King Lear is an absolute masterpiece – as told by Akira Kurosawa rather than Shakespeare

 

Guilty of barbaric cruelties for which he pays a hideous price … Tatsuya Nakadai as Hidetora in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran

King Lear is an absolute masterpiece – as told by Akira Kurosawa rather than Shakespeare

The tragedy’s mythic quality appeals to adapters the world over but the Japanese film-maker’s Ran, now rereleased, manages to solve the play’s problems

Michael Billington / Tuesday 8 July 2025

Ihave long had mixed feelings about King Lear. I admire its cosmic grandeur and sublime poetry but balk at its structural unwieldiness and dramatic implausibility: like Coleridge, I find the spectacle of Gloucester’s suffering “unendurable” and there is something gratuitously cruel about Edgar’s refusal to reveal his identity to his father. I’ve never regretted omitting it from my book The 101 Greatest Plays yet I still remember a shocked head of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford greeting me with the words: “I hear you’ve dropped Lear.”

Dracula / The Untold Story at Leeds Playhouse XLISTO 2021

THEATRE | Dracula 

The Untold Story at Leeds Playhouse

Richard Horsman

1 October 2021 

It’s New Year’s Eve in 1965. A jaded cop is in no mood to hear the deluded ramblings of a woman who’s just confessed to a murder. In the hands of multimedia theatre maestros IMITATING THE DOG at LEEDS PLAYHOUSE this is just the start of a surreal and nightmarish journey into the past. RICHARD HORSMAN went along for the ride.

It’s a scream … Mary Law in the West End production of The Mousetrap in 1957.

The Mousetrap: Agatha Christie’s West End hit to make Broadway debut after 70 years

Whodunnit running in the West End since 1952, interrupted only by Covid, will open in New York in 2023

Chris Wiegand
Friday 25 November 2022

The world’s longest-running play, The Mousetrap, is to finally make its Broadway debut. The announcement was made on Friday to mark the 70th anniversary of the London production of Agatha Christie’s whodunnit.

 

Lovable … Mae Munuo in Gulliver's Travels at the Unicorn Theatre. Photograph: Marc Brenner

Gulliver’s Travels review – bedroom voyage to the world of Jonathan Swift

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 3 / Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

Unicorn theatre, London
Bewitching video and ingenious sets combine in a staging that turns the 18th-century adventure into an escape for a troubled student

Arifa Akbar
Thursday 17 March 2022

This radical reimagining of Jonathan Swift’s 18th-century tale of a shipwrecked surgeon is less a biting social satire and more a journey into imagination and fantasy as a refuge from the real world.

The Historic Interview with Broadway’s Original Blanche DuBois

Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy
A Streetcar Named Desire

The Historic Interview with Broadway’s Original Blanche DuBois

BY COLETTE DOWLING

JUN 07, 2017

 

In this 1983 interview, Jessica Tandy gets deeply personal about her approach to acting and why she doesn’t consider actors “creators.”

Digging into the archives, we unearth the original articles printed in the Playbills of yesteryear.

At age 74, theatre legend Jessica Tandy returned to Broadway in a revival of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, which opened December 1, 1983, at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre. After originating the role of Blanche DuBois in the original 1947 production of A Streetcar Named Desire—a role that earned Tandy her first Tony Award—she was prepared to play Williams’ towering matriarch Amanda Wingfield.

When Max Stafford-Clark left Out of Joint in September, the company released a statement
stating he had departed to ‘focus on his international freelance career’. 
Photograph: Sarah Lee

Theatre director Max Stafford-Clark was ousted over inappropriate behaviour

This article is more than 4 years old

Exclusive: Out of Joint founder was forced out in September after formal complaint that he made lewd comments to a female member of staff

Alexandra Topping
Fri 20 Oct 2017 18.00 BST

One of the most influential directors in British theatre was forced to stand down from the company he founded after being accused of inappropriate, sexualised behaviour, the Guardian has learned.

Theatre by Somerset Maugham

Theatre by Somerset Maugham 

(1937)

Her dressing-room was like the cabin of a ship. The world seemed a long way off, and she relished her seclusion. She felt an enchanting freedom. She dozed a little, she read a little, or lying on the comfortable sofa she let her thoughts wander. She reflected on the part she was playing and the favourite parts she had played in the past. (Chapter 13)

SIMON

APRIL 18, 2018

My view of the world, art and literature rests on history and biology. There were some 3 billion humans alive when I was born in the 1960s, four billion in 1974, five billion in 1987, six billion in 1999 and we reached seven billion in March 2012. By the time I die 20 years hence there will be around 9 billion. The shortage of resources (starting with land and water) the environmental degradation (deforestation, desertification, ocean acidification) and global warming (if it is indeed true) mean that my children will grow up in a world of weeds, dead seas and vast multicultural slums.

 

Fierce … from left, Emily Spowage as Andrea Dunbar and Lucy Hird as her younger self,
Claire-Marie Seddon and Balvinder Sopal. 
Photograph: Tim Smith

Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile review – last orders for Andrea Dunbar

Ambassador, Bradford
At the pub, the night before her untimely death, the acclaimed playwright spars with her younger self in this tender adaptation of Adelle Stripe’s novel

Catherine Love
Monday 3 June 2019

A

ndrea Dunbar’s legacy reads like those of so many who lived intensely and died young. Almost 30 years after her death, she’s remembered as much for her turbulent life as she is for her brilliant and brutally honest plays.

Lucy Hird and Emily Spowage in rehearsals of Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile,
a play by Freedom Studios.
Photo by Tim Smith.

Andrea Dunbar and the story behind the Bradford playwright who wrote Rita, Sue and Bob Too

It’s probably through the 1987 film Rita, Sue and Bob Too that most people have heard of Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar.

By Yvette Huddleston
Tuesday, 4th June 2019, 1:31 pm

Set and shot in and around her home city, it was adapted by Dunbar from her 1982 stage play and told the story of two teenage girls and their relationship with an older married man. It was quite unlike anything anyone had seen before but its titillating tagline ‘Thatcher’s Britain with its knickers down’ somehow trivialised its gritty subject matter. Yes, it was funny but it had a dark underside.

Andrea Dunbar

Rita, Sue and Bob today: Andrea Dunbar's truths still haunt us

Dunbar’s bleakly funny tale of a menage a trois captured 80s austerity. What can her defiant heroines tell audiences today?

Catherine Love
Thursday 14 September 2017

 

‘This is life,” Andrea Dunbar told the Yorkshire Post in 1987, defending the film version of her play Rita, Sue and Bob Too. “The facts are there.” Dunbar was adamant about telling the truth in her work, insisting “you write what’s said, you don’t lie”. Her second play, an unvarnished tale of a married man having an affair with his teenage babysitters, still has that startling matter-of-factness today.

‘It’s a bit Carry On Up the Council Estate’ … Siobhan Finneran and Michelle Holmes, in white skirts,
as Rita and Sue, and George Costigan, far right, as Bob. 

How we made
Film

Interview

How we made Rita, Sue and Bob Too

Phil Hoad
Monday 26 June 2017

George Costigan: ‘I watched the premiere with my wife on one side of me – and my mother on the other’

Max Stafford-Clark, artistic director of the Royal Court theatre

Rita, Sue and Bob Too really happened. Andrea Dunbar, who wrote the play and the screenplay, had an affair with a married man, having sex with him in his car, along with her friend Eileen. I commissioned the play as a follow-up to her 1980 drama The Arbor. Andrea was the most talented and original young writer I’d ever come across.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jbf477OqjI

Rita Sue and Bob Too

When she was writing it, she said: “What can you do in theatre?” I knew she didn’t want a lecture on Brechtian alienation. What she really meant was: “Can you put shagging on stage?” She found the sex – and even the violence – on the Buttershaw estate, where she was from in Bradford and where her work was set, exciting. When the play got a certain amount of disapproval from her community for being so smutty, she was quite vigorous in saying these things happen, people should face up to them.

Alan Clarke, who directed the film adaptation, cannily gave it an upbeat ending, which Andrea hated. She said: “You’d never go back with somebody who had betrayed you.” She told me not to go and see it. But the judgment of people involved with the film had been astute. It was successful, which did us a great service in terms of reviving the play, even if their version is a bit Carry On Up the Council Estate.

White Nights review / Masterly staging of Dostoevsky’s unrequited love story

 

White Nights review – masterly staging of Dostoevsky’s unrequited love story

Pitlochry Festival theatre
Brian Ferguson performs with mesmerising verve in this poignant, desperately funny portrait of existential misery

Mark Fisher

Friday 9 July 2021

‘I

am alone,” says the narrator of Dostoevsky’s 1848 short story, a man who has had so little interaction with the world that he has no life story to tell. In a quest for connection, he paces the streets of St Petersburg, spotting familiar faces but remaining unrecognised. His isolation is existential; for all his dreams and desires, he has left no mark behind.

Interview Caryl Churchill by the people who know her best

'The plays speak for themselves' … Caryl Churchill in 1972. Photograph: Jane Bown for the Guardian

Interview

Caryl Churchill, by the people who know her best

Her plays arrive fully formed – and she refuses to talk about what they mean. Mark Lawson talks to actors, directors and her publisher about what really makes Churchill tick

Caryl Churchill / In theatre, it's all about the surprise

My hero / Caryl Churchill by Sadie Jones

Mark Lawson
Wednesday 3 October 2012

 

S

ince the death of JD Salinger, one of my biggest regrets as an interviewer is that Caryl Churchill declines to speak publicly about her work. It's a resolution she has stuck to through the quarter century in which she has established herself as one of theatre's most innovative and provocative dramatists. Tantalisingly, there have now been two new plays within a month that journalists can't ask her about: today, the Royal Court in London premieres Ding Dong the Wicked, a half-hour drama that will run alongside Love and Information, the enthusiastically reviewed full-length play that opened there three weeks ago.

Caryl Churchill / In theatre, it's all about the surprise

 

Caryl Churchill

In theatre, it's all about the surprise

The power of theatre to take you unawares can often be lost – which is why a new Royal Court initiative with Caryl Churchill is welcome

Interview Caryl Churchill by the people who know her best

My hero / Caryl Churchill by Sadie Jones

Lyn Gardner

Wednesday 5 June 2013

The box-office appeal of novel and film adaptations on stage suggests that audiences like known qualities. The whole point of Dirty Dancing is that it's a facsimile of the movie, and the fact it's coming back into the West End suggests there are plenty of people who know what they like. Maybe that represents less of a risk, particularly as West End ticket prices are so high, with a top price seat now averaging £87.

The Metamorphosis review / Kafka classic becomes metaphor for pandemic

Franz Kafka

 

Tron, Glasgow

Kafka’s story is given a chilling update that chimes with our times, referencing the migrant crisis, the gig economy and fear of the unknown

Mark Fisher

Monday 16 March 2020

Of all the shows to have been affected by the Covid-19 outbreak, it is ironic that Vanishing Point’s Kafka adaptation should have been one of the first. A co-production with Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione, it was due to have had its premiere at the 2020 VIE festival in Cesena at the end of February. The lockdown in Italy put paid to that; the entire festival was pulled.

Yet look at Matthew Lenton’s production, now making its debut on home turf, and it’s hard not to see a metaphor for the pandemic. Sam Stopford’s Gregor Samsa goes to bed as a takeaway cycle courier, having worked for three years without a day off for a zero-hours outfit wittily known as Grub’s Up. He is so burnt-out, he can scarcely bring himself to talk to the very family he is earning a living for, not even sister Grete whom he hopes to fund through music school.

 

The Night Watch review – Sarah Waters' sorrowful story speaks to the pain of war

Yvonne Arnaud theatre, Guildford

Set during and after the blitz, the lives of five characters and the scars left behind are movingly explored

Arifa Akbar
Friday 27 September 2019

S

arah Waters writes historical novels that seem to lend themselves perfectly to adaptation. Several books have been successfully set to screen, the best known being Tipping the Velvet, though fewer have been adapted for the stage.

This production of The Night Watch is one of them. It is a sorrowful, symphonic story of five people living through the blitz – Helen, Kay and Julia, who are secretly lesbians, along with Viv and her troubled brother, Duncan. They are ambulance-women, conscientious objectors and secretaries who present a slice of 1940s London life that is almost Dickensian in its scope.