Category: Theatre

  • Berberian Sound Studio

    Berberian Sound Studio was a very fine 2012 horror film made by Peter Strickland. Set in the seventies, Toby Jones starred as Gilderoy, a sound mixer who has been employed to work on an Italian film called The Equestrian Vortex. He believes that he was employed because of his sound recording and mixing on a documentary about…

  • Network

    The 1976 Paddy Chayefsky film is something of a classic with Peter Finch’s network news anchor Howard Beale essentially having a nervous breakdown on air when the network first tries to push him out the door, and then, when ratings soar, grab hold of him and let him do what he wants. It has always…

  • Nell Gwynn

    Sitting down at the Apollo with a few friends, I realised that I didn’t know a whole lot about Nell Gwynn. I knew vaguely that she’d once been a prostitute, became a stage actress – famous in her day – and won lots of admirers including the King. Broadly speaking that’s right, and although I…

  • The Encounter

    The Encounter is a tour de force piece from actor, writer and director Simon McBurney and the Complicite theatre company. I confess that I mostly knew McBurney from his acting roles including the excellent Archdeacon Robert in the wonderful Rev with Tom Hollander, but you soon realise how accomplished he is simply from this one…

  • A Streetcar Named Desire

    The corner of Royal and Desire in New Orleans. There really was a streetcar that ran along Desire… It seems that this has been one of the hot tickets of the season, which just makes it bit odd that I managed to buy a pair of tickets for a Saturday night a couple of weeks…

  • Medea

    Medea at the National is a superb new production of Euripes’ classic tale – first performed in 431 BC. Medea (Helen McCrory) has separated from her husband Jason (Danny Sapani), and been banished to some far flung part of Greece with her two sons. Jason is to marry the daughter of Creon, King of Corinth.…

  • Great Britain

    Here’s something a little unusual – a play that was written and rehearsed in secrecy, only being revealed at the culmination of the hacking trial, with the first performances at the National Theatre taking place just a week later. This certainly ticked all my boxes with the subject matter. This a fictionalised account of the…

  • Breaking The Code

    Breaking the Code by Hugh Whitmore dates from 1986, but I’d only previously seen the 1996 TV adaptation starring Derek Jacobi which was very good. So when I learnt the other week that there was a new production in London I thought I should go and see it, as Alan Turing is a fascinating man…

  • The Permanent Way

    After I recently saw The Power of Yes, it became apparent that this was not the first production that David Hare had produced in this way. In 2004, there was The Permanent Way, a National Theatre/Out of Joint co-production that carried out a similar dramatised investigation into the state of British railways following privatisation and…

  • The Power of Yes

    David Hare is an angry playwright, and rightly so. The Power of Yes is his attempt to make sense of the financial crisis, and rather than a conventional piece, we see the “author” (Anthony Calf) attempt to make sense of everything by conducting a series of interviews with relevant people. Many of them are named,…

  • Arcadia

    I first saw Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia in 1993 at the Theatre Royal Bath, when the play was touring following its premiere at the National Theatre in London. It was a joy to watch and I instantly fell in love with it. I rushed out to buy the text. It was smart, and literate. The dialogue…

  • Boeing Boeing

    Boeing Boeing is a new production of a French farce dating from the sixties (and filmed a couple of times). Bernard (Roger Allam) lives in a Parisian apartment, and at the play’s start we meet him with glamourous TWA air stewardess Gloria (Tamsin Outhwaite). But he has a secret. Aided and abetted by his world…