Beckett

Every crumb of Kurtag’s music is a feast: Endgame, at the Proms, reviewed

9 September 2023 9:00 am

The fun starts early in Beckett’s Endgame. Within minutes of opening his mouth, blind bully Hamm decides to starve his…

Godot Is a Woman will have you laughing all evening and arguing all night

19 June 2021 9:00 am

Godot Is a Woman opens with three tramps standing on a bare stage beneath a solitary upright. This isn’t Samuel…

A mesmerising piece of theatre: On Blueberry Hill reviewed

21 March 2020 9:00 am

On Blueberry Hill sounds like a musical but it’s a sombre prison drama set in Ireland. Two bunkbeds. Above, an…

The Gyorgy and Marta show: the nonagenarian couple have been an unlikely hit on YouTube

One of the last living avant-gardists speaks – Gyorgy Kurtag on his new Beckett opera

10 November 2018 9:00 am

Arriving in Budapest, I receive a summons I cannot refuse. Gyorgy Kurtag wants to see me. Famously elusive, the last…

Like Jon Bon Jovi struck by lightning: Garrett Lombard as Lucky in Waiting for Godot

Washed-up junkies, Trump the director and a cash giveaway: Edinburgh Festival round-up

11 August 2018 9:00 am

Trump Lear is a chaotically enjoyable one-man show with a complicated premise. David Carl, an American satirist, has arrived on…

Verbal diarrhoea

5 October 2017 2:00 pm

In Beckett’s Happy Days a prattling Irish granny is buried waist-deep, and later neck-deep, in a refuse tip whose detritus…

Deep learning

23 September 2017 9:00 am

Given the brilliance of his career as a fiction-writer, it is easy to forget that J.M. Coetzee has a commensurate…

Patrick Marber’s Red Lion at the Dorfman reviewed: ‘the woman next to me yawned a lot’

20 June 2015 9:00 am

For nine years Patrick Marber has grappled with writer’s block (which by some miracle doesn’t affect his screenplay work), but…