322 stories by "John Morrison"
Dramatic irony has nothing to do with irony. I don't know who coined this awkward phrase for a bit of scriptwriting technique that is extremely simple -- yet many playwrights don't know how …
When an audience titters at a tragedy, it's usually a sign that something isn't quite right, either in the text, the acting or the production. I hesitate to give a definitive verdict on what…
I've been lucky enough to catch a performance of a new play at RADA by Jessica Swale, better known as the talented artistic director of Red Handed Theatre. This short run is effectively a pr…
Go to Trafalgar Square and there, looking down Whitehall, is Charles I, a few hundred yards from the place where he lost his head. Walk as far as Parliament and you'll find another statue to…
Of all British theatre's great curmudgeons (Arnold Wesker, Edward Bond et al), Howard Barker is the most curmudgeonly of all. He grumbled to the Guardian that Scenes from an Execution, now r…
If I had to name five British male actors on whom I would slap a 'National Treasure' export ban if they ever planned to move to Hollywood, Adrian Lester would be one of them. Long ago he was…
After the RSC's dismal Twelfth Night at the Roundhouse earlier this year, it's a sheer joy to rediscover the play in this brilliant production at Shakespeare's Globe. This is a revival of an…
I'm no Ibsen expert, but this version of his play by Brian Friel contains a raft of rewrites which are at best unneccessary and at worst, seriously bonkers. Friel, who is extremely keen on C…
'You looked as if you didn't want to be woken up.' No, that is not a line from Caryl Churchill's new play. It's what the lady on my right said as we left the Royal Court stalls at the end...
'We're worth an evening in the stalls/We might be girls but we've got balls' Underneath the brick railway arches at Southwark Playhouse, there's an unmissable masterclass going on nightly in…
My guide to pronouncing the names of Chekhov's characters and getting the stress right has proved to be one of my most popular blog postings ever. I hope actors and directors everywhere in t…
This wasn't a play and so I'm not writing a review. Several hundred people crowded into the Royal Court Theatre's underground cafe in Sloane Square this morning to hear three actresses, incl…
There are moments in Mark Rylance's long-awaited Richard III which, like his performance in Jerusalem, conjure up the ghost of Laurence Olivier playing Archie Rice in The Entertainer. He's a…
I'm not usually a big fan of directors who want to update 19th century classics, but this Young Vic production of Ibsen's best known play by Carrie Cracknell is a model of how to do it; and …
From Falstaff to Macbeth, from Hamlet to Iago, from Leontes to Benedick -- I find it hard to think of a Shakespearean actor with the range of Simon Russell Beale, except Mark Rylance. Like G…
How do you stage one of Shakespeare's most problematic plays? The Merchant of Venice may have a whiff of antisemitism, but it also has layers of ambiguity; The Taming of Shrew, on the other …
A link to my theatre blog piece for the Guardian yesterday. The headline was written by someone else. I'm griping about productions of Shakespeare, not Chekhov, Ibsen, Shaw and everyone else.
Whatever happened to lunchtime theatre? Is it dead and buried, just like the traditional lunchbreak? It seems to be in terminal decline in London, a victim of a world in which people have to…
Is there a scientific basis for coincidence? I have absolutely no idea. In fact since passing my O level physics in 1964 I have struggled to understand science. I once found myself on a plan…
Another very disappointing evening at the Roundhouse, following Twelfth Night a few days ago. All I can say about David Farr's over-designed and under-acted production is that the phrase 'Sh…
It must be a fairly rare event for a first play by an unknown writer to get its premiere not in the Cottesloe but in the National Theatre's much larger Lyttelton. But director Howard Davies'…
Two years ago Shakespeare's Globe delivered a cracking production of Henry IV, with Jamie Parker playing the young Hal opposite Roger Allam's Olivier-winning Falstaff. Now Parker moves on to…
I have a modest 'back to basics' proposal for the Royal Shakespeare Company's new boss Greg Doran: despatch all the company's set and costume designers, composers, technical panjandrums and …
Ah well, you can't win them all. The Globe's magnificent worldwide Shakespeare season is coming to an end with a real stinker. I do not think I have ever seen a version of Shakespeare as bad…
Director Polly Findlay told the NT Platform audience before last night's performance of Antigone that she was hoping to recreate the atmosphere of an HBO television drama, using the Olivier'…
