696 stories by "Libby Purves"
THE PEOPLE OF THE PITS Tender, fierce, intelligent and humane, this superb production reminds us that D.H.Lawrence was at his best a great interpreter of 20th century change. Years before th…
THE PRESIDENT OR THE POP STAR? CHOOSE YOUR ROLE MODEL, GIRL! It's a portmanteau of Theodore Roosevelt and Elvis Presley. And, one must sorrowfully surmise, was lit upon by The Team, a col…
‘I MUST CLING TO MY HUSBAND!” OH NO YOU MUSTN’T… HE’S IN THE ATTIC… James Dacre’s leadership of this twin theatre is certainly lively: a…
CELEBRITY CULTURE DECODED – FURIOUSLY I’m a bit late on the curve catching this, but it runs all week with two more matinees, so Roll up! Shudder as you savour the freakish world…
TOURING NEAR YOU; RICH DARK OOZING EVIL AND FEMINIST DEFIANCE A fierce bleak play, this. Set in 1712 but, taking the wider world as it is, not un-topical: hangings, tortures, religion …
SINS OF A PREACHER-MANÂ Admit it, ladies. Within the most modestly-clothed and lipstickless of us pale white matrons, there lurks a sneaky wish to be – just for an hour or two ̵…
EUGENE O’NEILL, Â EARLY AND IMPASSIONED… Well, God bless the little Jermyn. Director and AD Antony Biggs, an unwearying ferret of lost drama, has dug up another barnstorming ea…
GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES FEELS THE NEED FOR A SCRUB Sex is at this play's core. But it's not sexy in the slightest. It's a means of leverage, abuse, it's a crime, a threat. Each of the 50 o…
QUEER ON CAMPUS, THE 21c BLUES Welcome to our college! Meet the students, America’s future. Or, as depicted in Christopher Shinn’s new play, a selection of the most sexuall…
A FROLIC… This is an artful wheeze. Take the story from the sunniest of films, a 1957 cheer-up British Lion starring Peter Sellers, Margaret Rutherford and Bernard Miles. Bolt on some …
THE GREATNESS OF SMALL LIVES We are in a pub garden in rural Hampshire, where landlord John is gathering logs for the fire (in high summer, “it’s part of what people come fo…
GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORIÂ FINDS ANCIENT TRUTH INÂ A GLORIOUSLY DARKÂ DIVORCE "I can unmake you the same way I made you. I write the story, remember?" Rachel Cusk's brilliant vis…
MONEY MAKES THE WORLD GO SOUR The setting is excellent . Terrible flashing screens of numbers, alerts, currencies; sometimes becoming a glass window onto a London scene made of banknot…
JOLLY HOCKEYSTICKS! “Put on your navy knicks, pick up your hockey sticks – and bully-up, bully-up..” Jeepers. I had completely forgotten that ritual “bul…
UNIMPROVABLE IMPROV… You won’t see this show again, nor the other Showstoppers’ evenings I have loved in Edinburgh. If you weren’t there tonight you’ve missed a…
A SMILE, A SONG, AND SAPPHIC SOCIALISM At last. The question tormenting many a fretful middle-aged man – what do lesbians actually DO? – is answered. Aerialism! When the giddy mo…
THE PROTESTANT WHORE RETURNS IN TRIUMPH Charles II came to the throne (in a fabulous wig, surrounded by fabulous spaniels), with England in a mood to throw aside Puritanism and party. The th…
A KIND OF HORRIFIC GRACE.. We are having a spate of grisly classicana at the moment, brutal old tales of curses and murders and doom spinning down the unforgiving generations. A brace of sta…
THE HOLLOW CROWN : A CIRCLE COMPLETED This is the crown, the final flourish of Gregory Doran’s magnificently rendered history cycle. We have seen preening emotional Richard…
THE WORST GUEST EVER…FARCE AND FEAR It’s the least likely setting imaginable for a farce, even a black one. We are in Baghdad, in the Alawai family’s kitchen and dinin…
A FINE PLUM-PUDDING OF ACTS AND IDEAS "Sex and the 18th century" said Brigid Brophy, quoted by the playwright Sam Kelly, "are the two most interesting things in the world". The fiery, subver…
EXECUTION STREET… Grotesque. Morbid. Hilarious. Dark, absurd, evocative. Start with the last one. This is a period-conscious piece, even more than Martin McDonagh’s Irish-set wor…
YOUTHFUL YEARNINGS A CONTAINER PORT CAN’T CONTAIN… You grow up with your mates in a dead-end town, and you're a solid gang – five a side footie team, in and out of each oth…
A WINNER AND A LOSER Human beings sometimes – disastrously – get erotically fixated on one phase of their sexual history. In the case of Patrick (Nick Sidi) it is a teenage momen…
SMALL BUDGET, BIG HEART, WELCOME UP WEST I had been wanting for a while to catch up on this fringe squib about the lives of front-of-house theatre workers, and with devilish cunning Max Reyn…
