Ian Dickson
In Washington, DC, Peter Rose and regular ABR theatre critic Ian Dickson discuss the career and legacy of Edward Albee, the great American playwright who died on Friday 16 September, aged 88.
Arthur Miller's reputation as the writer of glum naturalistic problem dramas is undergoing a re-evaluation at present. The fashionable director Ivo van Hove's ecstatically reviewed and Tony Award-winning production of A View from the Bridge stripped the play back to reveal its archetypal classic structure, and his brilliantly staged, if infuriatingly wrong-headed, approach to The Crucible, at present on Broadway, has flying girls, sinister wolfhounds, and icy hellish wind blasts in what appears to be an attempt to turn the piece into a replay of The Exorcist.
... (read more)At any time, Washington, DC would be an apposite place in which to stage Wagner's vast cautionary saga about the devastating effects of greed and lust for power on the human and natural world, but it is excruciatingly so at this moment. On Pennsylvania Avenue, roughly halfway between the ...
... (read more)As with London buses, one waits for ages for a film based on the life of that vocal phenomenon Florence Foster Jenkins (1868–1944), and then two arrive simultaneously. Add to the mix Maggie Smith's Miss Shepherd in The Lady in the Van and it seems to be open season on eccentric ladies of ...
... (read more)Gentles, perchance you'll wonder at this show
That comes to us with fanfare from abroad.
Mike Bartlett's many earlier plays, like ...
In this era of the jukebox musical, it is not surprising that the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century equivalent, the pasticcio opera, should be undergoing a revival. A couple of seasons ago, New York's Metropolitan Opera created a version, The Enchanted Island, which received a mainly ...
... (read more)The reappraisal of Australian plays from that great explosion of theatrical creativity in the 1970s and 1980s which has been in train for the last few years continues with the Sydney Theatre Company's production of Louis Nowra's mighty The Golden Age. The play was first performed in 1985 ...
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