Photos, video & podcast: Creating a musical out of wartime prejudice in Miss Nightingale
What a great way to get the Bank Holiday weekend off with a swing. Last night, I hosted a post-show Q&A at Miss Nightingale. This original British musical is now in its sixth iteration - musicals, as Sondheim says, aren't written but re-written - since starting life as a short piece in Ipswich and at the King's Head Theatre in 2011.
Q&A photos and podcast: A return to Brechtian politics via The Caucasian Chalk Circle
What would Bertolt Brecht have made of Donald Trump? Brecht's "epic theatre" was sparked by the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany. Many pundits have likened the political period we've now entered with that dark decade of the twentieth century.
Lizzie Q&A podcast and photos: Why axe murderer Lizzie Borden is a feminist icon
The American gothic rock musical Lizzie, which is now receiving its UK premiere in a limited season at London's Greenwich Theatre, opens and closes with a nursery rhyme I memorised in my own American youth about the real-life 19th-century crime.
Q&A photos and podcast: What’s most absurd about Murray Schisgal’s LUV?
What's most absurd about absurdist comedy LUV? That it's virtually unknown in this country - despite an incredible pedigree.
Q&A photos and podcast: Feeling the rage with Donny Stixx’s Philip Ridley
What a treat to pay my first visit to London's newest venue - The Bunker, carved out of a carpark beneath the Menier Chocolate Factory - to host this post-show Q&A for Tonight with Donny Stixx.
Photos and podcast: Nearly 300 years on, why does The Beggar’s Opera still resonate?
There's something in the water with The Beggar's Opera at the moment. Lazarus Theatre's new, modern-dress, 80-minute version at Brockley Jack Studio Theatre is the third major London presentation of the story of womanising highwayman Macheath this year.
Photos and podcast: Sharing joy with debut playwright Theresa Ikoko and her Girls
What an astonishing way to make your playwriting debut. Theresa Ikoko's first full-length play Girls was a Verity Bargate finalist and winner of both the Alfred Fagon Award and the George Devine Award.
Photos and podcast: Brush up your Berkoff with Nigel Harman and co
Two rarely seen short plays by Steven Berkoff are professionally performed together for the first time in this much-anticipated West End premiere: Lunch and, written 20 years later, its sequel The Bow of Ulysses.
Photos and podcast: One-to-one with The Book Club’s Amanda Muggleton
If you have to work on your birthday, this is just the kind of work you want. After watching the wonderful Amanda Muggleton rip through her 90-minute one-woman comedy The Book Club on Friday night, I joined her one-on-one on the onstage sofa for more hilarity.
Photos and podcast: Mart Crowley and The Boys in the Band cast on making history
Mart Crowley’s seminal play, The Boys in the Band, premiered in New York in 1968, just 14 months before the Stonewall riots that ignited the gay rights movement.
