‘Desolation yearning for hope’: David Schofield as Archie Rice in The Entertainer. A mirror ball, 3ft across, descends into the bleak boarding house, scattering red-white-and-blue beams over the brown sofa, brown table, brown sideboard, brown chairs; ...
About halfway through Alan Ayckbourn's My Wonderful Day, there is a scene where a nine-year-old girl reads The Secret Garden – first aloud and then quietly to herself – while a man she barely knows snores in a chair opposite her. It lasts for about ...
It's billed as a black comedy but Richard Bean's latest drama (since his epic and controversial England People Very Nice at the National) plays more like a try-out for a TV sitcom - at least in the first half. Post-interval, it morphs into an ...
This punk-in-a-paintshop Miser is a brave but underdeveloped attempt by director Helena Kaut-Howson and designer Ashley Martin-Davis to expose the social critique underpinning Moliere's brilliant comedy. They transpose the action from Louis XIV's Paris ...
To mark the second anniversary of some of the worst flooding ever to hit Britain, Hull Truck has commissioned a new work from Rupert Creed, a pioneer of aural-history documentary dramas and a fine director and writer in the genre. Creed has crafted the ...
Alan Ayckbourn likes to surprise his audiences. The astringent farceur of suburban angst is concluding his 36-year career as artistic director of the SJT with a winter's (fairy) tale. Not that this is a children's show. Duncan Patrick and Alice Fearn's ...
When 18-year-old Shelagh Delaney's unsolicited script landed on Joan Littlewood's desk 50 years ago this year, the veteran socialist director of Theatre Workshop in the East End of London must have whooped for joy. Two years after John Osborne's Look ...
On the Waterfront Nottingham Playhouse, until 3 May Interestingly, the idea wasn't Berkoff's. Schulberg himself, with long-time collaborator Stanley H Silverman, made the adaptation. But Berkoff, recognising the mythic aspect of the drama, saw how to ...
Year of the Rat West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds Year of the Rat starts from the fact that towards the end of his life, while writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell (Hugo Speer) lived on the remote Scottish island of Jura. Smiles fantasises that here he ...
Roots Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester The plot is simple and uneventful. Beatie (Claire Brown) returns from London to visit her Norfolk farming family. They don't match up to the political ideals she has learnt from her big-city boyfriend and ...
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