weekend at this ten-day annual event, held in the beautiful Suffolk coast town of Aldeburgh and now marking its tenth anniversary, I had the privilege of chairing three hour-long “Face to Face” talks with world-class artists.
In this […]
A New York artistic commune in the early 1940s – occupied by British exiles Benjamin Britten, WH Auden, American novelist Carson McCullers (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter) and stripper Gypsy Rose Lee amongst many other artists – is the setting for Zoe Lewis’ new play Britten in Brooklyn, which has just premiered at […]
Starting out as cheerleaders: Lauren Samuels, Ashleigh Gray and Lizzy Connolly in Vanities at Trafalgar Studios. © Pamela Raith
Cheerleaders generally get a bad rap. When I went back to the States for my twenty-year high school reunion a few years ago, I witnessed first hand just how bad that rap can be.
There was a […]
This instalment of my theatregoing recommendations could be called not just my musicals diary but my musicals-on-my-doorstep diary. All three shows – Children of Eden, Allegro and Groundhog Day – are playing at what I consider neighbourhood theatres, within five to ten minutes’ walk of my front door: Southwark Playhouse (more like two minutes), […]
Two hapless understudies on a production of Waiting for Godot occupy their time backstage, trying to understand art, life, theatre and their precarious existence within it. Dave Hanson’s hit New York comedy Waiting for Waiting for Godot receives its European premiere at London’s St James Theatre and, just before he flew back to New […]
Are there any stage taboos left? John Ford’s 17th-century romantic thriller ‘TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE, centring on an incestuous relationship between brother and sister Giovanni and Annabella, is one of the most controversial in the classical canon and was not performed in the UK for more than 200 years until the mid-twentieth century. Does […]
If the line “Laughter through tears is my favourite emotion” makes you nod your head, then you must see the play from which it comes: Robert Harling’s Steel Magnolias, now revived at the Hope Theatre. If you’ve already seen the 1989 film of the same name, which was released two years after the stage […]
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Could the dream team behind multi award-winning, all-over-the-globe hit Matilda – director Matthew Warchus, composer and lyricist Tim Minchin, choreographer Peter Darling and designer Rob Howell – possibly strike gold again with their very next musical? Judging by reactions of the first batch of reviews for Groundhog Day, the answer is a resounding […]
July was a big month for Q&As for me so I’ve been a little pre-occupied by follow-up blogs on those. But in addition to musicals I’ve hosted events at – I’m Getting My Act Together and Through the Mill, both of which have now completed their strictly limited runs at, respectively, Jermyn Street Theatre […]
What a treat it was to not only see Jon Brittain’s Rotterdam again last night, but to be able to question this hugely talented young writer about his bittersweet comedy, which ranked amongst my Top Ten new plays of last year.
The play – set in the titular Dutch city, where Jon once spent months (unhappily) working in a call […]
Ahead of the double-show gala day at the West End’s Palace Theatre this Saturday, a galaxy of stars have already turned out for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. And I’m not just talking about Emma Watson and other celebrities who have sneaked in during seven weeks of previews.
(The Cursed Child started performances in […]
I first – and last – saw Neil LaBute’s Some Girl(s) in its world premiere in the West End in 2005, in a production that starred Friends’ David Schwimmer along with “girls” including Catherine Tate and Lesley Manville. In this first major London revival, Charles Dorfman takes on the pivotal role of a writer (never addressed […]
What does The Trial of Jane Fonda, concerning the actor-activist’s controversial protests during the Vietnam War (in which the UK did not support our US allies), have to tell us about more recent conflicts in Syria and Iraq (in which we did)? Particularly in the wake of the Chilcot Report? (And was the timing of […]
I first saw – and adored – Through the Mill when it premiered at the London Theatre Workshop (then above a pub in Fulham) last year. I was delighted when the show, which revolves around three pivotal periods in the life of Judy Garland, announced its transfer to the – much larger, more centrally […]
Last seen in London in 1981, when its premiere production ran at the West End’s Apollo Theatre after success Off-Broadway, I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road has returned 35 years on for a limited season at Jermyn Street Theatre, where Landi Oshinowo takes on the role of pop star […]
Most theatregoers will have only learned about Carl Peter Værnet from watching Claudio Macor’s new play Savage, now running upstairs at the Arts Theatre. But the Nazi doctor from Denmark has played a large role in the life of LGBTI activist Peter Tatchell for decades.
It was in the late 1980s that Tatchell first learned of Værnet, […]
Has anyone else had difficulty getting back into their theatregoing after the results of the EU Referendum? The two – excellent – plays I have managed to see since the UK voted to leave on 23 June, have both, in a strange way, deepened my Brexit despair too.
Neither Florian Zeller’s The Truth nor Faith Healer by […]
The first-night bookers could never have imagined that the timing of Aladdin’s West End opening could feel so incongruous with what’s happening in the real world. For producers Disney themselves, it’s been a week of sadness and horror: a boy killed by an alligator at their resort in Orlando, Florida, where, of course, 49 […]
Character portraits aren’t just for Harry Potter. Photographer Darren Bell gained access to the new cast of Buckland Theatre’s revival of Neil LaBute’s Some Girl(s) to snap these beauties.
In the play, directed by Gary Condes, Guy (played by Charles Dorfman) is desperate to clear his conscience before he gets married. So he sets off on […]
In my years of covering theatre, I’ve seen a lot of Hollywood stars make their West End debuts, but I’ve rarely, if ever, seen it done with quite so much aplomb. Jesse Eisenberg and Kunal Nayyar – best known internationally for, respectively, multiple films including The Social Network, and US sitcom The Big Bang […]
I’ve long been a fan of Katy Lipson at Aria Entertainment and have followed her fast-growing career with great interest. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to physically follow her to Manchester, where she’s recently branched out into venue programming and management with the team behind the city’s newest fringe venue, the Hope Mill Theatre. […]
Celebrity photographer Charlie Gray has shot three sets of exclusive character portraits of the grown-up characters from JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, along with the next generation, which feature in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. The wildly anticipated two-part stage play receives its world premiere this summer at the West End’s Palace Theatre, […]
Did you know that Sideways was an unpublished novel – rejected, like the efforts of the character Miles in the story, some 66 times – when the film rights were first picked up? In fact, the novel and film, about middle-aged buddies Miles and Jack on a pre-nuptials road trip through California wine country, were […]
Having never met him before, in less than a week, I’ve crossed paths with Jon Lansman, chair of Momentum, twice. Last Thursday, he attended the monthly meeting of my constituency Labour party (CLP), in which one of his colleagues threatened the deselection (or to be precise, the “mandatory reselection”) of my MP. Tonight, I […]
I took slight umbrage with arts journalist Richard Brooks the other week. “You have probably not heard of Barney Norris,” started one of Brooks’ item in his weekly column in the Sunday Times’ Culture section.
“Yes, I absolutely have!” I harrumphed. I have been a vocal champion of Barney’s since seeing his award-winning debut play […]
When Monster Raving Loony was announced a few months ago, I got a bashing on Twitter when I cheekily asked dramatist James Graham if he’d considered writing his next political play about the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn – “or if that was too close to his current subject”.
I don’t want to attract more […]
The Buskers Opera, set during the London 2012 Olympics, is inspired by John Gay’s 1728 The Beggar’s Opera which, amongst other works, has also inspired Brecht’s 1928 piece The Threepenny Opera, revived later this month at the National Theatre.
But while the basic structure and characters are owed to Gay, the zany genius of The Buskers Opera […]
When the news came in late yesterday that, just a fortnight after opening, Show Boat had posted West End closing notices, I was both shocked and not the least bit surprised.
To be clear, Daniel Evans’ Sheffield Crucible production isn’t shuttering immediately at the New London Theatre, where it opened on Monday 25 April, following […]
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