Frank McGuinness’ play Dinner with Groucho, is a circuitous narrative about two twentieth-century cultural icons, TS Eliot and Groucho Marx. Although much has been written about Eliot, one of the world’s major poets, and about the anarchic, quick-witted comedy of Groucho Marx, little is known of their inner mysteries, sufferings and delights. McGuinness, in choosing…
The Doctor, created by writer/director Robert Icke, is a curious hybrid of a play. It works as an homage to Professor Bernhardi, a 1912 comedy/drama by Austrian dramatist Arthur Schnitzler, which Icke updates and imbues with the punishing wail of social media, the indignation of interest groups, the punch-drunk power of identity politics, and questions…
If Irish scholar and celebrated novelist CS Lewis were to pay a visit to Austrian neurologist and founding father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud what might the two men be keen to debate? And what significance would their discussion have when played out against the looming threat of Nazi invasion and the advent of the Second…
In the past couple of years, a spate of Terence Rattigan’s plays have been revived by drama schools and amateur theatre companies in the greater London area and further afield. I use the term ‘amateur’ quizzically as many of these low-scale undertakings embody the dignity of Rattigan’s intent more faithfully than big-budget productions in London’s…
Tryst by Karoline Leach is a London-based psychological thriller patterned on real-life events between a serial fraudster and a vulnerable young woman at the tail end of the Edwardian era. The year is circa 1912 and George Love (Fred Perry), a penniless predator, sniffs out lonely young women who, if not wealthy, at least have…
Eugene O’Hare’s debut play, The Weatherman is not for the fainthearted. It’s a disturbing mix of brutality and indifference that casts a harsh floodlight on the sordid underbelly of British society. Its depiction of a hidden world we all know exists, sex trafficking of children in London, leaves us with a burgeoning message – it…
