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Unamazing Grace
Most of the plays I see come with a story I already know. So when one comes along that I know nothing about, I try to keep it that way, I don’t look it up or read around it. I go in properly blind. That was the case with Grace Pervades. We booked for Ralph…
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Flat-line
I am a massive fan of Oscar Wilde’s wit, so imagine my excitement when I saw An Ideal Husband was being staged. A holier‑than‑thou politician linked to an insider‑trading scandal buried deep in the past, unearthed by a letter. And then there’s the infamous line, “Don’t use big words. They mean so little” — a…
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To‑Do or Not to Do
As part of its 70th‑anniversary season, the Royal Court—long the leading force in championing and cultivating new playwrights—has paired Krapp’s Last Tape, one of Beckett’s most frequently performed works, starring Gary Oldman, with Godot’s To‑Do List by Leo Simpe‑Asante, winner of the inaugural 2025 Royal Court Young Playwrights Award, performed by the relatively unknown Shakeel…
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You can die at twenty-six
When Victor sweeps his flashlight across the stage and into the audience, the slightly uncomfortable chairs of the tiny Marylebone theatre become additional items about to be sold to Gregory Solomon, and the packed audience an extension of the cluttered attic. Poor ventilation heightens the stifling atmosphere, and the musty smell quickly feels real. The…
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Toxic Femininity
I read the 1782 novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos in high school, relishing the story and its epistolary form. I was engrossed in the act of overhearing secrets and trying to piece together truth from conflicting, unreliable perspectives. I watched the 1988 film and, even though it had to cut out much of the…
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Certainly Uncertain
I am not entirely sure why Arcadia has acquired a reputation for being overly intellectual, whilst Copenhagen has not. The former gently ranges over a variety of broadly shared humanist reference points; the latter feels like being sat down for a lesson in nuclear physics, with a rather heavy‑handed allusion to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. At…
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Let’s dance
We went to see this play as a family, very early on in its run, and had the fortune to follow it up with a Q&A session with the playwright herself. It was a superb experience, and the close setting of the Royal Court added to the feeling of being part of something quite unique.…
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The life never had
I had a cousin who took his life. The night before going to see Romeo and Juliet, I had a dream about him. I woke up deeply affected. I wasn’t sure what had prompted it, but it was a beautiful dream. We talked about his daughter. He was happy. That evening I went to the…
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Staying sober at the Summerfolk Dacha
I like a lot of Russian classics – books, plays. There is so much lyricism in Master and Margarita, and so much longing in The Three Sisters. So I was quite excited reading on Wikipedia that Summerfolk is a play by Maxim Gorky written in 1904 (…) full of characters who “…might have stepped out…
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Hysterical impotence
Broken Glass premiered in 1994 — first in New York, where it was mostly disliked, and then in London at the National’s Lyttelton, where the reaction was more mixed. It became one of Miller’s more criticised works, with many seeing it as a messy low in his career. But wanting the play to resolve itself…
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