318 stories from John Morrison
Playwright Martin McDonagh, winner of the 2015 Olivier best new play award for Hangmen, is being honoured with his own theatre festival, in which his plays will be performed non-stop for a w…
Even when the actors are wringing their guts out on stage, my usual approach is to keep a stiff upper lip and maintain my critical distance. Occasionally that's not possible, and I have to c…
Some of the very best evenings in the theatre happen when great acting and directing bring to life a great text, without the benefit of elaborate sets, costumes, lighting, smoke, video monit…
This play is often considered Terence Rattigan's best, and it provides a fantastic opportunity for any actress in the central role of Hester Collyer, the judge's wife who has embarked on a d…
Sometimes in the theatre I look at my watch and hope the play will end soon. Just occasionally -- it happened last night -- I enjoy myself so much that when the show ends I want to see it al…
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. That's clearly not the belief of Emma Rice, who took over with a bang as artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe last month. Her two very successful predece…
Joe Penhall's Blue/Orange is a play with more questions than answers. One of the reasons it has become a classic is because the audience leaves the theatre after two and a half hours still u…
Thank heavens for a playwright who is prepared to wade into controversial issues but refuses to tell the audience what to think. May Sumbwanyambe's play, set in Zimbabwe in the late 1990s, h…
What would that grand master of the art of pauses Harold Pinter have made of this play? Annie Baker's extraordinary low-key drama, now playing a sellout run at the National Theatre's Dorfman…
President Obama and I both dropped in at Shakespeare's Globe this weekend. He watched a short extract from Hamlet while I stood as a groundling to see the whole performance on Saturday night…
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS Denise Gough has won rave reviews for her central performance as a drug-and-booze-fuelled actress trying to detox in Duncan Macmillan's play, which first o…
Over a decade ago I was at Wilton's Music Hall for the most fascinating production of Macbeth I have ever witnessed, a promenade production set in a war-torn African country and directed by …
Nobody who saw South African director Yael Farber's stunning version of Mies Julie or her Old Vic reinvention of The Crucible will be surprised to hear that her new production is an absolute…
Everbody has heard of the French writer Jean Genet, but his plays are still unfamiliar to many people, and that includes me. This makes this stunning version of The Maids (Les Bonnes), writt…
My heart sank when I read in the programme for this revival of Uncle Vanya that Tobias Menzies, the actor playing Dr Astrov, had a spent a day in the woods learning about forestry as prepara…
I made a last-minute outing to the NTLive transmission of the Donmar's stunning revival of Christopher Hampton's play, based on a classic French novel from the late 18th century. Seduction a…
August Wilson's 1984 Broadway hit was a landmark in American theatre, launching his career as the 20th century's leading black playwright. This new production on the National Theatre's Lytte…
Here's your starter question. Which play by Harold Pinter features references to a cheese roll and a Humber Super Snipe? The answer, of course, is The Homecoming, a play revived by Jamie Llo…
I know people who couldn't be dragged by wild horses to a Caryl Churchill play. That's perfectly okay by me (I have my own list of playwrights whose work I really don't want to see again) bu…
Nothing is ever certain to succeed in the theatre, though some plays and productions are certain to fail. But if you're consulting the form book, a production of an Ibsen play at the Almeida…
Some plays are like dogs. They sniff around a series of lampposts but never actually raise their legs. So it is with Wallace Shawn's new play at the National Theatre. At 100 minutes, it is a…
Harley Granville Barker's play, banned by the dead hand of the Lord Chamberlain more than a century ago because its story involved an illegal abortion, has been given a sparkling revival by …
Anna Chancellor's Irina Arkadina is the highlight of this production, offering a superb demonstration of how to play a character whose life is a series of overacted performances without upst…
Moliere wrote quite a few farces, but his greatest play Tartuffe isn't one of them. It's a sophisticated dark comedy about a family being preyed on by a fraudster. The best production I ever…
James Rushbrooke's Tomcat is a tense, chilling and totally absorbing 90 minutes of theatre that proves once again that the Papatango annual competition is the place to go for new stage writi…
