Theatre
Too much bawl and shriek
Yaël Farber’s Macbeth sets out to be a great work of art. The director crams the Almeida’s stage with suggestive…
Simply Shakespeare
Here goes. The Young Vic’s Hamlet, directed by Greg Hersov, is a triumph. This is a pared-back, plain-speaking version done…
Remaking history
The Normal Heart is not about Aids. Larry Kramer’s play is set in New York in 1981 at a time…
A script to raise whirlwinds
Boy meets girl. Girl gets pregnant. Then the entire world collapses. That’s the story of Camp Siegfried, which is set…
Phantom thread
Blithe Spirit is a comedy with the plot of a horror story. Charles, a middle-aged novelist, lives happily with his…
Cold spell
Frozen the musical declares war on woke politics. The 2013 Disney movie has been turned into a song-and-dance show that…
Tsunami of piffle
Deep breath. Here goes. Winsome Pinnock’s new play about Turner opens with one of the most confusing and illogical scenes…
Darkness visible
Translating the story of Jimmy Savile to stage or screen is a creative minefield, says Jonathan Maitland, who knows from first-hand experience
Rottweilers in frocks
It’s a rum beast the new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. Cinderella is set in Belleville, a European city of 18th-century…
London notebook
In London for the first time in 18 months, I was as excited as a child on a birthday outing.…
Screech, howl, yelp, crash
The new Lily Allen vehicle opens in a spruced-up terrace in the East End. Allen plays a self-satisfied yuppie, Jenny,…
What a farce
Lloyd Evans talks to Nigel Planer about the death of comedy theatre — and how he’s trying to revive it
Homeric levels of misery
The National Theatre has given Sophocles’s Philoctetes a makeover and a new title, Paradise. This must be ironic because the…
Still life
Lloyd Evans finds the newly returned Edinburgh Fringe quieter, more low-key — and all the better for it
Actor
‘That chap in Line of Duty. That’s what I’d call a bad actor,’ said my husband with vague certainty. He…
Frankly terrific
Sinatra: Raw (Pleasance, until 15 August) takes us inside the mind of the 20th century’s greatest crooner. The performer, Richard…
Theatrical opium
Ian McKellen in his early eighties plays the Dane in his mid-twenties. A production with such a strange innovation should…
West End pearl
The newly renovated Theatre Royal Drury Lane has seen it all and staged it all, says Robert Gore-Langton
High-minded vs heartbreaking
It can be difficult to remember that Tennessee Williams, the great songster of the Deep South during the 1950s, was…
Escapist comedy at its very best
Lady Sylvia is a gorgeous aristocrat whose hand is sought by the charming Dorante whom she has never met. To…
It’s who you know
All the world’s on stage again so where to go to for insight into what to see and why? Podcasts,…
Tasteless muddle
What shall we destroy next? Romeo & Julietseems a promising target and the Globe has set out to vandalise Shakespeare’s…
Shawn again
Pity the aesthete, the flâneur and the opera-goer. Those who find the contents of their own heads so dull and…
Stage fright
Uncertainty is crippling our cultural life
Diary
It turns out that if there’s one thing more expensive than making theatre, it’s not making it. Empty buildings haemorrhage…
