MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
IT SEEMS strange to realise that live theatre, with its shared audience experience, is so long ago. But two plays early in the year uncannily chimed with the present.
In February, Juliet Gilkes’s new play The Whip at the RSC’s Swan Theatre in Stratford seemed to presage the Black Lives Matter movement.
Uncovering the inevitable political shenanigans behind the 18th-century abolition of the slave trade — fought as passionately as the Brexit conflict — it followed the parliamentary battles over compensation demanded by the slave owners for freeing the 80,000 slaves in Britain’s West Indian colonies. It incurred a debt to the nation only cleared five years ago.

GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today

GORDON PARSONS is disappointed by an unsubtle production of this comedy of upper middle class infidelity

GORDON PARSONS joins a standing ovation for a brilliant production that fuses Shakespeare’s tragedy with Radiohead's music

GORDON PARSONS recommends a gripping account of flawed justice in the case of Pinochet and the Nazi fugitive Walther Rauff