In Willy Russell’s two-hander play Educating Rita, there is a monologue where the main heroine talks of her desire for more. She speaks of being in the pub with her family and friends, all singing some song from the jukebox, turning round and seeing her mother crying. “I said ‘Why...
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“When the sun stands at its zenith, he is at one with our shadow; then, in the hour of incandescence, history begins.” – Heiner Müller The old, short man takes a few steps. History is moving. Beaten into a pulp, he gets up again. A man with no legs, keeps...
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For when did a play deliver any justice? He wrote in a drunken daze – a long-faced father writing a gigantic storming tragedy, pulled out from his own smallness. This story moves through the dark times. Some total regime. Lear’s union, strung together by brutish greed. Where’s there’s nothing you...
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Euphoria, ecstasy– an abundance of amoral goodness is what comes to mind when I think of The Bacchae. Euripides’ last play is like many final works; radical, disjointed and at some points lacking the fire that earlier successes once had. The central anti-hero Dionysus pokes, prods and gouges out the...
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Roald Dahl is experiencing a rebirth in British theatre, albeit in widely different ways. I saw Mark Rosenblatt’s biographical drama Giant last summer. That was one of the most powerful plays of the last twenty years, a detailed expose of a complex, utterly fascinating writer. After watching John Lithgow’s Dahl...
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It’s a bright, chilly Sunday afternoon and I’m sitting in the rehearsal room for WUD’s newest production: The Bacchae. Euripides’ swan song, originally performed posthumously after his death, is a play that was made to rattle an audience. It’s amoral, it’s cynical, it’s dialectal, with the central demigod Dionysius seducing...
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A chest up for it, with broad steel beam Shoulders, eyes searching for some good Breath at the coalface. Wraiths that were young fellas. Hands that got bent into No good blunt tools. Carving out a contour in time. This door, this shiny mirror precious stuff that makes the world spin ...
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For a show featuring a bleak story, coupled with an indie rock score, Next to Normal sounds like it would be a tough sell. However, it has shown, over the years, it’s staying power. Brian Yorkey’s 2008 family drama musical has hopped from off-Broadway, to tours, to West End runs, to...
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There is a memorable moment, from the 2012 Summer Olympic opening ceremony. Isambard Brunel (played by Kenneth Branagh), holding a book to his chest, stands in front of a crowd of industrialists, their black top hats striking against the “green and pleasant land” of rural folk. He starts his speech...
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By the end of Alice Birch’s new epic-masculinity saga, I’m left half-astonished. Romans: A Novel is a play of great ambition – something that new plays should always be striving towards. Problems arise when a play’s fascinating form does not move in time with its content. Spanning over a century of...
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In the final scene of Harold Pinter’s play No Man’s Land, the nostalgic old poet Spooner states to his elderly counterpart Hirst: “No. You are in no man’s land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever, icy and silent.” I kept thinking of...
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His most common song– ‘Come over here and listen’. He stands with Dick Rodgers for an opening night triumph. I look round for another kid. The voice searches for me. A Harlem baritone that’s on the move. His hand leans down, presses my palm and tells me to hear...
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A radical in her time and ours, Sarah Kane is one of the greatest English Playwrights of the last fifty years, who is nearly never performed on the commercial stages. It is as if her plays have been given, like the biblical story that she was brought up with, a...
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