Reviews

Five things you may or may not know about Glenda Jackson?   Born in Birkenhead, she served two years on the beauty counter in Boots before getting in to RADA.   A staunch Labour MP...

Two hours and 55 interminable minutes during which I would happily have slit my own throat. No, that’s the journey from London to Colchester in one of the worst Friday night traffic jams in living memory:...

I despair of two-handed musicals. Required to judge the personalities or take sides, you feel trapped. Nowhere more so than at The Last Five Years in which the partners wail their issues at you in a relentless...

Whenever I wanted to climb five flights of stairs to sit on a hard wooden chair in an attic and listen to people shouting, I’d visit Great Aunt Frieda who spent her deaf and declining years on the topmost...

Did you ever hear the story of two young twins? As like each other as two new pins … oh, hang on, that’s Blood Brothers. What about sisters who became child stars on the Orpheum circuit? June and Louise in...

If you can’t take a joke, you really shouldn’t have joined. Some critics are up in arms that the 1979 ‘classic’ piece Amadeus has been deconstructed and, they say, dumbed down in the National...

If you are mining the classics for a rarely told story, Les Misérables proves that Victor Hugo is a profitable place to start. The master stroke of the creative team at Bristol Old Vic is to re-imagine his...

Shakespeare 101: muck/fuck about with it all you like, the poor sod’s well out of copyright, but the acid test for any modern rendering is 'if you hadn't seen this play before, would this production tell you...

In The Boys in the Band currently selling out the Park Theatre, Ian Hallard as Michael sings “any way you figure, it’s hard to be a nigger – but it’s better than being a jew”. There in one cheeky...

This isn’t an exhaustive list because there’ll be a panto somewhere in practically every postcode come December, but it is a rundown of your options – financial and artistic – for a special Christmas...