It's been nearly four years since I chaired a Q&A for the world premiere of Proforca's Flashbang at the Lion & Unicorn Theatre. Now, after a spring tour, the production is back for …
As the marketing material promises, An Adequate Abridgement of Boarding School Life as a Homo is definitely *not* a gay tragedy. Nor is a coming-out memoir or theatrical porn. The post An Ad…
Do women - and men - of a certain mature age stop being seen? When writer Bren Gosling turned 60 himself, it's a question he decided to explore in comedy-drama Invisible Me. The post Invisib…
Liz Truss has kept herself busy since Oxia Theatre's spring 2025 run of the one-woman show chronicling her Westminster rise and fall. A year on, I reunited with the team for this political f…
When director Tania Azevedo and composer Finn Anderson were first commissioned to write a new musical, they decided to follow two parallel lines of exploration. The post Ballad Lines post-sh…
Ask a theatregoer to name a Noël Coward play and they're likely to mention Private Lives, Hay Fever or Blithe Spirit. But before those glittering comedies secured his place in theatre his…
How do you compete with fireworks going off outside your pub theatre on Bonfire Night? Ensure that the drama onstage is just as explosive. That's what we got last night with Nance Turner's d…
It's a distinct pleasure to be invited back by a theatre company, even more so to be invited back to witness and celebrate the evolution of a concept. Like this one with the expanding univer…
Before Lenny Henry or Gary Wilmot, Charlie Williams paved the way as Britain's breakthrough black comedian who became a household name on ITV's stand-up show The Comedians. Chris England's n…
Proforca Theatre concludes its tenth anniversary season with a revival of its 2019 dystopian thriller At Last, set in the aftermath of a fascist regime. Six years on, how does this political…
In 2014, then twenty-something Jake Brunger was commissioned as part of the Old Vic New Voices emerging talent programme to write a "state of the nation gay play". The result was Four Play, …
What makes a certain brand of spy so iconic? So quintessentially British? And, if you were in charge of that brand, how far would you go to keep control and protect its legacy? The post …
At a secluded B&B, a couple arrives to celebrate their tenth anniversary. Twenty years later, another couple returns to the same room. What's the connection in the London premiere of Sus…
Have you cracked the code to a happy life yet? Maybe all you need is a three-point plan, an AI-empowered Alexa and the right playlist? That's the approach in Get Happy, written and performed…
How exercised do you get over the spacing of streetlights? David Shopland wrote his new play Cul de Sac with Londoners in mind, after overhearing an illuminating streetlights conversation be…
In Orthodox Judaism, homosexuality and suicide are both taboo. In American playwright Shimmy Braun's world premiere drama, based on real-life experiences, one leads tragically and inexorably…
A Q&A first for me last night at the King's Head: an onstage raffle to open post-show proceedings for David O'Brien's SNAP! as part of a benefit performance in aid of the International S…
Barney Norris' darkly comic reworking of Lorca's 1932 Spanish classic premiered in 2020 at Salisbury Playhouse, near the real-life village hall where his version of the disastrous nuptials o…
"Who knew terminal illness could be such fun?" But fun it is in writer/director Chris Burgess' world premiere musical Supersonic Man, inspired by the true story of a man who tries to fight a…
While a lettuce famously outlasted Liz Truss' 49-day tenure as Prime Minister, Emma Wilkinson Wright easily outperformed the prop iceberg in Oxia Theatre's hit, The Last Days of Liz Truss?, …
It's hard to imagine a woman whose life was more defined by grief and loss than Mary Todd Lincoln, as I discovered thanks to American multi-disciplinary artist John Ransom Phillips' intrigui…
At the height of the Red Scare in the US, Congress' House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) targeted Hollywood as a hub of subversive Communist activity and held high-profile hearings …
How will the world end? And how will you spend your final moments just before it happens? That's the setting for Proforca Theatre's latest world premiere play, And If The Surface Tension Bre…
On a Soviet Air Force Base in occupied Estonia in the 1970s, a conscripted private falls in love with a young maverick fighter pilot. The true-life love story that enraged Vladimir Putin now…
One of the most sobering statistics in Belly of the Beast's programme note comes from The School Report 2017: 84% of trans students, including non-binary individuals, self harmed, and 45% at…