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‘Tip your hat & get down there’: GUYS & DOLLS – Bridge Theatre ★★★★★

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Daniel Mays has played a lot of tough-guy roles but has by nature a rather innocent and worried-looking face. It is this quality that Nicholas Hytner spotted as perfect for his Nathan Detroit in Guys & Dolls at the Bridge Theatre: lowlife but hapless, indecisive about the faff and cost of marrying his tolerant fiancee of 14 years standing, Miss Adelaide (an irresistible Marisha Wallace).

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‘Never a false note’: JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN – Bridge Theatre ★★★★★

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In great plays a scene, character or domestic confrontation can be both appalling and comic: pity, terror and barks of shocked laughter are not incompatible even within a sentence. Ibsen knew that, but in the Norwegian rebel’s grim late works it takes a relaxed director and some weapons-grade actors to keep that balance. Cue Nicholas Hytner, Simon Russell Beale and Lia Williams: rescuing, for me and for good, a play (John Gabriel Borkman at the Bridge Theatre) I hated last time I saw it.

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‘Ralph Fiennes gives it everything… He is irresistible’: STRAIGHT LINE CRAZY – Bridge Theatre ★★★★

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It is not often I resort to drawing in the notebook, but there it is: half an hour into the first part of David Hare’s play about the city planner Robert Moses, whose demonic energy built modern New York between the 1920s and the ’60s.

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Looking back on the last two plague years: Part 1, The Onset

In Features, London theatre, Musicals, Opinion, Other Recent Articles, Plays, Regional theatre, Reviews by Libby PurvesLeave a Comment

I set out to chronicle and celebrate the return of live theatre since May 2021. And this will follow. But when I totted up the 2021 score – 60 theatre nights, 30 being completely new plays and 19 brand-new productions – it seemed to me only decent to pause, look back at the year before.

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NEWS: Dates announced for The Book of Dust – La Belle Sauvage at the Bridge Theatre

In London theatre, Native, News, Plays, Press Releases by Press Releases

Dates are now confirmed for Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust – La Belle Sauvage at the Bridge Theatre. Directed by Nicholas Hytner in Bryony Lavery’s new stage adaptation which takes place 12 years before Pullman’s epic His Dark Materials trilogy, performances are from 2 December 2021 to 19 February 2022 with opening night on 14 December.