696 stories by "Libby Purves"
 PITY AND TERROR IN A HANDFUL OF DUST There's a great tall door, portal of the ancient house of Atreus; a blighted tree, a votive lantern, a dusty arena. Like Greeks two tho…
THE SADNESS OF THE SINGLE SPY…BENNETTIAN COMICÂ MELANCHOLY These two short plays are vintage, premier-cru Alan Bennett: funny, melancholic, sparking with ideas about B…
GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES ENJOYS THE GRANS AND GANGSTERS The heyday, the heyday. Everyone’s Gran loves to chew over the heyday with anyone they can pin in a chair. But wh…
Well, what a day that was. There is still in October one chance to see, in one day, all three of Rona Munro's immense trilogy about the first three King Jameses of Scotland in the wild 15th …
THE JAMES PLAYS GET OFF TO A TERRIFIC START… This one's a stormer: thrilling, funny, vigorous, beguiling, accessible, a gripping and entertaining blend of the epic and th…
…AND IT GROWS DARKER James I is dead. His small son, defaced by a birthmark, puny and afraid, in surreal nightmare sequences constantly relives the bloodshed and concealm…
…AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT If the first play began with a ragged brawl and taunt, the second with a tenebrous nightmare of childhood, this one starts with a rom…
POETS AND PACIFISTS, Â LOVERS AND LOSS: A ‘THIRTIES TALE Â Modern historical recreations are valuable in this WW1 centenary year, but there is something thrilling, a frisso…
WIKILEAKS MEETS JUST WILLIAM Serious? Not always, it's not. "Everything is funny all the time!" screams one of our heroes. "Epic Lulz! Nothing is to be taken seriously!". The t…
TWO HUNDRED YEARS OLD AND FRESH AS A DAISY Two centuries before Oscar Wilde there was another eloquent, satirical, socially subversive, intermittently disreputable Irishman at work: O…
IMAGINING HOW HE WAS…. Simon Callow’s solo shows have become a landmark: his impassioned Dickens, his Marigold and Chips characters and his Christmas Carol. In Edinburgh I…
GHOST GUEST REVIEWER EDNA WELTHORPE TAKES ON ORTON, AGAIN by A.N.Onymous (The Critic Who Knows) Calling all ordinary, decent folk. Edna Welthorpe (Mrs) here!  I am on a …
VALHALLA IN A VALHANGAR Deep in the bleak Cold War desolation of the old US Air Base in Suffolk stands a shed where once jet engines were tested. Inside, the old Norse gods gather to bicker,…
A GALLANT SADNESS : FACES OF WAR “We don’t do glum here. Glum just doesn’t work”. Clipped, officerly with an edge of confident eccentricity, cradling his Cambr…
A PSYCHOTIC PUCKOON Watching Enda Walsh’s surreal new 90-minuter, late star of the Galway festival, one reflection kept intruding: that there is, God save us, a dangerously fine…
DAFT AND DARING, Â WITTY AND WHOOPEE Onstage a suave Robert Lindsay preens and pirouettes, a matinée idol sick of self-love, pivot of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels running just across th…
GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES WATCHES A GOOD IDEA STUMBLE AWAYÂ INTO THEÂ DESERT This is a drunk play. It rambles a great tale at you, mildly hooks you, then fluffs the end as it totters off…
GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES FINDS AS MUCH TO KEEP AS TO THROW AWAY Uneven, but with big laughs, confused but not entirely to fault; this production nestled itself almost perfectly between bril…
THE STAFF OF LIFE: ORDINARY LIVES. A shift in a Yorkshire mass-production bread factory in the 1970's: Richard Bean , at eighteen, was there. In that perceptive, new-fledged moment of…
NOT SO PEACEFUL IN THE PACIFIC It is not often that the Chichester front-row is questioned about its sexual practices by merry brown girls extolling carefree Tahitian sex. "Our…
BLISS? OH YES IT IS Here's a 1924 creation: swooping and frivolously asymmetric as a drop-waisted flapper-dress, flashily well-crafted as a Deco windowpane. Its first criti…
ESSEX GIRL COMES OF AGE I rather like Denise van Outen. A trouper, a trained musical-theatre talent who had to make it (and she did, triumphing in CHICAGO here and on Broadway)…
A NEW BLONDE BOMBSHELL STORMS THE STAGE Summer seaside rep is not dead. Frinton Summer Theatre is marking its 75th year, and it's worth celebrating , even though I caught the l…
ORWELL GOES GANGLAND Far out in DLR-land, in the wilderness of Urban Regeneration that is the new East-of-East End, Newham City Farm has been since 1977 a place where you can, …
A WINNING ROLL OF THE DICE FOR CHICHESTER There is a sort of generosity, an overflowing vigour, when Chichester's great three-sided arena does the classic musicals. They can't …
