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Read MoreCharacter assassination? The theatre takes on Trump
written for the Financial Times, 16 June 2017 “Who is it in the press that calls on me?” Amid the roar of spectators a blond, coiffed demagogue picks out a heckler in the crowd, his overlong red tie swinging below his waist as he bestrides the stage. This is Julius Caesar, Roman general and title character of Shakespeare’s play. Except, of course, it’s Donald Trump. In Oskar Eustis’...
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Read MoreTheresa May rejected the Tory detoxification project. That’s what’s behind this mess.
an edited version of this column appeared in The Guardian, 9 June 2017, the day after the 2017 General Election. Most people have heard of the term “detoxification”; it’s a familiar entry in the lexicon of food fads. Detoxing your body isn’t a pleasant process. Like Michael Gove, I recently went full St Jerome and tried purging my gastronomic sins at the spartan Mayr clinic in...
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Read MoreThe future of the monarchy has potential to be our next crisis
an edited version of this column appeared in the Financial Times, 25 November 2016 It is November 2018. President Trump arrives for a state dinner at Buckingham Palace, his arm around the de facto first lady, Ivanka. An official photograph from the White Drawing Room is flashed around the world: the nation’s favourite grandmother, still regal enough to grace a weighty tiara, purses her lips...
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Read MoreKing Lear with Glenda Jackson, Old Vic Theatre SE1
reviewed for The Wall Street Journal, 9 November 2016 In 1971, in a Chicago Tribune interview, Glenda Jackson summed up her career. In Ken Russell’s “The Music Lovers,” she had recently played Tchaikovsky’s hyper-sexed, institutionalized wife; her first hit on Broadway had been Peter Weiss’s “Marat/Sade,” set in a Napoleonic insane asylum. “Every time there’s a role for a nut...
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Read MoreTheresa May is more of a young Victoria than Queen Elizabeth I
written for The Telegraph, 30 August 2016 Ever since Theresa May arrived in Downing Street, friends and enemies have sought to find another woman to whom we can compare her – and each time come up with Margaret Thatcher. Now the PM has caused a stir by citing Elizabeth I as a role model in a carefully vetted Q&A with her local constituency paper. I’m not sure Elizabeth would have been...
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Read MoreYerma at the Young Vic, SE1
reviewed for The Times, 5 August 2016 Remember when Billie Piper was a toothy teen? No, me neither. But if any ghosts still lingered of Piper’s pop tart youth — synthetic disco anthems and that wedding to Chris Evans — they vanished for good last night in an extraordinary theatrical triumph at London’s Young Vic. Piper takes on the role of Yerma, a woman consumed by obsession with her...
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Read More‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts One and Two’
reviewed for The Wall Street Journal, 25th July 2016 Hogwarts is full of ghosts. As always, in J.K. Rowling’s world, they’re not much help. “I am paint and memory,” warns a portrait of Albus Dumbledore ( Barry McCarthy), as a grown-up Harry Potter ( Jamie Parker) turns to him in yet another dark moment. Comforting, but not the real thing. “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”...
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Read MoreThe Bedouin boy taking his epic to the Oscars
reviewed for The Times, 25th February 2016 On a wet Tuesday morning in London, Naji Abu Nowar sinks on to my living-room sofa with the dazed expression of a 34-year-old who has just won his first Bafta and hasn’t slept since Sunday. “I’m pretty sure Julie Walters thinks I’m a stalker. She was backstage, I started genuflecting, I had to be dragged away. I mean, Educating Rita was one of...
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