You wonder about the title of French dramatist Sam Gallet’s Mephisto [A Rhapsody], an adaptation for our days of Klaus Mann’s 1936 novel about an actor unable to resist the blandishments of fame, even if they come at the cost of losing himself.
A hit comedy about a textile scientist? It might sound unlikely, but Ealing Studios’ 1951 sci-fi satire, starring Alec Guinness, was one of the most popular films of the year in Britain. Now, Sean Foley hopes to repeat its success with his new West End stage version, which tweaks the formula to go big, broad and occasionally Brexit-referencing – with varying results.
Shuck 'n' Jive is an hour-long two-hander about writing a play about being black in a white industry. The industry? Theatre. Performance. The stage.
“Doors and sardines. Getting on, getting off. Getting the sardines on, getting the sardines off. That’s farce. That’s the theatre.
The American dramatist Katori Hall has created a work of rare accomplishment in Our Lady of Kibeho, a play that combines a beautifully established picture of a particular world – a church school in rural Rwanda, in the early 1980s – with profound themes such as faith and belief.
Reviewing Ian McKellen's show is, in one sense, like appraising the Taj Mahal or Mount Everest: he too is an awe-inspiring phenomenon.
Playwright Peter Nichols died aged 92 last month, just before the opening of this starry West End revival of his most celebrated masterpiece. A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1967) is based on his own family experience of bringing up his disabled daughter in the 1960s, and it has the reputation of being one of the most ground-breaking plays of its generation.
Time has been kind to Athol Fugard's "Master Harold"...and the Boys. It's a stealth bomb of a play that I saw in its world premiere production in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1982 and that has been a regular part of my playgoing life ever since. Yes, the apartheid-era South Africa that Fugard dissects with terrifying force has been dismantled, and we live in (supposedly) more enlightened times.
What a joy Laura Wade's latest play is. Transferring from its successful run at the Minerva Theatre at Chichester last year, The Watsons is developed from Jane Austen's unfinished novel (started in 1804 and abandoned the following year).
There’s a fine balance between the cosmic and the closely crafted in director Paul Miller’s Macbeth, his first production in the expansive space that is Chichester’s main stage.