George Bernard Shaw
Provocative, verbose and humourless: Mrs Warren’s Profession reviewed
George Bernard Shaw’s provocative play Mrs Warren’s Profession examines the moral hypocrisy of the moneyed classes. It opens with a…
Director’s cut
The unlovely Rose Theatre in Kingston is a modest three-storey eyesore. The concrete foyer looks like an exercise area on…
Tudorbethan hell
In his 1981 autobiography A Better Class of Person, the playwright John Osborne described an encounter he’d recently had with…
Is May Morris a feminist cause – a woman of genius unfairly overlooked?
You may think you don’t know May Morris, daughter of William, but you’ll probably have come across her wallpaper. Her…
Shaw thing
T.E. Lawrence is like the gap-year student from hell. He visits a country full of exotic barbarians and after a…
The rite stuff
Theo Hobson explores the enduring appeal that religion has for dramatists
Space case
The idea that Radio 2 should be sold off by the BBC to a commercial rival is as nonsensical as…
GBH meets BS
When I was a kid, I was taught by a kindly old Jesuit whose youth had been beguiled by George…
Politics as Victorian melodrama
The egotistical Churchill may have viewed the second world war as pure theatre, but that was exactly what was needed at the time, says Sam Leith
Reading a face
Do you think you can tell things about writers from the way they look in a painting or photograph? A…
