2,444 stories by "Michael Billington"
Cottesloe, LondonJohn Hodge is an honest man. He admits his new play about the relationship between Josef Stalin and the writer Mikhail Bulgakov derives from a film which was never made. But…
Riverside Studios, LondonDouble bills require a tricky balancing act: you want plays that echo, rather than simply repeat each other. This pairing of little-known pieces by Horton Foote and …
Not everyone liked 13 and The Faith Machine " but if drama isn't for airing big ideas, then what is it for?What does a critic do when he finds himself out of step with majority opinion? I&nb…
Hampstead Theatre, LondonWallis Simpson is, mysteriously, back in fashion. But Nicholas Wright's new play is not, as Madonna's new film reportedly is, a glowing personal portrait. Instead it…
Olivier theatre, LondonMike Bartlett has moved from writing minimalist dramas to maximalist epics without any intervening stage of development. Having tackled climate change in Earthquakes i…
Harold Pinter theatre, LondonIt is highly appropriate that Ariel Dorfman's 1990 moral thriller is the first play to be presented in this newly-named theatre. Not only is Harold Pinter one of…
Wilton's Music Hall, LondonOnce shunned by the British theatre, Racine is edging back into fashion. It is well worth the detour to London's East End to catch Irina Brown's modern-dress reviv…
Royal Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-AvonThe Sixties are back with a vengeance. After Bond's Saved and Osborne's Inadmissible Evidence we now have an RSC revival of Peter Weiss's 1964 dialectic…
Actor who excelled at playing women of strength, wit and charmSheila Allen, who has died aged 78, was an actor of extraordinary range and power, and a delightful, independent-minde…
Royal Court, LondonApril de Angelis has written a funny, generous play about a woman " a left-leaning feminist who once protested at Greenham Common " facing a crisis at the age of 50. But I…
Donmar Warehouse, LondonJohn Osborne and Samuel Beckett are always seen as opposites. But, just as Beckett was the poet of terminal stages, so Osborne's 1964 near-monodrama is a powerful stu…
Tricycle, LondonAs a prelude to next year's season on the nuclear bomb, the Tricycle revives Lee Blessing's play based on an unofficial encounter between US and Soviet arms negotiators that …
There are three strong contenders to fill Michael Boyd's shoes: Gregory Doran, Rupert Goold and David Farr. Or could a Shakespearean twist see the job going to a maverick outsider?Everyone i…
Bush, LondonI confess that this is a partial response to the vast enterprise with which Josie Rourke has chosen to christen the spaciously handsome new Bush theatre. The event consists …
Lyric Hammersmith, LondonBecause we see it so rarely, we forget that Edward Bond's Saved is a play rather than a cause celebre. And watching Sean Holmes's powerful production, the first majo…
St Pancras Church, LondonLast winter in Athens I discovered the work of a major Greek director, Theodoros Terzopoulos. The piece I saw, based on the letters of Elizabeth I and Mary Quee…
Test your knowledge of the man behind the play that shocked Britain in 1965, Saved, and which is now enjoying a revival at London's Lyric HammersmithMichael Billington
Palace, WatfordAs a playwright, Julian Mitchell is part of a vanishing breed: the fastidious craftsman who knows how to explore ideas while generating suspense. And I certainly enjoyed Mitch…
Finborough, LondonNo Irish play in recent months has given me more pleasure than this revival of a forgotten piece by St John Ervine. Written in 1911, long before the Belfast-born Ervine bec…
Reviewers who refuse to cover certain kinds of theatre are doing the art a disservice. And I should knowJohn Gielgud once said he sympathised with critics. It must be awful, he felt, to cons…
Arts Theatre, LondonThe BBC faces cutbacks; audience ratings are examined with microscopic precision; the axing of a popular soap star provokes national headlines " in some respects Frank Ma…
Chichester Festival theatreProductions of Sondheim's dark masterpiece tend to oscillate between a quasi-industrial vastness and a psychologically revealing intimacy. The great quality of Jon…
Wyndhams Theatre, LondonI think now, as I did when I first saw it in 1988, that Alfred Uhry's Pulitzer prize-winning play is not much more than a pleasing anecdote about the growing amity be…
Lyttelton, LondonConor McPherson has in the past shown a genius for investing the melancholy of modern Irish life with a sinister undertow. Now he has thrown caution to the winds by setting …
After four years, the adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's book is still going strong, and providing the RSC with vital income. But why do people love it so much?In racing parlance, War Horse is…
