696 stories by "Libby Purves"
WARM, WONDERFUL, WISE..THE YEAR’S BEST NEW MUSICAL Strewth! What a wonderful show.  In this trade we are cautious of superlatives, lest omething even better comes …
OUT IN THE FOREST, SOMETHING STIRS… The slope beneath the great chestnut trees makes a perfect arena: on tiered seating or below it on chairs, the audience are held b…
GUEST REVIEWER PHILIP FISHER ON RAVENHILL’S EXTENDED HIT It is amazing how quickly contemporary events become history, and recent history becomes the distant past. Mark R…
BUCKSKINS, BURLESQUERS, BLISS Yee-ha! Calamity Jane strides in, beefy in buckskins, more beltingly, braggingly alive than any man in the room. Or, indeed, any room. She's been ridin' …
GUEST CRITIC PHILIP FISHER IS AWED BY GEORGIAN ORWELL.. Anyone expecting a children’s show from Guy Masterson's adaptation of Orwell could be in for a shock. This deeply …
WHO'S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD WOLF? I thought it was a children’s walk-through amusement, something to keep the little bleeders willing to accompany parents to the serious Traverse plays…
A CREEPY GENTLENESSÂ I found this maverick pair, “Box Tale Soup” Â out in the boondocks last fringe: Antonia Christophers and noel Byrne, creating a wonderful Northanger Ab…
THE BONUS BOYS UNMASKED… Jamie Griffiths is not a quantitative analyst in the City. He's an actor and playwright. Not a "quant", a risk-taking star of the city betting an…
THE GRUMPY OLD ROMAN RETURNS… Terrible times we live in. A decadent civilization, a crumbling empire, hypocrites in power, toadies fawning on the rich, women strangers to chastity and …
FRANKIE GOES TO EXTREMES… Good to know (and I mean this seriously) that Edinburgh comedy is not cowed by squeamish PC seriousness. If you can't laugh at everything, you probably…
WHO SAYS THE ROM-COM IS DEAD? IT JUST GOT WITTY.. Last year I purred over Richard Marsh's "Dirty Great Love Story", a blissfully clever, likeable, honest miniature rom-com,…
OH DEAR Sometimes you have to check out the Fringe regulars, especially when tagged with “sizzling” by the Scottish Express and “well worth getting out of bed for…
IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT AIDS… Kevin Elyot's 1994 play is pretty much perfect: a twist on the traditional drawing-room, single-set comedy of sex, love, friendship and death. Dir…
FUTURE HORRORS OF A RISING BORIS?  Here is a cheerful, dishevelled Alan Cox as Max Newman, London Mayor turned Tory MP. He's a seemingly bumbling, teddybearish, pratfalling, polysylla…
COMRADES AND CANNIBALS “It's not just seven naked men eating each other” must be the most startling aplogia yet for a play; but the author David Ian Lee and the director J…
STICK, BAGGY PANTS AND BOWLER: Â POLITICS AND EXILE My Granny met young Charlie Chaplin once: he was at her father’s Theatre Royal Nottingham with Fred Karno’s M…
SEX , SEDUCTION AND STALE MARRIAGE… Middle-aged man in a hotel bar, having a drink after work; miniskirted girl hits on him, shameless, provocative – "do you w…
BEFORE THE REAL DEBATE…TRY THIS… Every afternoon at ten past five, a kilted 24-year-old woman in blue-and-white facepaint emerges from the leprous tenement of the Underbelly on a…
THE COMMEMORATION Posted, 0100, 5/08/2014 "Terrible old uniforms, no proper webbing, even. Off to Destination Unknown" says the private soldier, remembering how he threw a post…
1924Â PREPPY KILLERS RIDE AGAIN Kevin Spacey thrilled us all right as the lawyer Clarence Darrow (at the Old Vic, reviewed here). One of his great triumphs was saving two yo…
THE BEAST WITHIN "Our enemies are not the Germans, nor the Russians or the French. The common enemy of us all is the beast within". As Syria, Ukraine, Israel and Palestine burn and th…
BRACING, BRILLIANT AND NECESSARY… Mark Thomas is the most intelligent of the modern leftist standups: impassioned, a practical activist emotionally driven but capable of rich mockery o…
DELUSION AND DESIRE IN THE DEEP SOUTH If you are on one of the high back-row benches there is a bar to rest your feet on. It can create for a moment the illusion of being on a …
GERSHWIN'S GRANDEUR:Â Â Â SPLENDOUR ON THE GRASS From the moment Nicola Hughes wanders onto the stage in the overture, pulls on a strident red dress, sniffs her "happy dust" an…
A WORLD FOR THE WICKED It quotes a Roethke poem: "Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.." Indeed it is. In a shiningly hyper-real world suspended in t…
