Just a quick note about my second trip to see Midsummer, as it's quite late and besides I not only reviewed it last year but also just the other week gave it second place in my shows of 2010. After we saw it at Soho Theatre last year, both Andy's and my first reaction was that we wanted to recommend it to everyone we knew, but by then it had long ( Read more... )

Considering it seems to have every element that makes a fairy story appeal to me, I've never been that fussed about Peter Pan. Maybe it's the fact that most treatments of the story seem to be so anodyne and twee, without the darkness that you'd have thought was so central to it. I think it's the clapping to bring Tinkerbell back to life that puts ( Read more... )

Disclaimer time: This is a review of a preview performance. Dunsinane opens to critics officially this Wednesday, and in theory elements of the production could change before then ( Read more... )

I can get a bit grumpy about romantic comedies, mainly because they tend not to be that romantic, and worse, not that funny. They're also not a genre that often crops up in modern plays, but David Greig's Midsummer is unashamedly in that category, and hugely successful at it as well. Helena (Cora Bisset) is a lawyer, possibly pregnant by her ( Read more... )

Creditors at the Donmar wasn't one I was initially planning to see, but the glowing reviews swayed me, and they're deserved. An essay in the programme promises that with Strindberg you don't get context and/or excuses for the bad ways people behave, just their actions, and that's partly true here - we do get context, but the characters' actions go ( Read more... )

When the opening scene of a play has been described as many times as that of the new production of The Bacchae, when you finally see it it can't help but be a bit of an anticlimax. Oh well, I'll just make it worse by describing it once more: As the lights go up Alan Cumming as Dionysus is suspended upside-down by his feet, with his back to the ( Read more... )