MARIA DUARTE is swept along by the cocky self-belief of a ping-pong hustler in a surprisingly violent drama
Latest editorial
Different but the same
GORDON PARSONS sees an imagined confrontation between Queen Elizabeth I and the jailed Mary Queen of Scots which reveals them as equally confined by personal and political traumas
Juliet Stevenson (centre)
[Manuel Harlan]
STEVE ANDREW recommends a lively and often moving guide to once vibrant spaces that have been abandoned or swept away
GEOFF BOTTOMS appreciates the local touch brought to a production of Dickens’s perennial classic
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production whose design and cartoonish acting overwhelms the close scrutiny of characters
SUSAN DARLINGTON enjoys the raucous familiarity of a traditional topsy-turvy pantomime
RON JACOBS introduces the latest novel by the best writer of US working-class fiction writing today
Mary Stuart
Duke of York Theatre, London
WE ARE all prisoners of our own personalities and of history and no-one understood this better than Friedrich Schiller, widely regarded as Germany’s Shakespeare.
His epic historical drama Mary Stuart, transferred from the Almeida theatre to the West End, focuses on the tragic conflict between the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots and England’s Protestant Queen Elizabeth.
The complex family web of the Tudors left Mary with a valid claim to the English crown in the event of Elizabeth’s death and was consequently a rallying point for Catholic dissidents.
Similar stories
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
MARY CONWAY revels in the Irish American language and dense melancholy of O’Neill’s last and little-known play
GORDON PARSONS joins a standing ovation for a brilliant production that fuses Shakespeare’s tragedy with Radiohead's music