696 stories by "Libby Purves"
A LOST LADY RETURNS, SAD AND BEGUILING Theatre loves to eat its own history, and fair enough: if you want intensity, volatile emotion, hope and heartbreak and impossible yet irresistible cha…
A PIG TALE TROTS ITS STUFF Strike day in a hot pedestrian London, and a surreal opening matinee for Stiles and Drew’s new family musical (fresh from the…
BEHIND THE PALACE WALLS: A CHILLING MODERNITY Peter McKintosh designs cold, skilful dictator chic: above a shining marble floor, the majestic Mittel-Europa chandelier dims to a blood-r…
A FATHER AND A SON, Â WHEN THE TIMES WERE A-CHANGING… Old army jokes get readopted by every generation. I suspect that one of the most slyly placed laughs in this ultimately charming…
GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI GOES HAPPILY DEMENTED AT THE ALMEIDA “Cleverness is not wisdom,” warn the Maenad chorus, as king Pentheus determinedly resists the rise of new god…
GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORIÂ GLIMPSES A RUSSIAN SUMMER WITH PATRICK MARBER Patrick Marber has taken Turgenev's A Month in the Country and strengthened it in all directions, rather like…
GLORIOUS BRIDES AND BROTHERS…  LP NIPS BACK  MID-HOL TO CATCH THEM ALL Innocent virgins abducted from their family hearth, carried off  to wild territory by lawless bearded gu…
This is a tale of romance and of the lure of cinema: tricky on the stage. Mack Sennet, a clownish film director, is losing his beloved star, Mabel Normand, to the dreaded, meatier features. …
GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES FINDS AN EMPTY FAMILY DRAMA WITH GOOD GAGS TO KEEP IT AFLOAT After 17 years away, the grown-up daughter returns with the illegitimate child which got her thrown out…
GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES FINDS THINGS GET MUCH BETTER AFTER THE INTERVAL The jokes bought this play some time. Richard Bean, a former standup, is hot property at the moment after a slew of …
GUEST REVIEWERÂ CHARLOTTE VALORIÂ LEARNS ABOUT LASPO*… "When I was growing up the poor were seen as unfortunates. Now they're seen as manipulative. Grasping. Scroungers. It's very …
WHEN LARRY MET ORSON AND KEN AND IT DIDN’T GO WELL… Sir Larry spreads his arms wide in the rehearsal room and moans “I am a giant in chains!” His director rolls his e…
THE BIG HAIRY ONE RIDES AGAIN… Stage Hero of the week is Owen Guerin, aka The Gruffalo in the larky children’s play based on Julia Donaldson’s immortal book. On the hottest…
DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE Fifty minutes in, we got a 30ft yodelling falsetto caterpillar with flashing saucer eyes, and I cheered up. It also, as it happens, sang the central message of…
A HANDBAG? Â A WHOLE TRUNKFUL OF TREATS The heart sinks beforehand: Oscar Wilde's sunny comedy melodrama is too familiar: skipping from one well-worn epigram to the next, from handbag to m…
COMFORT YE! HANDEL AND THE FIRST MESSIAH Handel's Messiah is a phenomenon: written in three weeks in the composer's most disappointed phase, to this day it plays as sublimely as a chamber pi…
GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES IS CONVEYED BY A DYSTOPIAN INJUSTICE The auditorium is a coliseum, with a tremendous conveyor belt slicing it in half, flappy black curtains at either end. K w…
CHEKHOV UNDER THE TREES Fortune favours the brave, and the meteorological riskiness of outdoor theatre sometimes pays handsomely. A great heron flew over, squawking doom, just as Irina screa…
BACK OF THE NET! Rejoice! In the midst of Fifa’s dismal doings musical theatre makes football beautiful again. Gurinder Chadha’s and Paul Mayeda Berges’ fable, of a …
Libby Purves: Open air theatre works brilliantly. In fact, it offers some of the most enjoyable drama of the summer
NOW HERE’S THE ONE TO SEE. Â DON’T MIND THE LANGUAGE… If you worry about language, the clue's in the title. More f's and assholes than you can shake a reproving finger at…
PORN AND PHYSICALITY We’re all on the same page here, right? Online pornography is increasingly violent, graphically displaying real, abusive sexual acts devoid of tenderness. Rapist s…
UNDER THE BRIDGE, MEN UNDER PRESSURE “You gonna have a revolution”: the last words of Arthur Miller’s angry “play for the screen”, echo here with an interrogati…
SPECIAL GUEST REVIEWER DARREN RAYMOND OF INTERMISSION THEATRE COMPANY TAKES ON RSC OTHELLO, SKYPE, RAP, BOXBEAT AND ALL….. The RSC made a bold statement by casting their first ever bla…
