696 stories by "Libby Purves"
ADRIFT ON ANOTHER DEEP, BLUE, LONELY SEA… The Deep Blue Sea is Terence Rattigan's masterpiece (and about to play at the National Theatre). A young woman who has left her eminent…
THE LAST BLASPHEMY TRIAL..AND ECHOES FOR TODAY It is a thousand pities that John Osborne is predominantly famous for the spitting spoilt-brat misogyny of Jimmy Porter in Look Back In …
Kenneth Branagh's entire season has been built on one universal truth. From star to stage-sweeper, pack the production with the best talent and glorious things will inevitably follow. Why th…
Here's a sharp one, beautifully suited to what is not only a Referendum season but one in which both main political parties are more than likely to do mischief to their leaders. We can't rel…
A HEART FOR BEAUTY, Â A ‘FIFTIES DREAM If Daniel Evans means to leave his acclaimed stewardship of Sheffield Theatre on a flood of tears, he's chosen the right producti…
GUEST CRITIC LUKE JONES Â ON THE MENTAL Â WARD... You're clinically paranoid, you're black and you're bombarded on a daily basis with racism and when presented with an oran…
Of Shakespeare's plays this is one of the least done and loved: there's disputed authorship of some sections, parts of the plot missing and replaced from another text. Sir Trevor Nunn takes …
A CAUTIONARY TALE OF TRADE AND TERROR It is the modern terror that stalks our interconnected world. You're shut in a stone cell, alone and far from home, and in a chaotic incre…
Director William Galinksy pays respect to the building's normal life by recruiting Lost in Translation Circus to evoke Ariel's magical powers: the stately Jane Leaney at ground level gets a …
A DESERT HERO AND THE ROOTS OF TROUBLE.. One glory of Howard Brenton as a playwright is his ability to tease out, in very specific history plays (55 Days, Ann Boleyn, Dr Scroggy's War…
AS FLIES TO WANTON CLOWNS… You don't often see Queen Gertrude in Hamlet played by a short bearded Spaniard in a rainbow unitard with flamenco frills. But this is the Brig…
SUPERNATURAL, PHILOSOPHICAL, YET YORKSHIRE ALL THE WAY… Of all the lessons theatre has taught us about the backwash of WW1, some of the most fascinating are in 1930's pla…
Suppose neuroscience could cure creeping brain deterioration by taking out whole networks of decaying neurons and replacing them with silicon, guaranteeing functionality, but wiping years of…
A MODERN MASTERPIECE This is that finely balanced thing: a comedy built around a tragedy. Six summers ago, a newfledged critic for the Times, I wrote about its British premiere: "Bruc…
ROLLING ALONG, CARRYING ALL BEFORE IT Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly – you gotta laugh and you gotta cry. And believe me, you won't help loving this stunning, flawless, celebr…
GRIME AND GRACE IN THE URBAN JUNGLE You never know what you'll get from Poppy Burton-Morgan's Metta Theatre. I can't claim to have spotted every venture of her ten years, but definite…
MISCHIEF THEATRE STRIKES AGAIN. HURRAH! Years ago, a famous US television show called Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In hit on the strategy – as Ken Dodd had decades earlier, a…
LIGHTS! CAMERA!  SLOW BUT FASCINATING ACTION!  We sit as if we are the cinema screen of a run-down fleapit in Massachusetts: we confront the back wall at pro…
SIXTY YEARS, FOUR GENERATIONS: WHAT THE WOMEN DID Say, first of all, that Maureen Lipman was born to play Doris, the Lancashire matriarch at the heart of Charlotte Keatley's mo…
ELLE WOODS IS BACK,  PINKER THAN EVER Full disclosure: transport , domesticity and a hacking cough meant that on this two-show day in the lovely Curve I had to skip out at the i…
There are actually only about thirty, out of Craig Taylor's rather wonderful collection of 94 first seen in The Guardian. But the sense of our millions is there, as Laura Keefe's joyful, qui…
THE HEROES FROM THE EAST A hundred years ago, a Punjabi gunner in the 129th Baluchi regiment, Khudadad Khan, stayed at his post in the machine gun nest, injured and at bay , his comma…
STREETS OF LONDON, SNAKING TO NOWHERE… The boy of the title  is Liam: gormless and runty, lost and unnoticed , scion of a demographic much discussed right now. For he's a whi…
This play is not about the American backwash from the slave era, but a shattering, important take on Colonial Africa, an unnamed country on the edge of revolution and independence. It is by …
THE STATE OF ENGLAND:  FUNNY, BEAUTIFUL, SAD    AND TOURING! Some issues do best as satirical or farcical comedies: English class division, illicit sex, misunderstan…
