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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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Shadow Host
It isn’t a tale of two halves, really; more like one of four uneven quarters. I genuinely enjoyed the first half of the first half: the writing felt sharp, the dialogue quick, the energy alive. Things were actually happening. I wanted to know more. And, with hindsight, a good chunk of that early brilliance may…
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What a load of wobble
Spoiler alert – this is a new play – do not read on if you don’t want to know about what happens There is very little positive to say about Anna Ziegler’s Evening all afternoon at the Donmar. For a play about the importance of connecting, it really does not connect. I suppose it did…
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