Big British playwright David Hare offers The Red Barn, a new work which adapts La Main, a novel by prolific Belgian Georges Simenon. Simenon was a guy who wrote thrillers and he wrote a lot of them, and Hare mentions in the programme that his novels generally concerned those at the ‘bottom of society’. For […]
Following a successful run at the Chichester Festival Theatre, a trilogy of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov’s plays (adapted by David Hare) are now showing at the National Theatre in London. Regarded as the first of his four major plays, The Seagull is an interesting commentary on the struggle to create ‘the new’ against the obstinacy […]
For a play so intimately connected with Greek tragedy it is daring to have its protagonists’…
Annie Baker’s The Flick is of a radical theatrical style; it is new and maybe even profound. This is lofty description but it is a rare and wonderful thing when a play’s best moments consist in the absence of dialogue. With director Sam Gold and cast, Baker creates a genuinely new mode of storytelling. Undoubtedly, […]
The National’s version of a modest summer hit is The Motherfucker With the Hat, a vulgar look at a man trying to overcome his addictions and stick to his moral code. This man is Jackie, an ex-con who struggles to maintain a relationship after he finds out his coke-addled partner has been sleeping with the […]
It was not surprising that the National would put on a play post-election about the origins of Parliament. Fortunately, it is not the dry, dour production that one might expect it to be. Carol Churchill’s 1976 work takes on the struggle of the factions of Parliamentarians, Levellers and Diggers during the English Civil War in […]