696 stories by "Libby Purves"
THREE MEN IN A (PROBABLY RIGGED) VOTE… In 2010, three men came to a Zurich hotel to present (to a scandal-ridden FIFA) Britain's case for hosting the 2018 World Cup. David Cameron the chir…
SITCOM DOESN’T QUITE STAND UP First the good news. If there is an award for best-choreographed food-fight, it's just been won (take a bow, fight director Kate Waters). Â Stephen Mang…
SUBTERRANEAN STREISAND: SILLY AND SUBLIME It’s a heady cocktail, the Hollywood Heartbreaker: tartness and syrup, Â firewater and froth ,l served in the campest crystal with diamond s…
A GRAVE GRANDEUR, AN UNFORGOTTEN HORROR Hard to overstate the impact, the sense of event, commemoration and bleak grandeur in this extraordinary evening. There is, in this 70th anniversary o…
MANDERLEY AGAIN, Â AND VERY WELCOME TOOÂ "Last night, I dreamed I went to Manderley again…" The famous opening is spoken from the sea-bed: a dim otherworld where a jointed lifeless bo…
POST COALITION TRISTIS… The best line in this rather overstuffed play comes from Keith Parry as Bob, a magnificently slow-thinking lummox. In the corner of a scruffy Norfolk kitchen Bo…
MEMORIES OF A MADHOUSE Hard on the heels of her admirable PROGRESS, Joanna Carrick of Red Rose Chain revives (in this elegant new studio theatre) an earlier piece devised as site-specific th…
A BESPOKE PREMIERE, TRIBUTE TO A TRADE 1953, a tailors' basement workshop under Dover Street. Five people work eighty hours a week or longer. Out front, unseen, the smooth cutters and measur…
GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI IS CHARMED TWICE OVER Miss Dee arrives. She's from the newly-created DSRCDH: "Department for Social Regeneration through the Creation of Dream Homes." She mak…
ANCIENT GRIEF, A TERRIBLE BEAUTY There are some trademarks here: shaven heads, bare feet, bleak staging, immense and timeless dooms and subtle, insistent soundscape. Ivo van Hove, the Belgia…
ONE HOTEL, 150 YEARS, THREE PLAYS Plays in hotel rooms are in vogue: there's a voyeuristic intimacy and a pleasing sense of dislocation about them. And a grand hotel – the Langham was …
GAMES WE NEARLY PLAY It's the Almeida, Jim, but not as we know it. Hunched on benches in four uneasily intimate soundproofed zones padded with camouflage-print, summoned by a robotic voice a…
MOTHERHOOD, SECRETS AND LIES Neatly in time for International Women's Day and the celebratory WOW-ings on the South Bank, John Terry has had Chipping Norton's gorgeous galleried interior tem…
BRAVADO, BRIGANDS, FABIANS, LIFE-FORCES….. It is a truth universally acknowledged that George Bernard Shaw was a bit of a windbag. At no point did the words "Less is more", or "Show do…
GRIMLY COMIC, NOBLY TOUGH For a young actor to play a severely disabled, facially twisted, speech-impaired young man in an electric wheelchair cannot – in this week of Eddie Redmayne's…
KI YIP I YAY It's back. Again. But worth the buggy-ride: brightly directed by Rachel Kavanaugh and choreographed by Drew McOnie with athleticism, wit and inventiveness: ballet, ragtime and b…
NEW-GENERATION GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES UNIMPRESSED BY MARBER REVIVAL There were a lot of jokes about strippers' arseholes. Almost entirely for the joy of saying 'strippers' arseholes'.…
MONARCHY, MADNESS, MUSIC Philip of Spain, grandson of Louise XIV and captive of 18c monarchic rigidity, is lying on his bed , fishing in a goldfish-bowl and announcing that it is all a dream…
FIFTY SHADES OF FANNY A crane, giant crates. Foggy docklands, two hundred years ago. Foppishly approving Britain's mercantile culture, Voltaire coos "You are so moderne!" Up pops Caroline Qu…
MERRIMENT , MUSIC HALL, AND WAR A while ago I wrote – see http://tinyurl.com/q53tp5p – about how well and honestly fringe and mainstream theatre had evoked the popular first worl…
DOWN WITH REALITY! UP WITH THE RABBIT! "I've wrestled with reality for all of my life" says our hero roundly "and I'm happy to say that I've finally won out over it". It says a lot about the…
INDEPENDENCE AND SLAVERY: A TALE WORTH RETELLING Christian is a Maryland Quaker, shoemaker son of immigrants who came to the New World for freedom to worship in peaceable 'quietude'. But the…
EUROPE COLLAPSES, DEMONS ROAM FREE, WHO CARES? Capitalism, consumerism, the banking system, the transactional heartlessness of modern relationships, the illusory comfort of a deluded Europe.…
THE GIRLS ARE BACK… There are not many all-woman plays around, nor many about female friendship; nor do many reflect the particular, unique long-term comradeship which begins in the ch…
THIRTY YEARS OF TURBULENCE: A MARRIAGE There is no snake. It's a nickname for "Belinda", the female half of Clara Brennan's new two-hander, a 90-minute portrait of an 30-year marriage betwee…
