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: you’ll see [me sailing in antarctica], National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars The highest compliment I can pay to non zero one’s latest piece is that on getting home I tried to buy tickets for ...

Review: Get Stuff, Break Free, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars Up on the roof of the National Theatre, with one of the world’s leading cities stretched out below, Made In China a...

Review: Antigone, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars Antigone endures because it is both direct and malleable. Its cycle of action – decree, defiance, retaliation, com...

Review: Detroit, National Theatre

They make cars in Detroit. Loads of them. Or, at least, they did until around 2008, which left the city’s manufacturing industry in tatters....

Review: Black T-Shirt Collection, National Theatre

Written for Time Out Performance poet Inua Ellams returns to the National with this contemporary fable woven from real world geopolitics. As...

Review: Can We Talk About This?, National Theatre

Written for Whatsonstage.com “This is shit! Islamaphobic shit!” shouts the man who has just burst into the Lyttleton auditorium. He throws s...

Review: The Comedy of Errors, National Theatre

For a winter vacation of sorts, Dominic Cooke has skipped from his Sloane Square office to the biggest stage on the South Bank. Presumably, ...

Review: The Veil, National Theatre

Conor McPherson’s latest is a curious piece: a penny dreadful with the sort of highbrow ambitions that ought to set you back a shilling. The...

Review: Double Feature: Introduction, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars On account of London Road ’s blistering success, which led to a Summer extension in the Cottesloe, this double, dou...

Review: Edgar and Annabel, Double Feature, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars A man walks into a kitchen, announcing himself to a woman preparing food: “Honey, I’m home.” She turns to greet him...

Review: The Swan, Double Feature, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars As in Edgar and Annabel , no-one’s saying what they really mean in DC Moore’s The Swan , a raucous elegy to an ingr...

Review: Nightwatchman, Double Feature, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars Prasanna Puwanarajah’s ambitious monologue probably overreaches itself, trying to tackle sport, family, national id...

Review: Emperor and the Galilean, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars Now this, this is the sort of staging the Olivier deserves. Jonathan Kent and his designer Paul Brown have thrown e...

Review: One Man, Two Guvnors, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars Proper end of the pier stuff at the National Theatre, where Richard Bean has transposed Carlo Goldoni’s commedia de...

Review: Beauty and the Beast, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars Few seasonal offerings for family audiences contain overt espousals of proletariat values. Fewer still have their h...

Review: FIB, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars From the white lies that allow us to co-exist amicably to the more barbed, malicious and even motiveless, there are...

Review: Domini Public, National Theatre (with the Gate Theatre)

Written for Culture Wars From the census arises a picture of a nation torn apart. In the square outside the National Theatre, a civil war er...

Review: Life Streaming, National Theatre Square

Written for Culture Wars Parked on the South Bank there’s a portal to Sri Lanka: Dries Verhoeven has set up a temporary internet cafe to lin...

Review (of sorts): Love the Sinner, National Theatre

Drew Pautz’s play trips you up, but it does so less with a calculated outstretched leg as with a stumble of its own that happens to drag you...