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In the hands of many another actor, Jimmy might have turned out to be a flashy but hollow piece created to highlight the performer's skills and help them deal with [...]

It's increasingly common for the texts of new plays to be on sale at performances but not every show gets a tie-in recipe book. However, the literal Arab-Israeli Cookbook is [...]

Where Steve Thompson's Damages at the Bush combines the curious thrill of tabloid journalism with a penetrating examination of personal and professional ethics, Roger W. Kirby's Burleigh Grimes aims to [...]

During the interval I pointed out to the director that Damages'central viewpoint character, a revise sub-editor on a tabloid newspaper, was by vocation an old-school pedant and would therefore refuse [...]

The 'fuddy meers' in David Lindsay-Abaire's comedy are in fact 'funny mirrors', as described by Gertie, who has had a stroke and is hampered by her troubled control of language. [...]

The good news is that the Hampstead Theatre's new main-house presentation is just the sort of wonderful work to silence the dire mutterings about a major off-West End venue in [...]

It is reassuring of Rambert Dance to let us know that it is 'a choreographers' company' (such a change from troupes whom we realise all too soon are absolutely devoid [...]

The most satisfying endings are those which convey a sense that the stewardship of the world has willingly been passed on from those in the stories to those hearing them. [...]

No music reviewer would make a career writing about pianists solely from repeated performances of a single concerto, nor any pianist out of playing just the one piece. Yet sometimes [...]

It's like buying a house just as boom turns to bust: my first encounter with the work of Neil LaBute was his glum, pointless, minor 2002 play The Distance From [...]

Three years is a longer than usual gap between London visits for South African satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys; he has also switched venue from the Tricycle to Soho Theatre. In all [...]

Sophocles'Trachiniae, like Euripides' Medea (with which it is more or less contemporary), takes its narrative impulse from a wife's rage at her husband supplanting her with a younger woman, and [...]

Poor Hazel Woodus: she is torn between two woodsheds, and there's something nasty in each of them. As it were. In one direction is Jack Reddin, the drunken, selfish man [...]

You could be excused for thinking Alan Ayckbourn has rattled off his latest play with more than usual alacrity. As the Becks-sex-text saga rumbles on, Drowning On Dry Land examines [...]

Ricky Gervais: Politics Palace Theatre, London IAN SHUTTLEWORTH 'Obviously I can only manage an hour or so, so we have a support act and a long interval,' says Ricky Gervais [...]

The emotional zenith of Ronnie Burkett's Provenance is a long, very brutal scene in which a young man is raped near a first world war battlefield. The fact that the [...]

The emotional zenith of Ronnie Burkett'sProvenance is a long, brutal scene in which a young man is raped near a first world war battlefield. The fact that the victim is [...]

Criticising M.A.D. feels like stamping on author David Eldridge's exposed heart. One desperately hopes that the play isn't as intensely personal as it looks, so that it won't be too [...]

How to engage with an enemy who uses different rules? It's a question facing governments round the world at present and not an issue one might expect to see addressed [...]

Hans Nageli's air for 'Blest Be The Tie That Binds' punctuates most of the scene breaks in this production of the late Dona Daley's play which takes its name from [...]

'One of the thieves (crucified with Jesus) was saved. It's a reasonable percentage,' says Vladimir in Waiting For Godot, another play of the 1950s by an Irish writer whose central [...]

'The thing that keeps it fresh is really kind of a wonder, and it's not insincere, it's kinda like, wow! They will come! If you dangle it between your legs, [...]

The more faithful you are to some subjects when dramatising them, the less successful the dramatisation will be. Yes, a number of topics are inherently dull, but it's just as [...]

I'm told that a bookshop in Kilburn is now stocking that most pernicious fiction of the past century or so, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A little further [...]

Certain pairings just don't go well: suede shoes and a tuxedo, for instance, or Ian Paisley and patient listening. Here's another: contemporary dirty-realist drama and the archetypal Russian national character. [...]

The Bremer Shakespeare Company consider it an obligation to remake the Bard afresh every time: not only a new translation for each German-language production, but additional extrinsic material plus minimal [...]

There's a disconcerting moment about halfway through my meeting with Michael Hastings. I've finally asked The Question about the playwright's latest work Calico and his 'greatest hit' Tom And Viv. [...]

Marcy Kahan's stage adaptation of Nora Ephron's film script for When Harry Met Sally not only retains the between-scenes video clips of elderly couples recounting how they met, but ties [...]

Twelve years ago Diana Rigg played Medea in front of a wall of steel which came loudly tumbling down at the height of the tragedy. The first sight of Christopher [...]

Every few years since its publication in 1971, a new generation has rediscovered Luke Rhinehart's novel The Dice Man and its half-joking ideas about the liberation of letting a roll [...]

Simon Stephens's One Minute is not about the abduction of a child, any more than Waiting For Godotis about a meeting with Godot. The disappearance and presumed kidnapping of 11-year-old [...]

London International Mime Festival directors Joseph Seelig and Helen Lannaghan have long maintained that the principal reason for retaining 'Mime' in the title is brevity. As a descriptive term, it [...]

Perhaps it's because we now seem to doubt earthly powers and authorities as never before, but there has been an upturn in theatrical examinations of matters heavenly and how they [...]

There's something quintessentially English about Bobby Baker. The persona she adopts in her performance-art pieces, that of the middle-aged housewife, is at one with the everyday products that turn up [...]

I'm in the Schaubuhne theatre in Berlin, watching a comfortably off couple in their 30s. She has been shopping and is showing off one of her purchases to him. Slowly [...]

I was only sketchily aware of the much-loved radio show on which Round The Horne . . . Revisited is based. I thought that it was older than its late-1960s [...]

Overheard on the way out of the Queen Elizabeth Hall - Woman (slightly wheedling). 'That was quite good, James'; Man (with the petulance of a nine-year-old): 'It was rubbish and [...]

On my first visit to White Cabin at the Edinburgh Fringe, I could appreciate why it had been so lauded, but I couldn't entirely see it myself. I mean that [...]

A fringe theatre in a once-derelict swimming pool hall just off Fleet Street faces closure due to lack of funds. Not, on the face of it, a compelling story. However, [...]

In the 20 years since its inception, Cirque du Soleil has grown from a small group of alternative circus practitioners to a huge global enterprise with three permanent shows in [...]

What a change Gordon Anderson has wrought on the Actors' Touring Company. It had already begun to shift its focus from classics to contemporary work under previous artistic director Nick [...]

Even sitting in the Pavilion Theatre in Brighton, I couldn't help imagining that I was watching Christmas by Simon Stephens in the Bush Theatre in west London. It is a [...]

No, not Joan Armatrading (though that would be an intriguing idea). The Orange Tree's end-of-year musical is by Alan Ayckbourn and Paul Todd. The plot and the structural twist are [...]

I have often been sniffy about pantomimes which cast semi-celebrities for the sake of it. Sometimes, though, a 'name' will put real effort into the show, with delicious results. Kevin [...]

There's nothing actually wrong with Why The Whales Came. It's a dramatically efficient adaptation (for a cast of six) of Michael Morpurgo's children's book; it looks and sounds fine; there's [...]

For some time now, the highlight of my pre-Christmas reviewing has been to visit the Oxford Playhouse. Its show is the epitome of straightforward pantomime. Agreeably present are traits such [...]

If you've ever wondered exactly what the phrase 'awkward silence' means, go to a theatre production with a big act finale that's intended to bring the curtain down to prolonged [...]

After seeing the West End revival of David Hare's The Secret Rapture, I went home and read the reviews of its premiere 15 years ago. Some praised its sharp excoriation [...]

Jade Theatre Company's Graceexamined the chiming of one woman's biological clock as she turned 30 without having realised her ambitions and dreams. It was a creation of glorious humour, exquisite [...]

'Expanse of scorched grass rising centre to low mound. Gentle slopes down to front and either side of stage.' That's how the set is described in the text of Samuel [...]