If you’ve spent any time online in recent weeks, you’ve probably been accosted by umpteen ‘In’ and ‘Out’ lists for 2025, where people prove how cute/clever/cool they are by selecting what’s hot or not for the coming year. Don’t worry – I’m not about to offer a theatre version. But if I did, top of my ‘Out’ list would be: bothering with accents.
Continue reading “Is it time to ditch accents on stage?”Author: holly
The Stage Big Interview: Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss
The year 2019 was a busy one for Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss. Six the Musical, which the pair famously wrote together while still students at Cambridge, was really hitting the big time: they had a full-scale run in the West End, a UK-wide tour, opened the show on Norwegian cruise ships and toured the US and Canada ahead of opening on Broadway – where Marlow and Moss would eventually net a Tony for best score. But 2019 was also the year their new musical, Why Am I So Single?, first flickered into life.
Continue reading “The Stage Big Interview: Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss”When did theatre become so reliant on film?
As screen-to-stage adaptations go, taking on Stanley Kubrick and one of the most acclaimed comedies of all time is bold. But Dr Strangelove, which just opened at the Noël Coward Theatre in London’s West End, sounds like a tempting proposition rather than a sacrilegious one: adapted by Armando Iannucci, starring Steven Coogan, it’s a union between comedy screen royalty of our own time.
Continue reading “When did theatre become so reliant on film?”Review: Laurie Anderson, Factory International
Have you felt like screaming lately? Here’s your chance: Laurie Anderson has the entire audience at Factory International scream for 15 seconds, in tribute to Yoko Ono’s three-minute yowl when asked in 2016 how she felt about Trump’s victory. More soothingly, at the end we’re invited to stand and do t’ai chi, in tribute to Anderson’s late husband Lou Reed’s favourite sequence.
Continue reading “Review: Laurie Anderson, Factory International”I’ve relaunched Exeunt
In November 2024, I relaunched Exeunt – building a new home for the much-loved online theatre magazine on Substack, as a way to deliver in-depth, inventive, fierce and playful writing about theatre, straight to inboxes.
Continue reading “I’ve relaunched Exeunt”‘Poisonous revenge porn’: can you stage Look Back in Anger in 2024?
When George Devine took over the Royal Court Theatre in 1956 he put out an advert seeking “hard-hitting, uncompromising writers” who could revitalise a postwar British theatre scene still stuck in upper-class drawing rooms. He found what he was looking for in John Osborne and his play Look Back in Anger — seen by Devine as “the bomb that would blow a hole in the old theatre”.
Continue reading “‘Poisonous revenge porn’: can you stage Look Back in Anger in 2024?”Review: Gliff, Ali Smith
A new Ali Smith book is always an event – or should that be, a series of events. Artful (2012) started as lectures she gave at Oxford University, and became a ghost story novel-cum-essay. How to Be Both (2014) featured two stories that could be printed either way round. Her Seasonal Quartet formed rapidly-written responses to current affairs – with the years between Autumn in 2016 and Summer in 2020 offering plenty of material.
Continue reading “Review: Gliff, Ali Smith”‘Ignore the blood’: If you haven’t fallen over, you’ve not tried hard enough
“I’m proud of myself for falling over,” I tell a circle of women, and they clap enthusiastically. Falling over in public as an adult doesn’t seem like a natural cue for applause. But I’ve just been inducted into the world of roller derby, and how to fall over safely on roller skates is the first, and arguably most important, skill you learn.
Continue reading “‘Ignore the blood’: If you haven’t fallen over, you’ve not tried hard enough”Review: Pith, Daniel Kitson
Daniel Kitson’s new show was only announced three weeks ago, and it’ll be over by the weekend. But such is the cult comic’s draw that presumably even this short run is a blessed relief for the Royal Exchange, following the abrupt cancellation of its autumn production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream due to irreconcilable differences around references to Palestine.
Continue reading “Review: Pith, Daniel Kitson”‘Should I stop my birth control?’ The pop stars debating motherhood on record
We may be coming out of Brat Summer, where Charli XCX’s lime-green hedonism defined the season – but it’s also been the summer of the defiant “childless cat lady”. The insult Trump’s running mate JD Vance flung at Kamala Harris came back to hit him in the face, with women everywhere celebrating being child-free (and loving their cats.)
Continue reading “‘Should I stop my birth control?’ The pop stars debating motherhood on record”