What you won’t learn from Channel 4’s Partygate drama
Partygate has morphed from a half-forgotten scandal into a new drama-documentary which airs on Channel 4 tomorrow night. This rehash…
My lonely heart
Was a Guardian Blind Date the answer?
Cheesy skit
The playwright Sam Holcroft likes to toy with dramatic conventions and to tease her audiences by withholding key information about…
Russell Brand’s gags are coming back to haunt him
It has now officially all gone wrong for stand-up’s sex god. Ahead of Saturday night’s Channel 4 documentary about Russell…
Gone girl
Anthropology is a drama about artificial intelligence that starts as an ultra-gloomy soap opera. A suicidal lesbian, Merril, speaks on…
Osborne, Balls and a glimpse of Westminster’s rotten culture
Podcast mania continues at Westminster. Discarded grandees from all parties have noticed the success of The Rest is Politics, the…
The weasel under the cocktail cabinet
Macbeth at the Globe wants to put us at our ease and make us feel comfortable with the play’s arcane…
Germ of an idea
Bleach and germs are the central themes of Dr Semmelweis, written by Mark Rylance and Stephen Brown. The opening scene,…
Love and other drugs
Lucy Prebble belongs to the posse of scribblers responsible for the HBO hit, Succession. Perhaps in honour of this distinction,…
Sister act
The Mitfords is a superb one-woman show by Emma Wilkinson Wright who focuses her attention on Unity, Diana and Jessica.…
Comedy gold
A chilly August in Edinburgh. Colder than it’s been for 20 years and the city looks scruffier than ever. Locked…
Alex Salmond teases a reconciliation with Sturgeon
Even in her absence, Nicola Sturgeon dominated Iain Dale’s discussion with Alex Salmond and David Davis at the Edinburgh festival.…
Mick Lynch is stuck in the past
Mick Lynch, the general secretary of the RMT, has never felt truly English. In conversation with Iain Dale at the…
Clueless
The Royal Court’s new topical satire, Word-Play, opens with a gaffe-prone Tory prime minister giving a TV interview in which…
Comic relief
The boss of the Royal Court, Vicky Featherstone, will soon step down and she’s using her final spell in charge…
Bad blood
In the 1990s, the BBC had a popular flat-share comedy, Men Behaving Badly, about a pair of giggling bachelors who…
Roll up, roll up for Ian Blackford’s farewell tour
Ian Blackford, the SNP MP, is to stand down at the next election. And last night he gave an interview…
Omission accomplished
Beneatha’s Place, set in the 1950s, follows a black couple who encounter racial prejudice when they move to a predominately…
More cuddly than cutting
Nothing demonstrates the inanity of profanity like an undercooked comedy. The famous Spitting Image puppets have returned in a political…
Penalty points
James Graham’s entertaining new play looks at the England manager’s job. Everyone knows that coaching the national side is just…
Not tuned in
When Winston Went to War with the Wireless is the clumsy and misleading title of a new play about John…
Rocky peaks
One of the earliest jukebox musicals has returned to the West End. When the show opened in 2002 the author,…
Weird and wonderful
A puzzle at Hampstead Theatre. Literally, a brain teaser. Its new production, Re-member Me, is a one-man show written and…
The ex factor
Mrs Doubtfire is a social comedy about divorce. We meet Miranda, a talentless, bitter mother, who tires of her caring…
Brief encounters
Brokeback Mountain, a play with music, opens in a scruffy bedroom where a snowy-haired tramp finds a lumberjack’s shirt and…
