Reviews

At 53, Simon Evans isn’t so different from circuit comedians half his age - a rhetorical stream of invective squirted squarely at current events, with the exception that he speaks entirely in well-honed...

“You put the grill on high, and the bread under it. Turn it over half-way through. And then you take it out and scrape it.” That extract from my eight-year-old school essay could just as easily have...

Every time I see a new musical made from a recent-ish film, I wonder if this could be ‘the one’, the one that jumps the shark and enters the canon of the regularly performed. With composers James Lapine...

An excuse to review Maggie May is really an excuse to tell my Lionel Bart story. In the 80’s I was in a pretty shoddy production of his Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be at a West London theatrical...

In December 1976 on my first visit to New York I saw the late great Zero Mostel walking down Broadway. He would have been about 61 at the time but looked eighty – I assumed it was the strain of eight shows...

I used to date a geneticist.   Well ‘Bobby the Biotec scientist’ as I knew him is now professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, so the themes of The...

Somewhere, hopefully in a locked vault in the basement of the BFI, is a 16mm black-and-white version of Lord of the Flies in which I play Percival Wemyss Madison, the smallest of the boys marooned on the...

David Cecil MacAlister Tomlinson was a polite, genial, diffident actor. Miles Hugh Barrett Jupp is a polite, genial, diffident comedian.They are clearly made for each other, and in this gentle, charming...

At last, Rufus Norris’s National Theatre has come of age. ` Breathtaking, brave and brilliantly acted, Downstate is a landmark play. It’s listed as a ‘collaboration’ between NT and Steppenwolf,...

Darren and Andrew look like two East End plumbers who’ve turned up to fix Barbara Windsor’s downstairs leak. They’re the last people you’d imagine could be an ace mind-reading act. Formerly two...