Culture

Buried Child is a typical Sam Shepard play. The main character, Dodge, is a brain-damaged alcoholic cripple stuck in a Midwest shack with a half-witted xenophobic wife shrieking at him from the coal cellar. The wife makes an early speech about her son who ‘married a Catholic whore’ and got stabbed to death by her

What if? is the engine of every great story. What if the toys came to life when their owner left the room? What if the prince’s uncle killed the king, seduced the queen, and stole the crown? Lucy Kirkwood asks: what if an elderly atomic physicist volunteered to take charge of the team decommissioning a

An ice floe. Two anglers. Months to kill. That’s the premise of Nice Fish by Mark Rylance and Louis Jenkins. The off-beat script is full of bleak and quirky insights. Rylance, who stars as the bungling Ron, admits that sometimes he gets so bored he bangs nails through frozen bananas. His pal compares dogs with

Who could resist School of Rock? For me it was a chance to see a heavy-metal musical written by the best-known headbanger in the House of Lords, Julian Fellowes. The movie features Jack Black as a failed rock guitarist who bluffs his way into a private school and turns a class of robotic snoots into

One of David Bowie’s last works, Lazarus, is a musical based on Walter Tevis’s novel The Man Who Fell to Earth. Enda Walsh has written the script. The lead character, Newton, is a derelict celebrity addicted to gin who occupies a big brown apartment full of bickering attendants. It’s unclear who or what Newton is.

Dynastic affairs and international relations were once a seamless continuum. Royal weddings accompanied peace treaties. An heirless realm was vulnerable to invasion. Botched successions led to war. This is the political context of King Lear but Deborah Warner sets the play in modern times, which muddles everything. Britain in the Dark Ages is represented by

Amadeus by Peter Shaffer is haunted by its own antecedents. Viewers are apt to feel that a new production lacks the beauties they’ve seen, or believe they’ve seen, in previous versions. Director Michael Longhurst opens with a fusion of time zones. The courtiers are attired in silk curtains like proper 18th-century toffs, while the musicians

Great subject, terminal illness. Popular dramas like Love Story, Terms of Endearment and My Night With Reg handle the issue with tact and artistry by presenting us with a single victim and a narrative focus that reveals as much about the survivors as about the patient. Crucially, the disease is omitted from the title for

Travesties is a multi-layered confection of art, song, literature and pastiche. Tiny snippets of it are true. In Zurich, in 1917, James Joyce directed a production of The Importance of Being Earnest featuring a British diplomat, Henry Carr, in the role of Algy. Joyce and Carr fell out over the costume budget and became embroiled

Here are three roles all actors love to play. The drunk (no need to learn your lines), the dementia victim (ditto) and the aristocratic roister-doisterer humping his way through the brothels of restoration London. Nothing quite beats the 17th century. Great costumes, stylish language, shoes that add three inches to your height, and a parallel

No Man’s Land isn’t quite as great as its classic status suggests. At first sight the script is a bit of a head-scrambler because Pinter’s characters are obscure to the point of incoherence. A demented alcoholic, Hirst, is cared for in his Hampstead mansion by two mysterious thugs, or servants, who may be emeritus rent

The Emperor seems like a worthy lesson in Ethiopian history. Haile Selassie’s final days are recounted by a retinue of devoted flunkies. He had valets, chauffeurs, zoo-keepers and door-openers to perform every conceivable chore. Each morning a butler proffered a silver dish loaded with meat from which the emperor fed his exotic pets. A clock-watcher,

Coleridge deemed the narrative structure of The Alchemist perfect. But, I wonder. A landowner quits plague-ridden London and his cunning servants pose as learned sages in order to defraud affluent locals. Ben Jonson’s plotting is certainly adroit. The action takes place in a single location within the span of an afternoon, and this concentration of

Kenneth Branagh’s obsession with Larry Olivier’s career is becoming such a bizarre act of theatrical necromancy that it deserves to be turned into a drama. Sir Ken and Lord Olivier could be played by the same actor. The Entertainer, written for Larry in 1956 by John Osborne, presents us with a washed-up music-hall star, Archie

‘European premiere of classic American musical’ is a phrase that deeply alarms the experienced playgoer. As I tootled along to Southwark Playhouse I asked myself why this Rodgers and Hammerstein masterpiece had taken so long to plough its way across the ocean. In 1947 the Broadway prodigies decided to follow up their first two hits,

Dominic Frisby is an actor best known for voicing the booking.com adverts (‘Booking dot com, booking dot yeah’). Voiceover specialists can earn large fees for a morning’s work and they have endless time in which to ponder where their money ends up. Frisby is irked by the UK tax regime, whose code-book is four times

Consider it commercially. So powerful is the pull of the Potter franchise that the characters could simply re-enact the plot of ‘Incy-Wincy Spider’ and the fans would swoon with joy. The stage show has been written by a two-man committee, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany, with the help of billionaire equality campaigner J.K. Rowling. Harry

An inspired decision to stage Jesus Christ Superstar in a summer theatre in Regent’s Park. The action takes place outdoors, in balmy climes, so the atmosphere is ideal for Rice and Lloyd Webber’s finest show. The songbook bursts with melodic inventiveness, and the score blithely rips apart the conventions of musical theatre and remakes them

Fracking is a British tradition. Since 1969 more than 200 sites have used hydraulic fracturing ‘without environmental catastrophes’ according to Dick Selley, an emeritus professor of geology, writing in the programme notes to Fracked! by Alistair Beaton. The satire takes the opposite view and regards fracking as a wicked novelty inflicted on rustic innocents by

Anthony Neilson is an Arts Council favourite known for trivial but impenetrable plays with off-putting names like The Wonderful World of Dissocia. His latest effort has another hazard-warning instead of a title. Unreachable starts with an actress auditioning for a dystopian sci-fi movie set in a clichéd future. She lands the role and we cut

Does anyone believe Brian Friel’s libellous blarney? He portrays Ireland in the 20th century as an economic basket case where the starving, the retarded, the crippled and the widowed offer up prayers to a heartless God who responds by heaping their burden ever higher. Friel is popular with British mainlanders who are tickled by the

Mike Bartlett’s curious blank-verse drama Charles III became an international hit. His new effort examines the cut-throat world of dark-web espionage. An American traitor named Andrew (Edward Snowden presumably) is hiding out in a Moscow hotel. Enter a flirty, giggling Irishwoman played by Caoilfhionn Dunne, who claims to be British and who teases Andrew over

When Richard III’s bones were unearthed in a Leicester car park, Frankie Boyle suggested the headline ‘Bent royal found at dogging hotspot’. Rupert Goold opens his version of the play by restaging the 2012 excavation as if to inform us that the past and the future are held together by something called time. That glib

Gauche, perhaps, to complain about Aladdin but it slightly deserves it. The terrific Genie opens the show and then disappears for 45 minutes while the plot is explained. My squirmy ten-year-old kept whispering Aladdin-related trivia at me in order to occupy himself as the rags-to-riches storyline was laid out in far too much detail. Visually

Bertolt Brecht took The Threepenny Opera  from an 18th-century script by John Gay and relocated it to Victorian London. This National Theatre version wants to straddle the contemporary and the antique. Mack the Knife, an Afghan war veteran who murders strangers, contracts a bigamous marriage with Polly Peachum, the daughter of a cross-dressing mastermind who

Out come the stars in Kenneth Branagh’s Romeo and Juliet. He musters a well-drilled, celebrity-ridden crew but they can’t quite get the rocket off the launchpad. The stylish setting evokes Italy in the early 1950s. The girls wear New Look frocks and the boys sport tight slacks and shirtsleeves. Christopher Oram’s muted set has bland