Month: April 2023

Staging the most spectacular of Italian operas is a logistical challenge for any company, as Verdi himself discovered when his scenery for the Cairo première remained stuck in Paris for months. Dnipro Opera’s immediate problem for its Cheltenham performance was not quite on the same scale, but the lorry carrying all the scenery arrived just… Continue reading Aida

More than fifty years since Nobel-prize-winning Dario Fo and his wife Franca Rame wrote Accidental Death of An Anarchist, amazingly not much seems to have changed regarding police corruption. The Italian partisan protest song “Bella Ciao”, closing and opening the acts, is a nod to the play’s origins. And a call to arms? A co-production… Continue reading Accidental Death of An Anarchist

First seen in 1999 with several later stagings, Zinnie Harris’s award-winnng play now gets a stylish in-the-round revival at the Young Vic. Though drawing on the dramatist’s family history on Pitcairn, it is the fictional story of remote islanders who find their traditional life confronted first by capitalist development and then by life in the… Continue reading Further than the Furthest Thing

America’s brutal war against Vietnam killed, according to many estimates, over a million people. It left many more people deeply traumatised. Richard Vergette’s sensitive seventy-minute monologue as the troubled American ex-marine Jimmy Vandenburg who fought in Vietnam takes us through much of his life story. Set in the auto repair shop Jimmy runs in the… Continue reading Leaving Vietnam

Magnus and Ben are not the first brothers brought to a reckoning by their father’s death—witness any number of plays, films or books. In activist playwright Anders Lustgarten’s The City and the Town, the siblings meet up on the morning of the funeral after 13 years apart, and their conversation inevitably dances around Magnus’s anger… Continue reading The City and the Town

Many words have already been written about J B Priestley’s stage thriller An Inspector Calls, now approaching the 80th anniversary of its first performance in 1945 in Moscow. And these words aren’t just by the critics over the years but by thousands of GCSE students, given the play’s longstanding appearance on the National Curriculum. Coachloads… Continue reading An Inspector Calls

After a forced exit from Germany during the Hitler years, Brecht completed The Good Person of Szechwan in Santa Monica in 1941. Nina Segal’s “brilliant new adaptation” breathes life into existing versions of the text and provides contemporary relevance at a time of economic concern. The fable introduces Wang the water carrier who encounters three… Continue reading The Good Person of Szechwan

The Importance of Being Earnest has delighted audiences for almost 130 years. Therefore, one wonders why nobody has previously sought to write a sequel. After all, there is a ready-made audience and a series of beloved characters waiting to be mined for laughs. That has changed thanks to Alice Scovell and the producers at New York… Continue reading The Rewards of Being Frank

If you love courtroom drama, then The Verdict is probably one of the best—and even if like me it’s not really your favourite genre, this is still a cracking production of one of the most famous in the field. Written as a novel in 1980 by an American lawyer, Barry Reed, it was adapted for… Continue reading The Verdict