696 stories by "Libby Purves"
AN AFGHAN EPIC TO REMEMBER Khaled Hosseini's novel is an intimate epic: a flawed, damaged, remorseful man's journey through thirty years of turbulent history. Amir is the privileged P…
When Yasmina Reza won an Olivier for best comedy, she joked "I thought I had written a tragedy". She did both: the French actor-novelist-playwright sees far enough into the cracks in human c…
THE MAID OF ORLEANS AND HER TORMENTORS For fifteen minutes as the audience troops in Gemma Arterton, in chainmail and breastplate, kneels on a dais in rapt contemplation: mouthing pra…
FRESH AS PAINT, Â THE OLD STORY "Marley was dead…". Oh how we need Dickens' story every year. You can do it panto or earnest, screen or stage, Tommy Steele or Alistair Sim,…
OH YES IT IS, IT REALLY IS… Want to see Julian Clary in a feather headdress and spangles, looping the loop on a flying Vespa over the front stalls.? Course you do! Hungry for pumpki…
LIVES IN LIMBO At the Connection at St Martin's they say that none of us is more than two bad decisions away from the pavement. The street homeless we know, a little. Less plainly lai…
A COLD-BURNING BRILLIANCE A century ago Henrik Ibsen saw, with more clarity than the strait bourgeois world around him, that it wouldn’t do. Not the hypocrisies, not the …
BETTER TO RANT IN HELL.. Magnificent in military jacket as he lectures the College of Tempters, then at ease in his study in fine brocade against a marvellous backdrop of skulls and b…
All the Angels is a fascinating, moving examination of the power of music to inspire, to challenge, and to regenerate souls, as well as an unnerving glance at the strange intimacy between co…
LUKE JONES BUZZES HAPPILY ROUND THE HONEY Where Ivanov, The Seagull and Uncle Vanya mull, the youthfully fresh and fashionably unfinished Platonov rattles along like the TGV. Michael …
O THE PRETTINESS, O THE JOKES… Our heroine gets a job as sales clerk in Maraczek's perfumery by selling a customer ia gorgeous hand-painted musical candy box. Which sums …
HURRAH FOR HOLLYWOOD, AND LONG LIVE FOOLS 'Tis the season to be silly, and the Young Vic's revival of a screwball 1930's Hollywood satire hit the spot triumphantly with this theatre's…
PULLING THE FAIRY STRINGS IN AN URBAN NEVERLAND Wendy is grown up now, earthbound , with her own child to tell about the wonder and danger of Neverland and Pan. She can't leave the gr…
IN WHICH LUKE JONES TRIES AND FAILS TO DISINTER DEEP TRUTHS As in  all slow-burning plays there moments where you tune out for a second and ask yourself 'is this a masterpiece o…
THE BLEAK AND THE BOUNCY…RICE COOKS UP A CHRISTMAS PUD Emma Rice's warm, candelit take on Hans Christian Andersen, inventive and full-hearted as ever, raises a certain anxiety: I wo…
DIVISIONS…DIVISIONS…DIVISIONS…. The Parliamentary chaos of the 1970's – hung parliaments, fragile alliances and lost divisions which predated the dawn of Mrs Thatc…
THE 1930’S SPEAK TO US AGAIN… It's 1937, hard times for the just-managing family. The Monkhams are broke, dreading creditors and bailiffs. The great hope is that the son C…
HERE'S THEÂ PLAICE TO BE… Ah ,universal truths! We are all living on thin ice, knocking up inadequate shelters, fishing hopefully down holes into the chilly truth beneath, accepti…
GUEST CRITIC LUKE JONES CHEERSÂ KIRKWOOD AT THE COURT The Children are the focus of this play, Â in their absence. Instead we have The Pensioners. Parents and a non-parent …
O BRAVE NEW WORLD, IN BRAVE CAPTIVITY Three years ago the Donmar's all-woman Julius Caesar, set in prison, left me feeling that something genuinely new had happened: a revolution, a s…
O BRAVE NEW WORLD…. The talking-point is Ariel: a daring innovation for live theatre. Motion-capture technology sensors on Mark Quartley's graceful body – skintight…
THEY’RE BACK.  OH YES.  INCLUDING URSULA. There comes a time in the year when the spirit yearns for a stiff drink and a whoop-along night in a mirrored tent, watching …
TRUTH, BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSEÂ Nearly 25 years on from its first outing at the National, Stephen Daldry's interpretation of the old JB Priestley standard – not least due to …
LUKE JONES ON THE RSC’s NEW LEAR.. (interesting contrast of response with LP’s Stratford review  , here on http://tinyurl.com/gnu73zq . We both love Essiedu’s Edmu…
TWO LORDS A-ROCKING… Now we know why Lord Lloyd Webber got so grumpy about being summoned back from the US to vote. Been head-down and happy, revelling in his first Broadway hit sin…
