Beating Berlusconi
If you’re on tenterhooks for the World Cup, you could do worse for a warm-up than Beating Berlusconi. But you don’t need a review to tell you that; you can work out from the poster alone that it’s pitched at football fans. This review is for everyone else.
Napoleon Noir
Poor Toussaint L’Ouverture is reduced to a bit player even in the play that bears his nom de guerre.
4.48 Psychosis
4.48 Psychosis is a gift for a director. Kane’s text – her last – is more prose poem than script, lacking stage directions or delineated characters: a nearly blank slate onto which a director can impose context, character and narrative.
Lyn Gardner fully expects to be replaced by Katie Price
Upper-echelon theatre critics are as worried as young hopefuls about “celebrity critics”, albeit for different reasons.
‘I’d rather be in the pub’ is not an excuse
You can have both: a theatre trip and an evening down the pub are not mutually exclusive
Olivier Audience Award shortlist: four musicals and a horse
What is heartening about the shortlist is the eerily perfect proportional representation of musicals and “straight” theatre. The longlist consisted of 16 musicals and four plays – an 80-20 split, if you want to talk percentages. The shortlist contains four musicals and one play, War Horse – another perfect 80-20 split.
Excuse me, you’re standing in my dead men’s shoes
The men at the top are on their way out, but does that mean the people below them get a look-in? Does it heck.
Decade
What do you remember about the Noughties? (Yes, it turns out that is what we’re calling them.) Theatre503 asked that question to ten playwrights – five established, five as-yet unproduced – and the result is Decade, a collection of ten ten-minute plays, each one representing a single year.
New Olivier Award celebrates the power of you
For the first time, you can decide one of the winners of the Olivier Awards
No excuses: theatre is affordable
If you can afford a cinema ticket, you can afford a theatre ticket.
