Machinal was first performed in 1928 but its ninety-minute dissection of enforced marriage and America’s obsession with business and money-making is as resonant today as it has been over the last few decades. Playwright Sophie Treadwell (also a human rights journalist ahead of her time) took her main inspiration from...
Julie is playwright Polly Stenham’s modern day reworking of Strindberg’s naturalistic 1888 play Miss Julie. The original was daring for its emphasis on class and sex wars in an intimate realistic setting, which explains why it is has been such a mainstay in British Theatre’s diet. It is possible to see...
Like the characters who wear several layers of clothes even though it’s a hot summer in 1833 in Baile Beag, an Irish speaking community in Donegal about to have a new civilisation and language imposed on them by the English, director Ian Rickson’s production of Brian Friel’s Translations (1980) is...
Old certainties die and new ones rise as sure as the sun. Stories with their truths embellished are told to maintain a sense of control, even as the sheep farming family in Simon Longman’s sparse piece realises that their fate might be out of their hands. As two sisters, Becky...
“Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is 100%” said R D Laing. He also said “Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be a breakthrough.” Alice Birch seems to explore these not quite perfect opposite attitudes to mental ill health in her new play...
With change or revolution comes a breakdown in convention and relationships between things have to be re-established and new narratives invented. I get this from reading journalist and broadcaster Paul Mason’s Wtf is Eleni Haifa? inspired by Viginia Woolf’s argument with Arnold Bennett who believed that after WW1 writers could...
This review contains spoilers Obsession is a work about frustrated sexual expectations and celluloid dreams. It is self-reflexive and caught in the repetitive loop of Luchino Visconti’s 1942 film Ossessione yet feels like a radical comment on our age. Ivo van Hove directs and Simon Stephens gives us an English...
The Ferryman, set in Derry in the 1981 by Jez Butterworth, comes after his last sell out 2009 show Jerusalem. As with that play the title here is ambiguous. Who is The Ferryman exactly? Is it the actual ferryman who takes hundreds of disillusioned Irish men and women to Liverpool...
There could not be a better time to write a play about revolutionary commitment and individual freedom. Journalist Paul Mason’s piece about working class female communards exiled to New Caledonia on the back of a colonial project for their part in the 1871 Parisian uprising asks hard questions about what...