Theatre
I currently write two regular monthly columns on theatre: one for Prospect Magazine as their theatre critic, and one for The Stage, drawing in part on my experience as Chair of the Drama Section of the UK Critics’ Circle.
Prior to the pandemic, I was the New York Review of Books‘ resident London theatre critic, and I had previously spent several years as the junior theatre critic at The Times, reviewing for that paper two or three times a week. I have also contributed theatre reviews to The Spectator, The Guardian, The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal. As a theatre programme obsessive, I regularly contribute programme notes to theatre and opera venues, and welcome inquiries about potential work in this area.
As Critics’ Circle Chair, I organise our prestigious annual Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards, the only awards made in British theatre purely on the basis of professional theatre critics’ votes, and without any input from vested interests within the industry. We successfully relaunched in April 2022 after the Covid-19 pandemic with a ceremony at London’s Ham Yard Hotel. I also maintain an active interest in arts philanthropy. I can date the moment I fell in love with theatre to a Joanna Laurens production at the Gate Theatre, W11. Consequently, I founded a Young Supporters’ Network at the Gate and have sat on their Development Working Group, which means that this is the only venue at which I now exclude myself from reviewing.
Hamlet at the Cockpit Theatre, NW8
reviewed for The Times, 8th April 2016 The 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death is only a few weeks away, so ’tis the season of Shakespearean press releases. The media campaign for this staging of the “bad quarto” script for Hamlet, the earliest published text, wants us to rehabilitate it as...
Read MoreAll That Fall at Wilton’s Music Hall, E1
reviewed for The Times, 28th March 2016 Samuel Beckett’s heirs are known for maintaining the ban on women performing his male roles. They also deter directors from veering from the original conception of this dark vignette as a radio play, commissioned by the BBC in 1956. So the Out of Joint...
Read MoreThe Marxist at the Met and her choir of the homeless
written for The Times, 22nd March 2016 The last time Penny Woolcock was in a rehearsal room, she was at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, walking the Polish baritone Mariusz Kwiecien through her production of Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers. Woolcock is used to big budgets: her first production for the Met, John...
Read MoreRun at the New Diorama Theatre, NW1
reviewed for The Times, 17th March 2016 Each summer, Oxford and Cambridge (and a few others) disgorge a few thousand of their most worldly, conventionally competitive young students into the City of London’s gruelling subculture of banking internships. There’s pressure to work late and party later; the...
Read MoreTable Top Shakespeare at the Barbican Pit
reviewed for The Times, 2nd March 2016 Forced Entertainment is known for vibrant, challenging work, unweaving the traditional structures of drama with installation pieces such as the six-hour confessional Speak Bitterness or the Scheherazade-inspired, hydra-headed narrative And on the Thousandth Night....
Read MoreA Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
reviewed for The Times, 25th February 2016 A Midsummer Night’s Dream must be the nation’s favourite play. So, in Shakespeare’s anniversary year, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s deputy artistic director, Erica Whyman, has set out to democratise it, with a demographically diverse cast, 580 children...
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