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?”Category: Theatre
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?”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: 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”‘I got major doubt from the movie guys’: Julie Taymor
The Lion King musical is a beast of a show – captivating US audiences since 1997, it is the highest-grossing production of all time, in theatre or in film, taking over $10 billion (£7.68 billion) worldwide. It’s currently celebrating 25 years in the West End, hits 27 years on Broadway next month, and has been staged all around the world – from South Africa to South Korea, Australia to the United Arab Emirates – visiting every continent except Antarctica.
Continue reading “‘I got major doubt from the movie guys’: Julie Taymor”How British theatre became obsessed with horror
You’re sitting in the dark, watching a scary story unfold. Maybe the hairs on your neck stand up. Maybe you’re on the edge of your seat – and maybe it’s a slightly tired, slightly cramped red velvet seat, next to a stranger nursing an overpriced plastic glass of wine… Because these days, you’re as likely to encounter a ghost story in a theatre as in the cinema or on your sofa. Horror is coming back to life on stage.
Continue reading “How British theatre became obsessed with horror”Starlight Express shaped my youth – how will the new version compare?
Forty years after it first opened, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s roller-skating musical extravaganza Starlight Express is back on stage. Admittedly less well-remembered than the 1984 London production – although just as significant for this writer – was a show mounted 11 years later, at the Pavilion in Llandrindod Wells, where, in a spirit of unbridled optimism, my primary school had a crack at staging this audacious, absurd musical about cosmic racing trains.
Continue reading “Starlight Express shaped my youth – how will the new version compare?”Review: The Buddha of Suburbia, RSC
Welcome to Bromley, 1976 – and a tale of “betrayal, deceit and heart-following”. It’s told by Karim, a young man still finding his feet as he attempts to strut towards adulthood. Even with an almost three-hour running time, this sprawling story – about the 17-year-old mixed-race, British-Indian Karim and the travails of his immigrant family – can feel fit to burst in Emma Rice and Hanif Kureishi’s adaptation of the latter’s debut 1990 novel.
Continue reading “Review: The Buddha of Suburbia, RSC”