Is Shakespeare racist?
Shakespeare’s Globe has a new wheeze to popularise its shows. The latest production, Henry VIII, is supported by a seminar…
Absolute beginner
The House of Shades is a state-of-the nation play that covers the past six decades of grinding poverty in Nottingham.…
Quiet thunder
Hampstead’s latest play is a knotty rape drama by Naomi Wallace set in Kentucky. Four teenagers with weird names meet…
Body language
‘I fink I doan luv yew any maw.’ A marital bust-up drama at the National Theatre opens with a whining…
Losing the plot
The title of the Donmar’s new effort, Marys Seacole, appears to be a misprint and that makes the reader look…
Piers Morgan’s Uncensored has a huge mountain to climb
He sits alone at a huge glossy desk like a James Bond baddie inhis lair. The viewer expects Daniel Craig…
Bad education
The Corn is Green by Emlyn Williams is a sociology essay written in 1938 about a prickly tyrant, Miss Moffat,…
Trumpian lullaby
Trump is said to be a gift for bad satirists and a problem for good ones. He dominates Mike Bartlett’s…
Soused in bilge
The Fever Syndrome is a dramatised lecture set in a New York brownstone occupied by the super-brainy Myers family. The…
Boris’s crazy defence
‘I was very busy. The party was crap. I’m sorry you’re angry. Now leave me alone.’ That was the gist…
Changing of the Bard
The NT has rejigged Hamlet for 8- to 12-year-old children. It’s a decent attempt to cover the highlights at a…
Shaw thing
It’s good of Nicholas Hytner to let Londoners see David Hare’s new play before it travels to Broadway where it…
Sheer torture
Cock was written by Mike Bartlett in 2009 while he was in Mexico at a drama conference. The title suggests…
‘I had no interest in the theatre whatsoever’
Lloyd Evans talks to Keith Allen about Max Bygraves, how he fell into acting and the sensitivities of contemporary audiences
Miller’s crossing
Bloody Difficult Women is a documentary drama by the popular journalist Tim Walker, which looks at the similarities between Gina…
Is Boris a Russian agent?
Is Boris a Russian agent? That bizarre question occupied most of PMQs where Dominic Raab deputised for the PM while…
Wonder woman
Shedding a Skin opens with an office nightmare. Amanda is a mixed-race employee in a predominantly white firm who gets…
Zelensky’s address was strange, but sensational
This afternoon, the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the House of Commons. A single flat-screen TV broadcast his speech to…
The philosopher and the philistine
The Collaboration is set in the 1980s when Andy Warhol teamed up with the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat to create bad…
Boris is back
Boris looks quite the statesman as he deals with the Ukraine crisis. MPs have spotted this and they want to…
Threadbare brain-teaser
The Forest is the latest thriller from the French dramatist Florian Zeller, translated by Oscar winner Christopher Hampton. It’s a…
Clown prince
Never Not Once has a cold and forbidding title but it starts as an amusing tale set in an LA…
Double trouble
A Number, by Caryl Churchill, is a sci-fi drama of impenetrable complexity. It’s set in a future society where cloning…
PMQs: Boris looks chipper for a man on the brink
And still they try. MPs are desperate to get the Prime Minister to quit, live on TV, during PMQs. As…
Fraudulent tripe
It’s getting silly now. London’s subsidised theatres aren’t just competing to put on the worst play of the year but…
