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Modern Classic

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A View From the Bridge

A View From the Bridge

28 May 2009

One of the gifts that made Arthur Miller such a significant dramatic writer was his ability to capture the world of Greek tragedy – on the face of it an unfamiliar theatrical landscape with its dark blood feuds, incest and primal passions – and make it…

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

(4 stars)19 Mar 2009

MODERN CLASSIC Mention Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and most people will recall the 1966 film adaptation starring Taylor and Burton at the peak of their own convoluted marital soap opera. While the movie has achieved iconic status in its own…

Educating Rita

Educating Rita

(3 stars)19 Feb 2009

MODERN CLASSIC A full-length two-hander with a single setting has to be made of really special stuff to avoid outstaying its welcome. Jeremy Raison’s production of Educating Rita for the Citz manages to keep its audience onside – just – but in spite…

4.48 Psychosis

4.48 Psychosis

(4 stars)13 Nov 2008

MODERN CLASSIC It doesn’t seem right to say you have enjoyed Sarah Kane’s final play. Written not long before her suicide in 1999 and staged posthumously, it is a poetic evocation of the mind of someone in the depths of clinical depression. There are…

The Caretaker

The Caretaker

(4 stars)30 Oct 2008

Pinter’s tale of a power struggle between three men, one destitute, one marginalised by mental health issues and one seeming to exist at the twilight edge of bourgeois respectability, assumes a new power in the current economic climate. When…

Marat/Sade

Marat/Sade

(1 star)30 Oct 2008

Call it a testament to the human spirit or the will to triumph in the face of adversity, but for some reason, after the interval, the audience comes back. Perhaps, they are thinking, it is a mistake to imagine the acting is terrible. Maybe, they hope…

The Lesson

The Lesson

(3 stars)16 Oct 2008

MODERN CLASSIC Ionesco’s absurdist classic continues to feel relevant because it chips away at our feeling that something of ourselves remains unexpressed beneath the world of manners, and the arcane language that surrounds it. In Gerry Mulgrew’s…

Waiting For Godot

Waiting For Godot

(4 stars)28 Feb 2008

MODERN CLASSIC Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, until Sat 8 Mar Our thirst for enquiry may be waning in an age when answers are so readily available at the click of a mouse. But the Citizens’ company’s production of Beckett’s masterpiece, perhaps the least…

Translations

Translations

17 Jan 2008

MODERN CLASSIC Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, Wed 23 Jan–Sat 2 Feb The nearest thing we have to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha county on our side of the Atlantic is another fictional place with an anchor in reality, Brian Friel’s Ballybeg, a made-up small…

The Glass Menagerie

The Glass Menagerie

(3 stars)17 Jan 2008

MODERN CLASSIC Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, until Sat 9 Feb For all its insight into character and human emotion, Tennessee Williams’ earliest hit is perhaps the least of his major plays, with the excesses of sentiment in the text too often…

Endgame

Endgame

(3 stars)15 Nov 2007

MODERN CLASSIC Arches, Glasgow, Wed 21–Fri 23 Nov, then touring There are so many expectations attached to Beckett’s masterpiece, be it existential, political, comedic or other in intent, that it’s hard to see how it can be approached without a…

Desire Under The Elms

Desire Under The Elms

(3 stars)1 Nov 2007

MODERN CLASSIC Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, until Sat 17 Nov O’Neill’s 1925 experiment in modern tragedy has been acclaimed as a powerful, elemental drama, so it might ill-behove me to question its status. But Jeremy Raison’s production at the Citz…

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