Tuesday, April 14, 2026
Every day, for many weeks, we keep hearing about nuclear weapons. Part of the reason for the current attack on Iran by the United States and Israel is the idea, whether true or not, that the…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 11:28AMWednesday, April 8, 2026
Okay, this is odd. The original novel, Les Liaisons dangereuses, first published in 1782, features a rich and powerful man and woman positively exulting in their manipulation of a much young…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 03:49PMFriday, February 20, 2026
Today, in Geneva, there are tentative peace talks between Ukraine and Russia; today, in London, there is a powerful play about the ongoing war. Oddly enough, it is fringe venues, the Finboro…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 12:48PMThursday, February 19, 2026
Terence Rattigan is a posh playwright whose work encapsulates the emotional restraint of the 1950s, and who was overtaken by the Angry Young Men. Right? Wrong! Although this sketch of his ca…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 11:01AMMonday, February 9, 2026
Some shows have great moments, but somehow just don’t work — the whole is less than the sum of its parts. This is my feeling about Frantic Assembly’s 30th anniversary sh…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 12:48PMThursday, January 8, 2026
New Year, new line up of West End stars. This time it’s the turn of Olivier-Award-winner Sheridan Smith and multi-award-winning comedian Romesh Ranganathan, both household names, now …
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 09:47AMSunday, November 2, 2025
Thatcher, and the image of Thatcher’s Britain, continues to cast a long shadow over contemporary culture. So it’s hardly a surprise that the most audience-pleasing moment in pl…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 11:23AMThursday, October 30, 2025
In 2023, Malaysian actor Michelle Yeoh won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Some reactions praised her as “the first Asian actressâ€�…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 09:26AMMonday, October 27, 2025
Weird scenes inside the farmhouse; weird scenes in Northern Ireland; weird scenes of the 1980s. Meghan Tyler’s Crocodile Fever at the Arcola Theatre is a breath-takingly eccentric and…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 02:23PMSunday, October 26, 2025
The Royal Court, Britain’s premiere new writing venue, celebrates its platinum anniversary next year — yes, it’s been 70 years since 1956’s Look Back in Anger. In…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 07:24PMTuesday, September 30, 2025
Broken Britain has a big problem with youth. About a million of those aged 16 to 24 are NEETs (not in education, employment or training), some 13 per cent of this age group. Many working-cla…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 05:31PMFriday, September 26, 2025
Perhaps it’s an indicator of the feebleness of new writing after the pandemic that so many of the current highly hyped plays are 1990s and 2000s revivals — success in the past …
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 12:56PMSaturday, August 23, 2025
Slowly, very slowly, the audience begins to arrive. Taking their seats, shedding jackets, arranging bags and glancing at programmes. But already, there’s a stir: the imposing figure o…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 04:37AMSaturday, August 2, 2025
Is there such a thing as the seven-year itch? Named after Billy Wilder’s 1955 comedy, which starred Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell, in which a psychiatrist argues that almost all men ne…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 07:40AMSunday, July 6, 2025
George Bernard Shaw is the supreme example of old writing. Maddeningly verbose, eye-poppingly articulate and self-consciously progressive, his work is so Edwardian that any revival runs the …
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 01:32PMThursday, June 19, 2025
Let us always remember the pioneers. Although there is a fair amount of relatively mainstream queer theatre today (fueled in the popular imagination by RuPaul’s Drag Race on BBC telev…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 07:37AMTuesday, June 17, 2025
Only the truth, we are told, can set us free — but there are times in love when the New Testament Gospel of John is an inadequate guide. A good example is the situation that Terence R…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 01:40PMTuesday, April 29, 2025
Theatre needs mystery. In the darkened auditorium, with a crowd of strangers sharing your experience, it is possible to believe in anything you see on the stage: ghosts, miracles and magic. …
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 06:51AMTuesday, April 15, 2025
Coming of age stories are more or less all the same. But what distinguishes Julia Grogan’s Playfight, which was first staged at the Edinburgh Festival last year, and is now at London�…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 12:33PMFriday, April 11, 2025
Are we really in “a new era of male anger, societal discontent and rageâ€? This is what Royal Court artistic director David Byrne claims in the programme of Manhunt, Robert Ickeâ…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 05:26PMFriday, March 28, 2025
Anxiety. Apprehension. Angst even. Yes, that’s the feeling that rises in me as I come into the auditorium of Omnibus Theatre, in Clapham, south London, to watch Chris Fung perform in …
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 04:48PMFriday, March 21, 2025
One of the joys of contemporary playwriting is its openness to flexible casting. In Ruby Thomas’s 2019 play Either, for example, there are two lovers — denoted as A and B  
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 04:30PMWednesday, March 5, 2025
How long would you wait for your soulmate? In “The Demon Loverâ€, a short story by Elizabeth Bowen, published in 1945, a young couple make a passionate vow during the first world …
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 04:44AMWednesday, February 26, 2025
Diaries are dynamite — they hold secrets, and secrets can tear families apart. In Coral Wylie’s debut, Lavender, Hyacinth, Violet, Yew, currently at the Bush Theatre, written r…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 06:10AMFriday, February 21, 2025
British people are socially awkward: this explains why we talk about the weather, queue compulsively and pretend to be polite. It is also at the heart of our television culture, anything fro…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 11:19AMMonday, February 10, 2025
Marketing is the new real. For many years, in theatre as elsewhere in society, the most important thing is not creativity, or originality, or integrity, but hype. A good example is The Years…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 10:19AMWednesday, January 22, 2025
Even the best streamed theatre can’t compete with the live version. It’s simple — with this art form you really have to be there. In person. Take the case of Tarantula, …
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 10:27AMMonday, January 20, 2025
Is resilience the most powerful character trait? When you think about the suffering of the Windrush Generation, migrants to the UK in the 1950s, it is their sheer staying power that is immed…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 11:29AMFriday, November 1, 2024
Fringe venues perform a vital role on the ecology of London theatre. While many shows at these small venues are underfunded, and some are frankly rough as well as ready, you can occasionally…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 03:48PMSunday, October 20, 2024
The myth of Oedipus is so central to our psychic world that I was really surprised how many people in the audience for this revival were shocked by the revelation of the protagonist’s…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 02:04PMMonday, October 7, 2024
Roald Dahl evokes mixed feelings. He’s one of the greatest children’s storytellers, whose macabre books have sold hundreds of millions of copies worldwide; he was also anti-Sem…
SOURCE: thetheatretimes.com at 03:39PM 
