Theatre

Twenty years ago, there was a lot of it about: light comedies afloat in the West End, chronicling the disintegration of a suburban marriage while simultaneously lampooning the middle-class enthusiasm for some...

With the possible exception of my own heterosexual betrothal one heady night in Malta in 1976, I can think of few projects more certifiably doomed to failure than The Dowager’s Oyster. As a succession of...

When I was a kid, the Saturday morning BBC radio programme Children’s Favourites regularly played Tommy Steele’s ‘Flash, Bang, Wallop’. I didn’t like it then, and I’m not much more keen on it today...

Needle, meet haystack. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find one man identified only by a fuzzy faxed photograph in a city of nine million. He has a beard and a bad haircut. As if that...

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...