Review: Privates on Parade, Noel Coward Theatre

Written for Culture Wars Seven years ago, Schiller was all over Shaftesbury Avenue. Not once, but twice, thanks to Phyllida Lloyd’s Mary Stu...

Review: Hero, Royal Court

Written for Culture Wars E.V. Crowe’s Hero is more conflicted than its sexually-confused protagonist Jamie, a married man who seems to be r...

Review: Sight is the Sense That Dying People Lose First, Battersea Arts Centre

Written for Culture Wars Tim Etchells is a man who could bore for Britain. Boring is not always a bad thing. Jim Fletcher could make the shi...

Review: The Effect, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars Anyone writing drama about cutting-edge scientific research has a problem; namely, us. The idiots watching. For mos...

Review: Medea, Richmond Theatre

Written for Culture Wars Why does Medea go postal? Is it a) because her husband has eloped with a younger model and the resulting jealousy h...

Review: The Promise, Donmar @ Trafalgar Studios

Written for Culture Wars Leningrad, 1942. A city under siege, so starved that household pets and dead bodies will do for food. In a small fl...

Review: As The Flames Rose, We Danced to the Sirens, the Sirens, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars She swoons. On the video tape, she swoons. In black and white, she swoons. Her eyelids slide shut and she rocks bac...

Review: Chewing Gum Dreams, Bush Theatre

To dream of chewing gum supposedly signifies an inability to express oneself. Hackney teenager Tracey Gordon has all the words and a fair fe...

Review: The River, Royal Court

The maxim behind Jez Butterworth’s new play might as well have been ‘Next year, as far from Jerusalem as possible.’ Following the unruly an...

Review: 55 Days, Hampstead Theatre

Written for the Financial Times Howard Brenton has long raided history for its present-tense parallels and in England’s 17th-century civil w...

Review: Happy Birthday Wanda June, Old Red Lion

Written for Time Out Wanda June herself scarcely appears in Kurt Vonnegut’s first play. Run over by an ice-cream van on her 10th birthday, s...

Thoughts on London, Brighton Dome

Simon Stephens wrote Sea Wall and T5 independently of one another: the first for the Bush’s Broken Space season in 2008, the second had be...

Review: Dangerous Lady, Theatre Royal Stratford East

Written for Time Out There’s enough plot in Dangerous Lady to warrant arrest under the Terrorism Act. It's got births, deaths and hospi...

Review: The Good Neighbour, Battersea Arts Centre

Written for Culture Wars A friend told me recently about David Eagleman’s Sum , as a trade for my recommendation of Italo Calvino’s Invisibl...

Review: You Can Still Make a Killing, Southwark Playhouse

Written for Culture Wars What’s particularly great about Nicholas Pierpan’s latest play is the way it entirely inhabits its subject. New wri...

Review: Terror 2012, Soho Theatre

Written for Time Out After nine years, The Sticking Place's annual fright fest has become a shadow of its former self. This year's l...

Review: Lucy and the Hawk, Ovalhouse

Written for Culture Wars In science, dissociation involves splitting molecules into their component parts: an individual object blasted apar...

Review: Desire Under the Elms, Lyric Hammersmith

Written for Culture Wars Drama hates waste. Or rather, it hates extraneity. Maybe all stories do, the idea being that anything superfluous t...

Review: I, Malvolio, Unicorn Theatre

Written for Culture Wars Malvolio, a fictional character no less, has made me feel genuine remorse. That’s curious. It’s like grieving for B...

Review: Hot Mikado, Landor Theatre

Written for Time Out Gilbert and Sullivan catch a serious case of the jitterbug in David H. Bell and Rob Bowman’s 1986 adaptation of their c...

Review: Fireface, Young Vic

Written for Time Out The titular anti-heroes of Max Frisch's well-known 1958 play, The Fire Raisers , are destructive strangers, who tur...

Review: Enquirer, Barbican Centre off-site

Written for Culture Wars “ In my experience the newspapers are a combination of what people never meant, combined with what people never sai...

Review: Lungs, Roundabout Season

Written for Culture Wars After Cock , comes Lungs . Duncan Macmillan’s cleverly intricate two-hander shares more than just a corporeal title...