Ever been to a queer club? You know, drag cabaret night at Madame Jojo's, or the Black Cap or Her Upstairs. No? Well, not to worry " the Royal Court's latest provides a fabulously extravagan…
Billed as an examination of gentrification, Kerry Jackson at the National Theatre has disappointingly little to say about this subject. Its main characters have clichéd opinions and stereot…
How many plays pass the Bechdel Test? Originally featured in a comic strip, and popularised in film criticism, it simply states that to pass this test your story has to have: 1) at least two…
In his award-winning play, which premiered in Boston in 2011, American playwright Stephen Karam examines the issues in a thoroughly original, brilliantly constructed and thematically compell…
What is the best way of talking about the Middle East? Should plays take a documentary or verbatim approach, all the better to educate and inform, or is there another path, which includes en…
Julia Pascal is a resourceful theatre-maker who is unafraid of controversy. Her interest in the relationship between the personal and the political, and sympathy with both the victims of the…
Julia Pascal is a resourceful theatre-maker who is unafraid of being controversial. Her interest in the relationship between the personal and the political, and sympathy with both the victim…
In his latest, Blackout Songs, a powerful 95-minute two-hander, Joe White uses a flexible structure to represent some excruciating emotional material, and the result gives an almost overwhel…
Joe White is great at staging fraught emotions. His Mayfly in 2018 vividly showed a family whose members were at the end of their tethers; it also had an intriguingly intelligent form. In hi…
At best Baghdaddy at the Royal Court Theatre is a surreal trip into traumatic memory, at its worst it's a self-indulgent mess. If you think that American crime are worse than Saddam's you'll…
Last night, at the Arcola, I witnessed the return of The Poltergeist, Philip Ridley's blazing one-man show from 2020. It is a terrific piece of writing, a text which is a masterpiece of stor…
Martin Crimp's Not One of These People at the Royal Court: radical investigation of presence and absence in fiction
Sudha Bhuchar's Evening Conversations at the Soho Theatre: a calmly intelligent exploration of family identity
Nica Burns' choice of an opening production for @sohoplace is Marvellous, a celebratory bio-drama about Newcastle-under-Lyme's local legend, the irrepressible Neil "Nello" Baldwin, whose ama…
Therapy is inherently dramatic. After all, it's all about character " and it has the aim of producing a recognizable change. But who is most affected by the process: client or therapist? Geo…
Therapy is inherently dramatic. After all, it's all about character " and it has the aim of producing a recognisable change. But who is most affected by the process: client or therapist? Geo…
If you accept the documentary verbatim style of Jews. In Their Own Words at the Royal Court, and don't mind the lack of any real drama, this is an intelligently crafted and committed piece o…
Identity is the sum of the stories we tell ourselves. Some of these are personal, and some political. Sometimes they blend, sometimes clash. In Aaron Kilercioglu and Bilal Hasna's excellentl…
Identity is the sum of the stories we tell ourselves. Some of these are personal, and some political. Sometimes they blend, sometimes clash. In Aaron Kilercioglu and Bilal Hasna's excellentl…
Britain is a divided nation, but one of the divisions that we don't hear that much about is that between Pakistani gay men. Written by Waleed Akhtar (who also stars in this impressively hear…
In Silence at the Donmar Warehouse four British playwrights have adapted Kavita Puri's book Partition Voices: Untold British Stories in a joint production between Donmar Warehouse and Tara T…
In developing The Trials, the Donmar worked with more than 1,300 young people plus a further 200 in workshops at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and National Youth Theatre. Director…
While Britain is experiencing a "summer of discontent", with inflation, strikes and other conflicts, it is odd that so few plays are as overtly political, and as overtly resonant as Sonali B…
If the plotting is predictable, and the story arc unremarkable, the image of life represented is both strongly compassionate and often very pleasurable. In true welfare state style, comedian…
Yesterday evening I went to see Dog/Actor at the Etcetera Theatre in Camden. Written by Steven Berkoff, in his instantly recognizable snarling voice, these two short monologues are bri…