London’s Top 10 Cultural Cafés

People watching is one of the greatest pleasures a big city affords. It’s especially good when practiced from a warm corner with a flat white …

Stuff As Dreams Are Made On

What more can there possibly be to say about Shakespeare?

This was the ignoble thought I carried into the British Museum’s much-hyped autumn blockbuster, Shakespeare: staging …

Theatreland’s celebrity ladder

TThe moment Stephen Fry utters his first lugubrious syllable in Tim Carroll’s Twelfth Night at The Globe, a frisson runs through the assembled crowd. …

The Tricycle’s new wheels

Becoming the artistic director of any well-known theatre is always a tough gig. With Josie Rourke only one season into her tenure at the …

The luxury of a one-gulp read

Last Friday, I spent eight hours reading The Great Gatsby – in Soho, in the dark, along with six hundred or so other skiving bibliophiles. This extraordinary …

Video design grows up

London’s new smash musical Singin’ In The Rain has more than its fair share of memorable moments. And although the scene where Don Lockwood (Adam Cooper) …

Scary Christmas shows

It was the blow job joke that did it.

Admittedly, the RSC’s new winter show, The Heart of Robin Hood, had signalled from the …

Hamlet @ Young Vic

Ian Rickson‘s new Hamlet at the Young Vic contained a lot of firsts for me. It was the first time I’ve been …

Are you ready to be a member?

When it comes to London arts and culture, membership is a rather fraught concept. On one hand it seems inimical to the spirit of the …

Uncovering Shakespeare’s contemporaries

There’s a brilliant man strutting his stuff on the Southbank this summer. He’s a shrewd, witty Brit who swoops through time …

Theatre embraces old age

Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, currently running at the Young Vic, is a feast of quotable lines and memorable scenes. But of all …

The Centaur and the Animal @ Sadlers Wells

I didn’t have many expectations about The Centaur and The Animal. What is one supposed to expect from a show that purports to combine …

The secret of great sets? Less is more

When was the last time you looked up the name of the set designer in your theatre programme? I did so only last week, at …

Letter bombs

Sticks and stones can break our bones, but words will never hurt us? Bah. Every playground-dwelling kid in the world has shown that phrase the …

La Bête @ Comedy Theatre

I was in need of a giggle.

Sure, Michael Attenborough’s production of Through A Glass Darkly at the Almeida had its moments of bleak, …