This week on my Twitter feed, my first trip of the year to Stratford-upon-Avon, which always means extra tweets from me 'cause I get bored. This time it largely involved me grumbling about the trend of repackaging classic novels so they look like the cover to Twilight. And then it snowed, so you also get some photos of Stratford all white and ( Read more... )

Christopher Hampton is best known nowadays for Dangerous Liaisons and his translations of foreign plays, but he made a precocious¹ debut at the Royal Court aged 18 with a play about teenage sexual frustration and the particular kind of confused sexuality bred at boarding schools, When Did You Last See My Mother? Blanche McIntyre revives the play ( Read more... )

Richard III was one of the first Shakespeare plays I saw multiple productions of (David Troughton's jester and Eddie Marsan's East End gangster) but since then it's been well over a decade with no poisonous bunch-backed toads in sight. In typical 2011 fashion there's now two competing for my attention - I've booked for the very end of the Mendes/ ( Read more... )

It's a good job Antipholus of Syracuse and Helena of Athens inhabit different Shakespeare plays¹ because they're both so thick if they ever met and bred the offspring would have been so stupid it would have set evolution back centuries. Observe, a man who goes off on his travels for the express purpose of finding his identical twin brother; and who ( Read more... )

In the runup to every election my building gets flooded with a pile of leaflets from the British National Party, with their carefully-worded messages attempting to disguise their core ideals and make people vote for them in the belief that they no longer represent bigotry. Anders Lustgarten's A Day at the Racists takes this spin-doctoring to its ( Read more... )

Seamus Heaney retitled his translation of Antigone by Sophocles The Burial at Thebes to bring to the fore the theme of mortality. Nottingham Playhouse's production continues on this road by opening and closing with sand dropping into a bowl, like the protagonists' lives slipping away. Against a backdrop of a blasted concrete wall, this is obviously ( Read more... )