Theatre
Winter wonderland
Kenneth Branagh opens his West End tenancy with Shakespeare’s inexplicably popular The Winter’s Tale. We start in Sicily where Leontes…
How did this plotless goon-show wind up at the Royal Court?
One of the challenges of art is to know the difference between innovation and error. I wonder sometimes if the…
Theatre and transgression in Europe’s last dictatorship
Juan Holzmann goes underground in Minsk with the Belarus Free Theatre
Glyndebourne caters to the lower-middle classes not past-it toffs
What is Glyndebourne? A middle-aged Bullingdon. That’s a common view: a luxury bun fight for past-it toffs who glug champagne,…
Character assassination
Here are three truths about play-writing. A script without an interval will be structurally flawed. A vague, whimsical title means…
The Pit of hipsterdom
Penny is an all-day café in the former Pit Bar in the basement of the Old Vic, a famous and…
The characters are barely stereotypes: The Father at the Wyndham’s reviewed
The Father, set in a swish Paris apartment, has a beautifully spare and elegant set. The stage is framed by…
It may have a meagre script and no plot but Farinelli and the King is still a major work of art
Philippe V was a Bourbon prince who secured the throne of Spain using his family connections. Claire van Kampen is…
Foote fault
Samuel Foote (1720–77) was a star of the 18th-century stage who avoided the censors by extemporising his performances. Today we’d…
The big chill
Michael Grandage’s latest show is about an old snap. Geneticists regard the X-ray of the hydrated ‘B’ form of DNA…
Nice work
You can’t play the part of Hamlet, only parts of Hamlet. And the bits Benedict Cumberbatch offers us are of…
Dublin
What a delight it is to toy with a wooden newspaper-holder rather than a smartphone, tucked away in the cosy…
All white on the night
Trevor Nunn is staging Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses without a single black actor. So what, says Robert Gore-Langton
Shtumming the spiel
London may cry foul over Hamlet’s misplaced to-be-ing and not-to-be-ing but Edinburgh is in raptures over a Magic Flute which…
Art by committee
Australia, 1788. A transport ship arrives in Port Jackson (later Sydney harbour) carrying hundreds of convicts and a detachment of…
Press night
Sam Mendes once said there is no such thing as the history of British theatre, only the history of British…
Barometer
How many cheats? More data on members of extramarital dating site Ashley Madison were put online. How widespread is adultery?…
Edinburgh on Thames
Showstopper! The Improvised Musical offers a brand new song-and-dance spectacular at every performance. It opens with a brilliantly chaotic piece…
The master returns
The visionary theatremaker Robert Lepage is back in Edinburgh after a 20-year absence. Matt Trueman talks to him about trends and legacies
Chekhov by numbers
Chekhov so dominates 19th-century Russian drama that Turgenev doesn’t get much of a look-in. His best known play, A Month…
Look at my Fringe
Our theatre critic, Lloyd Evans, makes his Edinburgh debut
Family matters
God, what a title. The Gathered Leaves. It sounds like a tremulous weepie about grief and endurance with a closing…
Has-Bean
Richard Bean, the country’s most bankable playwright, knocks out a new script every four months. Thanks to the success of…
Home and away
Refugee crisis in the Mediterranean! Fear not. Anders Lustgarten and his trusty rescue ship are here to save mankind. Lampedusa…
Bid low, break even
A new Seagull lands in Regent’s Park. Director Matthew Dunster has lured Chekhov’s classic into a leafy corner of north…
