Reviews

My favourite character in Tartuffe is Madame Pernelle, the ferocious grandmère who whirls in at the top of act one and in a genius piece of exposition by Molière slags off every single member of the cast in...

'Put it in the tissue paper' sing the cast of The Biograph Girl in its wistful closing number 'they won't want that shadow till another day' and there you have both the motif for the end of the silent film...

guest reviewer Jonathan Loudan The Open Air Theatre in Regent’s park finally has a summer pantomime they can revive with minor tweaks and cast changes for ever, if they so desire. Peter Pan is, in any...

There’s a chapel in a suburb of Houston, Texas, whose hexagonal walls each carry a black or nearly-black canvas by the painter Mark Rothko. When I went there, I thought it a lonely, eerie space which can...

How often do you see a set with fitted carpets? Walking into Trafalgar Studios and seeing such a realistically dated four-star hotel suite, I thought, ‘oh, good, Katy Brand is going to rip conventional box...

I grew up in a house without music.   We didn’t own a record player, and I didn’t know – apart from the signature tune to Listen With Mother – that music came out of the radio until I was about...

Set your watches – actually they make you put a timer on your phone – and it’s 59 minutes to Doomsday in Unexploded Ordnances, a new-one-on-me genre called ‘Forum Theatre’ where two celebrated...

Two groups are better impersonated on television than by theatre: the Royal Family, and East Enders.   In H R Haitch they collide awkwardly in a royal wedding spoof musical with all the elegance of a bin...

The trouble with touring American musicals is … well, where do you start? First of all they have to be de-skilled from the Broadway originals so that an associate director and a lower-cost cast can...

The unique selling feature of a $200-a-ticket Broadway musical which sets it apart from our home made West End ones is often a vast stage filled with forty hoofers and a dozen ginormous sets. What makes Dear...