27 stories by "Caroline Crampton"
When a play is preceded by a long list of content warnings, it's hard not to let your judgement be coloured in advance. Sexual violence, strong language, strobe lighting, smoke effects, audi…
A significant milestone was passed this week - Tuesday, 4 November, was Equal Pay Day. From that day until the end of the year, the average woman in this country effectively works for free c…
As a political act, the first performance of Angelina Weld Grimké's Rachel in 1916 is exceptionally important. It was staged in Washington DC by the drama committee of the Na…
As we arrive at the last few months of 2014, the temptation to say "Enough! No more!" to representations of the First World War creeps up. The centenary of 1914 has been so comprehensively c…
Richard Bean has had a busy year, and it isn't over yet. Great Britain, his bawdy play about press ethics and police corruption, is transferring to the West End after hitting the spot at the…
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars," declares Lord Darlington in Act II of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan. He's the classic Wildean cad - unprincipled, f…
When the lights go up on Jack Shepherd's In Lambeth, you could be forgiven for assuming you were looking at a biblical scene. A man and a woman sit naked in the branches of a tree, a tableau…
For a play that involves a lot of movement, it is the freeze-frame stillnesses in Athol Fugard's Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act that linger before the eyes once it is ov…
In creating Mr Burns, Anne Washburn was trying to answer a question overlooked by most purveyors of dystopian fictions: what would happen to pop culture after an apocalypse? The physical and…
Is there such a thing as a human right to forgiveness? Nicholas Wright's riveting play about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in post-apartheid South Africa circles around this …
In French, when you want to end a digression and get a conversation back on point, you say "revenons à nos moutons". It's a commonly used idiom, meaning literally "let's get back to our s…
Usually, to describe a play as "of its time" is a criticism. It is suggestive of drama that hasn't aged well, that doesn't work quite as well for today's audience as it did for the original …
Thérèse Raquin is not a happy sort of production. This musical adaptation of Émile Zola's 1867 novel transports you to the dank darkness of the Passage du Pont Neuf in 19th century Par…
It's unusual for a play to be political without being preachy, or dull, or both. As obsessed as we are with class distinctions, we aren't as good as we should be at pulling them apart. Invin…
The Husbands is set in a feminist utopia " or so it appears at first glance. Shaktipur, the place the characters call home, is a rural matriarchal community in which women are leaders a…
Would you be able to tell if the world had ended? For Beth and Franklin, the wannabe intellectuals at the heart of Stephen Sewell's play, it proves quite difficult to ascertain whether life …
Barely a month of 2014 has passed, and yet already the opportunities to remember the First World War seem to be presenting themselves at every turn. In this trio of short plays, we get a mor…
In many ways, the darkness is the most memorable aspect of this production. It's so deep and all-encompassing that your eyes start to play tricks on you, seeing spots of light and shadow whe…
There is no point during Bloodshot where you can be entirely sure just what you are watching. At times it seems like a straightforward one-man show, with sole cast member Simon Slater chargi…
"My mum was given this new wonder-drug for morning sickness when she was pregnant with me," explains Mat Fraser at the start of Beauty and the Beast. "It was called Thalidomide. That's why I…
In several of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories, reference is made to something called "a knockabout cross-talk act". It's a two-handed sketch, usually performed at a village hall …
A single movement is all it takes. A wounded man is held at gunpoint, and instead of cringing away from the inevitable bullet, he lifts his head and looks his would-be executioner in eye. Th…
â€The best moment in this production of Pinter's The Dumb Waiter is when one of the protagonists snatches up a piece of paper and bellows "Scampi!" at his bewildered partner in crime. T…
It's often a sign of a good drama when, as it concludes, you find it hard to tell which character you dislike most. And so it is with Adult Supervision - all the way through, first-time play…
The opening of Charles Dickens's novel A Tale of Two Cities is among the most famous ever written: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the …
