696 stories by "Libby Purves"
A LONG WAY FROM DOCK GREEN… Gail Wilde earned her nickname at Hendon. A firecracker, an enthusiastic gym-bunny aglow with desire to be a good copper in the Met. She turns up early f…
THE POETRY AND THE PITY On this evening of Armistice day a hundred years on, no more fitting place to be than at this finely drawn revival of Stephen MacDonald's two-hander about the …
NO STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS: Â 600 YEAR OLD SEX CRIMEÂ COMES TO TRIAL It is the year 1399. In dim light, great John of Gaunt lies on his funeral bier awaiting burial in St Pa…
GUEST REVIEWER CHARLOTTE VALORI SINKS INTO HER SEAT UNDER THE WEIGHT OF SCIENCE It so happened that, on my way to 2071, I had been listening (repeatedly) to Brünnhilde's Immolation Scene: W…
IN WHICH GUEST CRITIC AND TOP THEATREKITTEN LUKE JONES IS SADLY UNDERWHELMED This – created by Lloyd Newson of DV8 physical company – wasn’t quite the piece o…
UP THE WOMEN, UP THE WORKERS…AND A JIGÂ Â FROM HAROLD WILSON It was not until the second-act opener that I thought it might fulfil the hope. That hope has been considerab…
BRAM AT THE BBC: A FRIVOLOUS FORTIES FRIGHTENER Ah, happy memories! As an unfledged BBC techie in the '70s, my favourite job was "Spot Effects" in radio drama studios: a techni…
THE WOMEN AND THE BOYS: YOUNG RATTIGAN BEGINS… There's a rugby ball and a bottle of Oxford Ale, clothbound law books, pipes, a cricket bat, 1930's clutter. There are twee…
DORAN CALLS UP DEMONSÂ Devils! Not Hallowe'enily cosy at all. Obscenely beguiling, tenebrous creatures of evil, they lurk inside all human nature and they know it. Mother Sa…
DARKNESS VISIBLE: Â CANDLELIT HORRORS, ANCIENT SORROWS By the end of three hours the gilt-reflecting candlelight of this little jewel-box playhouse is flickering over a birth…
RADIO FOUR THE MUSICAL? Â ABOUT TIME TOO Radio 4 announcers tend to have a dry, contained sense of humour, honed by years in their lonely hutches listening to that most literate of…
FLINTLOCK STRIKES A SPARK – IN A LIBRARY, TOO… Cervantes' story gave us a word: quixotic. From politics to artistic enterprises, it defines all extravagantly romant…
“LIKE A SAD OLD MELODY, TEARS YOU UP AND SETS YOU FREE, Â THAT’S HOW MEMPHIS SEEMS TO ME’ "Ain't no daytime on Beale Street, only nighttime!' Delroy's joint is jum…
A STUNNING SIMPLICITY, A HUMAN HEART Only the dead see life clearly. Â In the last strange simple minutes of this undramatic drama, half of Thornton Wilder’s citizens b…
A NEW EYE ON AN OLD SADNESS: THE WILDE TRIAL RECREATED This is fascinating: the playwright John O'Connor and Oscar Wilde's grandson Merlin Holland mark the centenary of the great man'…
COMEDY, BRUTALITY, UNCERTAINTY IN Â AÂ BYGONEÂ SALFORD There is a telling moment at the end of Sam Yates' production of Ayub Khan Din's portrait of a Pakistani Muslim fam…
IN WHICH YOUR CRITIC FALLS IN LOVE WITH A BENEDICK AND A DOG-BOWL This is actually the one we know as Much Ado About Nothing – though some nifty Shakespeareology sugge…
BEFORE THE DAWN OF WAR…THE LAST LARKSÂ This is the young Shakespeare: making his way, dazzling with wordplay, confecting improbable japes and charades, laughing at absurd eld…
EVERYTHING COMES UP ROSES FOR THIS ONE. OH YES. It is not often in a big musical that you remember the silences: the pin-drop, tense waits. But then, Gypsy was no run-of-the-mill musi…
DORFMAN DOES DISCO, HURRAH Oh, fabulous! Nicholas Hytner could have done lots of traditional things to launch the recreated third auditorium, the jewel of "NT Future" with its …
BACK TO PRISON:Â WOMEN WIN THE HOLLOW CROWN This is epic and intimate, mischievous and macho, truthful and painful and bleak. A two-hour condensation of the Henry IV plays, set in …
THE INTERIORITY OF EXTERIORITY EXAMINED..ER.. Theresa Rebeck's play about a creative-writing seminar in New York, directed with pace and flair by Terry Johnson, has met some sniffy re…
DORIAN GRAY IS BACK. AND THIS TIME SHE’S A GIRL. I am usually too humble about my exiguous visual gift to dare remonstrate with designers, but in this case would plead, t…
SWEET SEDUCTION, OLD CORRUPTION In 1978 as a Today reporter the day editor hustled me off to the Prince Edward theatre where this chap Lloyd-Webber ("He did that Joseph thi…
LINDSAY, LINDSAY AND LINDSAY.  TWO OUT OF THREE DO FINE. David Mamet's angostura sharpness is not everyone's taste , but few playwrights have such rat-a-tat rhythm and economic…
