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I’m not in that camp
I love Wilde, and I love The Importance of Being Earnest, because it is extraordinarily clever. For all its outrageousness, it is also beautifully subtle, dependent on the interplay between what is said, what is meant, and what remains unspoken. Wilde’s innuendos are powerful precisely because they remain unresolved, allowing different audiences to perceive different…
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Slow motion
The Cherry Orchard is undoubtedly a brilliant play, one that tells the human story with stunning precision and nuance. The way comedy rides atop the undercurrents of sadness and despair is perhaps the most perfect illustration of how life actually is. As one person’s universe falls apart, others stand around laughing, failing to notice the…
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Feeling Tartuffed
I had a bit of a moral dilemma about whether to write this review at all. In fact, on the way back from the theatre, I had concluded that I would do no more than a short paragraph, more as a reminder to myself than anything else. This is clearly not just another major London…
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Off the scale
We are led to believe that the toss of a coin determined that we saw Blanchett as Electra. Only seeing the production once, I have no way of assessing what impact that might have had. What I can state very confidently is that the first half, Electra, was off-the-scale good; the second, Persona, was off-the-scale…
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Swinton succeeds where the script struggles
I went to see Man to Man for the opportunity to watch Tilda Swinton perform live, with no prior knowledge of the play. Contrary to the reviews I read afterwards, I do not consider gender its central concern. In my view, sex functions principally as a vehicle through which Karge explores a broader theme: the…
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Mary comes to me
A Slow Fire is a very new play from Simon Stephens (of Vanya fame). It premiered in Dublin in January 2026 and is currently playing at Jermyn Street Theatre in London. Unlike many dystopian dramas, A Slow Fire keeps the catastrophe largely offstage, a choice that reminded me of I Who Have Never Known Men,…
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Behind reed bars
This was the third Russian play I’d seen in fairly quick succession, after The Seagull and Summerfolk. In A Month in the Country, disappointment is expressed primarily through romantic desire, though beneath the love plot lies a broader unease about aging, inertia and lives insufficiently lived. Chekhov deepens these concerns, showing how artistic ambition, love…
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LLL = LOL
Love’s Labour’s Lost is apparently one of Shakespeare’s least-performed comedies, probably because the plot is surprisingly thin, it contains an extraordinary amount of wordplay, and its refusal to offer immediate gratification makes for a somewhat frustrating ending. As such, I had never seen it before and, despite strong reservations when I read that this production…
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No FOMO
Laurence and Beverly, a solidly middle-class couple, have invited the neighbours over for drinks and a little cheesy pineapple. Their guests consist of a younger couple anxiously feeling their way into suburban respectability and Sue, a divorcée who has fled her daughter Abigail’s birthday party next door. Not being from the UK, the cultural significance…
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Canned laughter
I’m not sure I’ve ever laughed as much in a theatre. Alan Ayckbourn wrote in The Crafty Art of Playmaking that the “superimposed composite set” in How The Other Half Loves “contributes enormously to the storytelling and, incidentally, brings about fifty per cent of the laughs”. Sitting in the middle of this production, as the…
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