I first met actor Tony Bell twenty years ago thanks to Propeller Theatre, the hugely successful all-male Shakespearean ensemble. He now returns to the stage in a deeply personal, self-penned…
My friend Raymond Whitaker and I give our reactions to Arthur I Miller's new play about the friendship between psychologist Carl Jung and the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Th…
If not through the 1932 Nobel Prize-winning nine-novel literary classic, many audience members will be familiar with John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga through its serial TV adaptations. The…
Eleven million people died during the Holocaust, six million of them Jews. Simon Wiesenthal survived and then dedicated the rest of his life to preserving the memory of, and seeking justice …
Stop what you're doing and Google Madge Gill right now. This fascinating woman and self-taught artist, the subject of the sixth in James Kenworth's Newham Plays series, is worthy of your tim…
On Day Four at the Edinburgh Fringe, my last, I squeezed in two final shows before rushing for my afternoon train home: Every Brilliant Thing and It's the Economy, Stupid! The post Edinburgh…
Getting into my stride on Day 3 with six shows. Meta theatricality, strong women, lost little boys, activism, and musical hit-makers are amongst some of the common themes. The post Edinburgh…
Day two in Edinburgh - my first full day - comprised five shows sandwiched around an industry drinks event: two more featuring performers with large social media followings. Not least, the i…
In my first return to Edinburgh since long before the pandemic, can I manage a proper Fringe binge? Straight off the train, I see I Wish My Life Were Like a Musical, The Sex Lives of Puppets…
Two of the most urgent issues facing the world today - climate change and the dizzying acceleration of Artificial Intelligence - collide in Jupiter's Ghost, Tani Gill's dystopian drama with …
Before chairing this discussion for Marie Curie at Charing Cross Theatre, I was racking my brains trying to think of other musicals about science. Films and plays aplenty. But musicals? T…
There were multiple art-imitating-life revelations and resonances during the post-show talk for Grace Carroll's new play Drag Baby, about a drag queen considering sperm donation for an ex-gi…
The timing of this overdue European premiere of Jeffrey Sweet's 2013 biographical play about the American civil rights lawyer William Kunstler (1919-1995), best known for his defence of Viet…
When you find 'the one', can you ever know how long you have? Will your time together be long or short? What will be the first and last thing you remember about it? The post Remembrance Mond…
Remember how exciting it was when England made it to the men's Euro 2020 final (in 2021 due to Covid). Remember the bloke who got so excited he lit his bum on fire?! His incendiary social me…
It's been an extraordinary eight-year journey for Breeding, Barry McStay's comedy-drama about a gay couple's struggles with adoption, with many midwives helping the play's rebirths along the…
Are we all headed straight to heaven or hell? Is there anything we can do to change direction? To alter who we truly are ? These are some of the big questions at the heart of Nina Atesh's…
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, with his ever-loyal sidekick Dr Watson, holds the Guinness World Record as the most portrayed human literary character in history. What's the endur…
How do you reimagine a 3,700-line play with 20+ named characters and a normal performance time of up to four hours into a 70-minute monologue? The post Lear's Shadow post-show video and phot…
It was a shared love of 1930s screwball comedies that brought Shaun McKenna and Andrew Van Sickle together. And a realisation that so many of the dramatists of the time were secretly gay tha…
It was a shared love of screwball comedies from the 1930s and 1940s that brought Shaun McKenna and Andrew Van Sickle together. And the realisation that so many of the dramatists of the time …
How often do you have a word with yourself? We're all familiar with the concept of an inner voice, chipping in with sometimes decidedly unhelpful suggestions. The post Double Act post-show v…
I started my post-show talk for Kali Theatre's premiere of Phantasmagoria by asking the audience about their thoughts on politics today, including: are you feeling largely optimistic or p…
My admiration for Emma Burnell knows no bounds. I followed her as a political journalist for years before becoming friends through MyTheatreMates. I've been amazed to watch her turn her hand…
In Lazarus Theatre's new reimagining of Jacobean drama The Changeling, adapter/director Ricky Dukes has taken his usual scalpel to the original text. In this case, losing the entire subplot …