696 stories by "Libby Purves"
POKER AND PATERNITY: A WOMAN QUIETLY DESPAIRS… Poker, like good drama, requires an ability to transmit or conceal "tells": moments of facial or body language revealing or hiding…
Guest reviewer  LUKE JONES  appreciates our Dawnie… At the very beginning, with a large clock face ticking behind her, Dawn French describes what we are about to see as a slice…
A HIGH PRESSURE TRIUMPH , AND A TRIBUTE It happened seventy years ago so we know the outcome. D-Day was the biggest amphibious invasion in history – 156,000 men, 6939 vessels, 11590 pl…
GORDON CONTRA MUNDUM…A BLEAK IMAGINING The focus groups, mourns this briefest of Prime Ministers, always come up with the same words about him. "Strong" and "Solid" are fine. "S…
ONE GREAT PERFORMER'S TRIBUTE TO ANOTHER The main causes of crime, said the famous American defence lawyer Darrow, are "Poverty, ignorance, hard luck and, generally, youth". A century later,…
A WICKED WIT, WITH HEART ON SLEEVE : LIPPA TAKES LONDON Here is Summer Strallen as Cinderella, ripping off her rags and scorning the ballgown for a dominatrix PVC corset and whip. Her…
DEATH , TRUTH, TORMENT : THE REBIRTH OF A NATION "What" asks the calm academic , "should our attitude be to people who have committed atrocities?". From Belfast to the Balkans, Sy…
FRESHER THAN EVER, AN ANCIENT LOVE UNDER THE SKY Eve Best is an irresistible Cleopatra for today: no slinky seductive exoticism but a fresh, joyful, larky sensuality as well-expressed in…
KATHLEEN TURNER BLOWS INTO TOWN, AN AUTHENTIC HURRICANE Under a tangle of brushwood and a ratty telegraph pole, Maude's trailer-park home is full of junk from dumpsters and charity sh…
REDEMPTION OF A HOLLYWOOD HUNK… The tiny am-dram theatre is threatened with redevelopment: only celebrity casting can save it. Jefferson Steel – fading star of Ultimate Finality …
POWERFUL, EMOTIONAL, CHALLENGING -Â GUEST REVIEWER Â Â JOHN PETERÂ WRITES:Â Do you remember Vietnam? Â Â How, in the sixties and seventies, we wondered whether the communis…
WELL, SWIPE ME DOWN THE OLD KENT ROAD, ME OLD CHINA… Would you Adam and Eve it: the Joan Littlewood centenary restores to her sacred stage not only Oh What A Lovely War but this celebr…
AN EXTRAORDINARY ALICE IN THE DARK HEART OF WAR In a cellar, sheltering from bombs in 1915, a wispily grey, middle-aged Alice Liddell roams through an Edwardian clutter of old chests,…
INTIMATE, HUMBLE: THE BEST COMMEMORATION The title comes from Philip Larkin's poem MCMXIV, evoking the rural England of 1914 as young men queued, as if at a football match, to enlist.…
POSTWAR, COLD-WAR, ANGRY AND RESTLESS Ever since our manufacturing and metal-bashing trades eroded, we have seen a sentimentality about old industrial Britain: the glory days when…
SEW, STRUT, SWIRL AND SHAKE IT ! When this production ran at Chichester, I found myself forced to invent new words to describe Stephen Mear's marvellously varied choreography as the SleepTit…
IMBRUGLIA IN A FINE IMBROGLIO When two old schoolfriends meet after eleven years, naturally they sing the old school song. "Girls of St Gert's! Pure in your body, healthy in mind.." When two…
AN HOUR OF SHOCKING BRILLIANCE AND ARTISAN OBSCENITY Phoebe Waller-Bridge's extraordinary self-written monologue performance won awards in Edinburgh, the Offies, The Stage and the Cri…
SKITTERBANG ISLAND Little Angel, N1 Is three-to-five years old too young for opera? Not really. Small children sing their world all the time, chant their feelings freely. As for puppe…
MINXY MURDEROUSNESS AMID THE WAVING CATS.. Polly Findlay, who gave us the National Theatre's tough Antigone and Derren Brown's Svengali, has great fun with RSC directorial debut: heav…
IT’S TRUE! A FISH DOES NEED A BICYCLE! We're in a cavernous Victorian swimming-pool, a dreamworld where the waterfall is made of bath-plug chains. Then we're in a sea-green underwater …
HOW SWEET THE BIRDS OF AVONDALE… The room where the poet Stevie Smith lived for over half a century lies before us: chintz, potted geranium, sherry-decanter and stained-glass do…
OUR FIRST GUEST REVIEWER!  GALLANT LUKE JONES BRAVES THE BLOOD, SPIT AND RAIN. Oh how it poured. With the large strips of black, makeshift roofing not covering but neat…
WHERE HAVE ALL THE GOOD TIMES GONE? OH, THEY'RE BACK.. It is not every week the Hampstead audience gets to leap up and down with 1966 World Cup confetti in its hair, chanting "L-L-L L…
A MOTHERÂ AND A MODERN MILE-HIGH NIGHTMARE Crop-haired, upright, an Aryan Alpha-female, she stands proud in flying-suit and straps. She's a USAF fighter pilot, in love with her F16…
