Hadley Fraser some while ago established himself as one of the most protean actors around: a talent equally at home both in big-name musicals (Les Mis, Young Frankenstein) and Shakespeare (playing Aufidius to Tom Hiddleston’s Coriolanus and Polixenes in The Winter’s Tale, alongside Kenneth Brana
Harold Pinter's 1960 two-hander seems to be near-ubiquitous of late, having been revived on the West End early in 2019 as part of an all-Pinter season and then again separately late last year at the Hampstead, in a run that was truncated by the pandemic.
English life looks set to return to something resembling normalcy from July 19, following UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson's announcement this evening that the majority of the restrictions imposed by the coronavirus are due to end in two weeks - a month later than had originally been planned.
The 60th anniversary production of Beckett's masterwork Happy Days, newly opened at west London's Riverside Studios, is indistinguishable from the keen eye of its director, Trevor Nunn, who across more than six decades has contributed many of the most significant (not to mention quite a few of the
I must admit, my first reaction was not wholly positive: some time in January this year, the producer Alastair Whatley rang me to say that he proposed to go ahead with rehearsing my new play, A Splinter of Ice, in March, despite the national lockdown.
And they're off! London theatres have been open for several weeks now, and the reviews once again are coming hard and fast as a glance at this very site will confirm.
The fabled date is getting nearer! For months, May 17 has loomed large in the calendar of London theatreland as the signal for playhouses to reopen their doors after a five-month lockdown - a period of closure that has, of course, been much longer in New York for the simple reason that London thea
No death of course is easy to absorb, especially one as premature and shocking as that of Helen McCrory, whose surrender to cancer late last week, age 52, came like the most brutal and sudden of thunderclaps.
May 17 has long held near-sacrosanct status in and around London theatreland.
Earlier this month, we marked the 91st birthday of the living legend that is Stephen Sondheim with a look back at five London productions of his work that are embedded in my memory.
Last week, we acknowledged the forthcoming birthday of Andrew Lloyd Webber via a look back at five defining London stagings of his work.
March is the month in which both Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Sondheim celebrate their birthdays and on the same date (March 22), albeit 18 years apart.
Our monthlong series culling some of the early London theatrical triumphs of stars before they became known to the world at large draws to a close with our look back at a brilliant quintet of actresses who commanded attention in one musical (sometimes several) before broader renown came to call.
We've looked across successive weeks at a range of plays over time that offered crucial opportunities to an array of then little-known men and women who have since shot to varying degrees of renown.
Since 2019, the fast-rising director Tinuke Craig has fielded various iterations of her first-ever musical, The Color Purple, which was acclaimed in performance at Leicester's Curve Theatre and the Birmingham Hippodrome.
Last week, we looked at the early stage work of a quintet of actors who have gone on to celebrated work, and a wider public, onscreen.
Many British screen stars may seem to have burst on to the screen as comparative unknowns, except to theatre devotees who knew them already from the stage.
An ever-mutating virus has led to general uncertainty on and off the West End about the start-up of live performance.
It's not clear as of this writing quite when live theatre will return in force, so in the interest of casting as wide a net as possible, what follows are five performances to whet the appetite, culled from offerings both online and, in due course, inside an actual playhouse.
In the spirit of eternal optimism, here is a handful of London show titles promised for the year ahead that have us giddy with anticipation to be in a playhouse once again.
