58 stories by "Jenny Gilbert"
Adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's bestseller is not built to soarKhaled Hosseini's 2003 bestseller ticks all the boxes as an A-level text. A personal story with epic sweep, it interweaves…
Revival of Tony Harrison's satyr play remains virile, but shows its ageWhen a leading fringe theatre starts the year with a production whose gender ratio is 8:1 in favour of men, it had…
Ibsen's Hedda has been called the female Hamlet and not just because it's a role that every serious actress wants to play. The blank at the heart of her presents a daunting challenge. Why is…
Ed Harris gives a masterclass in Sam Shepard's gothic family dramaWhat stroke of prescience brought two Sam Shepard plays to London in the very month America voted for Trump? The kind o…
Stephen Daldry's makeover of the JB Priestley classic is back, and misses its markSo, the Inspector has come calling yet again. Twenty-four years have passed since Stephen Daldry's grap…
Gender-blind casting has arrived and we'd better get used to it. Correction it seems we are getting used to it, viz the imminent revival of the Donmar's all-female Shakespeare trilogy. So th…
FOOL FOR LOVE, FOUND111 Sam Shepard's incest play makes a fine swansong for a pop-up venueSam Shepard's incest play makes a fine swansong for a pop-up venueWho is the fool in Sam Shepar…
If Kenneth MacMillan had left well alone, the taut little chamber piece he made in 1967 - stark, inventive and affecting - would be hailed a modernist masterpiece by now. Instead, swayed by …
The perception of Steven many-hats Berkoff as "one of the major minor contemporary dramatists in Britain" makes sense when you see this. Here are two chamber pieces, both two-handers, writte…
Very occasionally the playing of a play leaves a deeper impression than does the play itself. This is the case with Good Canary, a lippy, sweary tragicomedy by Zach Helm about secrets and ad…
There are obvious reasons why films about the theatre outnumber plays about the movie industry, but here's a play that bucks that trend. Anthony Neilson's latest drama is located on a film s…
In the town of Nizhni Novgorod where Maxim Gorky was born, it was said that "the houses are made of stone, the people of iron". Vassa Zheleznova, the titular matriarch of this rarely perform…
On the face of it, there is nothing in this tightly focussed little piece that says anything new about the Holocaust. The plight of a poor Jewish boy unfortunate enough to be growing up in 1…
In the long tradition of fictional characters who embody their monikers, the naming of Nick Bright hardly counts as the most colourful, but it has a sardonic edge when pinned to a young bank…
The playwright Anders Lustgarten has spent a considerable chunk of his life reading and writing and thinking about China, and clearly wants to set a few points straight. Tired of the persist…
As settings for musical comedy go, this one promised some boom for your buck. Las Vegas in the early 1950s was just emerging as a magnet not only for hedonists and gamblers, mobsters and sho…
It's often remarked that are no new stories, only old stories retold. The French playwright Jean Anouihl got the idea for his first play from a French newspaper report of 1919, about a young…
Shakespeare's plays have proved remarkably resilient to everything that's been thrown at them down the years, including " in the case of A Midsummer Night's Dream with its flowery bowers and…
Given that Edmond Rostand's 1897 tragicomic verse play Cyrano de Bergerac gave the word "panache" to the English language, it's an irony that panache is the quality most woefully lacking in …
Two plays for the price of one. What's not to like? Particularly when they resonate so strongly with each other on a hard, uncompromising theme. Broadly, that theme is love and war, sex and …
Entertaining our troops overseas has already proved a fruitful subject for drama, and not only for its show-within-a-show potential. Peter Nichols' Privates on Parade " revived in the W…
Musicals are cheesy by nature, aren't they? If not cheesy, then picturesque. The cast of Les Mis may be grimy and poor, but they're picture-postcard poor. Even modern musicals play by the ru…
"The only way is up" might have been the motto for the Orange Tree over the past year. Last spring, the future couldn't have looked bleaker for the Richmond producing house when it lost its …
'I sometimes wish we were more normal' sighs one of the adult Bliss children in Noel Coward's country-house comedy. But it's her family's self-dramatising abnormality that provides both the …
Agitprop is a term that seems to have dropped out of use. It has too many negative connotations; it smacks of political rant. Yet artistic director Neil McPherson, whose small and feisty Fin…
