STEVE ANDREW enjoys an account of the many communities that flourished independently of and in resistance to the empires of old
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Best of 2018: Performance
Love letter to theatre: Wise Children
TOM STONE urges you to catch the last dates of a New York singer/songwriter, never afraid to challenge her audiences musically or politically
JAN WOOLF examines work that aims to give viewers a material experience of the environments in the polar north and Britain equally affected by the climate crisis
The bard recalls advice received 50 years ago from his TRB muse, and sorts out appropriate legislation for football club ownership
MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE review Facing War, Kontinental ’25, Bugonia, and Relay
MAYER WAKEFIELD is frustrated by a production of Ibsen’s classic study of an anti-heroine that fails to elucidate her motivations
PETER MASON tunes his ear into the domestic affairs of a Carribbean couple with a troublesome son
THE NATIONAL Theatre production of Stefano Massini’s The Lehman Trilogy, directed by Sam Mendes, was remarkable.
It traces the development of US capitalism through the fortunes of the emigre German-Jewish Lehman brothers, whose mid-19th century enterprise in cotton trading evolved over the next century and a half from a family business, mutually beneficial to farmers and traders, into the ruthless banking empire which collapsed in 2008, throwing the world into financial crisis.
Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles and Adam Godley are superb. Portraying a gallery of characters, they give the play an intimacy that complements the national and international corporate power-play at the heart of current global chaos. It'll run in the West End from May onwards.
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GORDON PARSONS is blown away by a superb production of Rostand’s comedy of verbal panache and swordmanship
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
GORDON PARSONS meditates on the appetite of contemporary audiences for the obscene cruelty of Shakespeare’s Roman nightmare
A nervous year, showing that the theatre, like the world, stands on a precipice and seems uncertain where to jump