322 stories by "John Morrison"
Al Smith's play, now at the Gate Theatre, garnered a raft of good reviews at the Traverse in Edinburgh in August, and it's easy to see why. It's a very loose adaptation of a short story by N…
Belarus Free Theatre has been established in exile in the UK for more than a decade, but their uncompromising work makes few easy concessions to charm a fickle British theatre audience. Some…
Lear's cavalier division of his kingdom into three ranks with David Cameron's ill-thought referendum on EU membership as an example of catastrophic decision-making. Both moves are followed b…
Director Iqbal Khan has delivered a Macbeth packed with good acting and exciting ideas, but one whose impact is for me fatally undermined by the Globe's new policy of heavy reliance on artif…
Playwright Martin McDonagh, winner of the 2015 Olivier best new play award for Hangmen, is being honoured with his own theatre festival, in which his plays will be performed non-stop for a w…
Even when the actors are wringing their guts out on stage, my usual approach is to keep a stiff upper lip and maintain my critical distance. Occasionally that's not possible, and I have to c…
Some of the very best evenings in the theatre happen when great acting and directing bring to life a great text, without the benefit of elaborate sets, costumes, lighting, smoke, video monit…
This play is often considered Terence Rattigan's best, and it provides a fantastic opportunity for any actress in the central role of Hester Collyer, the judge's wife who has embarked on a d…
Sometimes in the theatre I look at my watch and hope the play will end soon. Just occasionally -- it happened last night -- I enjoy myself so much that when the show ends I want to see it al…
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. That's clearly not the belief of Emma Rice, who took over with a bang as artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe last month. Her two very successful predece…
Joe Penhall's Blue/Orange is a play with more questions than answers. One of the reasons it has become a classic is because the audience leaves the theatre after two and a half hours still u…
Thank heavens for a playwright who is prepared to wade into controversial issues but refuses to tell the audience what to think. May Sumbwanyambe's play, set in Zimbabwe in the late 1990s, h…
What would that grand master of the art of pauses Harold Pinter have made of this play? Annie Baker's extraordinary low-key drama, now playing a sellout run at the National Theatre's Dorfman…
President Obama and I both dropped in at Shakespeare's Globe this weekend. He watched a short extract from Hamlet while I stood as a groundling to see the whole performance on Saturday night…
Over a decade ago I was at Wilton's Music Hall for the most fascinating production of Macbeth I have ever witnessed, a promenade production set in a war-torn African country and directed by …
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS Denise Gough has won rave reviews for her central performance as a drug-and-booze-fuelled actress trying to detox in Duncan Macmillan's play, which first o…
Nobody who saw South African director Yael Farber's stunning version of Mies Julie or her Old Vic reinvention of The Crucible will be surprised to hear that her new production is an absolute…
Everbody has heard of the French writer Jean Genet, but his plays are still unfamiliar to many people, and that includes me. This makes this stunning version of The Maids (Les Bonnes), writt…
My heart sank when I read in the programme for this revival of Uncle Vanya that Tobias Menzies, the actor playing Dr Astrov, had a spent a day in the woods learning about forestry as prepara…
I made a last-minute outing to the NTLive transmission of the Donmar's stunning revival of Christopher Hampton's play, based on a classic French novel from the late 18th century. Seduction a…
August Wilson's 1984 Broadway hit was a landmark in American theatre, launching his career as the 20th century's leading black playwright. This new production on the National Theatre's Lytte…
Here's your starter question. Which play by Harold Pinter features references to a cheese roll and a Humber Super Snipe? The answer, of course, is The Homecoming, a play revived by Jamie Llo…
I know people who couldn't be dragged by wild horses to a Caryl Churchill play. That's perfectly okay by me (I have my own list of playwrights whose work I really don't want to see again) bu…
Nothing is ever certain to succeed in the theatre, though some plays and productions are certain to fail. But if you're consulting the form book, a production of an Ibsen play at the Almeida…
Some plays are like dogs. They sniff around a series of lampposts but never actually raise their legs. So it is with Wallace Shawn's new play at the National Theatre. At 100 minutes, it is a…
