696 stories by "Libby Purves"
AND THEY CALL IT PUPPET LOVE…. "Avenue Q meets The Exorcist" claim posters for Robert Askins' Broadway hit, directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel. Or "The Muppets play The Omen". B…
IN THE END, AN HONOURABLE PLAY Its fame rolls before it: a debut play, premiered in London by Matthew Perry. To a generation of young adults (and to many far younger, thanks to ceasel…
SHAKESPEARE’S TOWN LAID BEFORE US The year 1613: somewhere offstage old Shakespeare is dying, and in her husband's physic-garden, competent and dignified, his daughter Susanna a…
THE DEEPEST GRIEF OBSERVED Pretty much everyone agreed – here and on its West End transfer- that the American David Lindsay-Abaire's GOOD PEOPLE was a masterpiece, with its defi…
GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI FINDS OLD IDEAS COMING BACK TO HAUNT THEIR CREATOR The Master Builder, Halvard Solness, is universally acknowledged by his townsfolk as a lucky man: self-made…
RED VELVET:Â Â DEEP AND RICH AS EVER This (I sneaked in to an early preview , because I am on holiday) was my third visit to Lolita Chakrabarti's play, starring her husband the matchles…
MARTY FELDMAN: Â A GREAT COMIC’S ENDGAME Next week at the Jermyn there opens a play which is a memorial to a late-life friendship with Lucille Ball; already on the far side of the Ch…
THE EMPTY NEST, THE TROUBLED MIND Hold tight. It's the French genius litterateur Florian Zeller messing with our heads again. We are confused, wary, deceived and unsettled by the tric…
A MEMORIAL IN MUSIC This is a solo show, a memorial to a mother and to a generation. It is performed not by an actor but by the American concert pianist, Mona Golabek.  Yet as a…
ANOTHER CHICHESTER SMASH COMES WEST This is a revisit, to a partly recast Chichester show: and I must admit I had qualms about losing that generosity, that overflowing vigour you get with th…
MORE POIGNANT THAN POISONOUS: A 125TH ANNIVERSARY MARKED One wit called it 'the first French novel in English', with its seductive evocation of exotic decadence and corrupting wickedn…
AMNESIA AS A NEW START? In a hospital bed lies Michael: Alistair McGowan, motionless in a coma, we learn, for three weeks. His mother Carol (Maggie Ollerenshaw) holds his hand, has be…
The playtext of Rob Hayes' monologue austerely insists that performance "should not exceed 60 minutes in duration". This author doesn't want it larded with significant pauses or dreamy manne…
A CENTURY ON, THEY WALK BEFORE US It was gruesome, politically problematic, tragic and heroic and wasteful; it was a turning-point in history. I have written before about how l…
THE BOHO BOUVIERS: Â REBELLIOUS RECLUSES Hot on the heels of THE DAZZLE (about the New York Collyer brothers living in hoarderly squalid isolation) this is about Edith Bouvier Beale…
A HALF-FORGOTTEN QUEEN RISES… School history was terrible. Terrible! We got the Tudors, and a bore-in about the Thirty Years War, but a fog of confusion and a sense of 1066 And …
DARK DOINGS IN THE BURROW I hope that the great Beatrix Potter, out of copyright just last year, would be pleased at the pointing, bouncing, giggling and gasping in Red Rose Ch…
A WHIFF OF SULPHUR UNDER THE BROCADE… There are certainly crinolines, but Quality Street it ain't. How smart of Josie Rourke to offer adults, worn down by fairylights and panto …
THNEEDS MUST WHEN CONSUMERISM DRIVES… It's a heartfelt welcome. The Old Vic, for a long while fiercely grownup, throws its arms open to children under Matthew Warchus' leadershi…
SUICIDE BY THINGS... We are up 71 concrete steps in the old St Martin's School of Art, eccentric creativity soaked into its grimy plaster and echoing down its grim old Hitchcock-ish iron lif…
SUICIDE BY THINGS… We are up 71 concrete steps in the old St Martin's School of Art, eccentric creativity soaked into its grimy plaster and echoing down its grim old Hitchcock-i…
A LORDLY FOGGÂ Â WITHÂ Â UNDERSTAGE COGS AND A Â FAITHFULÂ FROG… If you can't face another panto (oh no you can't) but want to share a treat with the young, this is …
BROADBENT & BARLOW BRING BACKÂ THE BIG BAD BANKER…Â Tom Pye's design of Victorian découpage creates a toy paper-theatre within the stark stage area: the scenes revolve…
UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLES AND UNPRINCIPLED CERTAINTIES It is a mildly shaming reflection that  Tom Stoppard plays generally dismissed by his cadre of scholarly admirers as "not…
ALL IS FORGIVEN Â (UNLESS YOU’RE DEAD, AND DON’TÂ DESERVE IT)Â This is part of Dominic Dromgoole's candlelit farewell to his tenure at the Globe: a set of late Sha…
