What is a play? A message to the future, a fart in your face or a pain in the arse?
What is a play? A message to the future, a fart in your face or a pain in the arse? Just a few of the suggestions that the writer clients of agent Peggy Ramsay offer up when a young ingenue asks that fatal question in her office one otherwise ordi…
There’s a lovely serendipity. The main theatre is running Peggy for You while the little downstairs space has Nell Leyshon’s rather lovely new play imagining Cecil Sharp collecting folk-songs in Somerset.
With its interest in identity, ownership, tradition and the ‘rules’ applied to written rather than oral forms, Nell Leyshon’s play, which aired on Radio 3 in 2021, now earns a fully-staged run.
Peggy Ramsay is a play agent, but she is more famous than the playwrights and the work that she represents.
Lounging in the small hours on her office couch, under a wall of posters for her many clients’ shows – both famous and forgotten – Peggy is fresh back from bailing out a client.
Marsha Norman’s 1981 play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama on its debut, and remains one of the best plays I have read on the page, long before I saw it acted.
On LoveLondonLoveCulture, Emma Clarendon rounds up the reviews for Hampstead Theatre’s revival of Marsha Norman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play ‘Night, Mother, now running until 4 December 2021.
The play is set in rural America, where a mother (Stockard Channing) and daughter Jessie (Rebecca Night), who has epilepsy, live together.
It’s fascinating to see a play that, 35 years after its UK premiere, has the courage of its convictions, a drama that stays true to its characters with no soapy or simplistic conclusion that would betray its purpose.
Emma Clarendon rounds up the reviews for the new revival of The Memory of Water. Shelagh Stephenson’s play originally premiered at Hampstead Theatre in 1996.
I remember seeing Shelagh Stephenson’s contemporary classic at the Hampstead, when this venue was still an ageing prefab, and enjoying Terry Johnson’s racy staging,
The three sisters in Shelagh Stephenson’s play The Memory of Water – Teresa (Lucy Black), Mary (Laura Rogers) and Catherine (Carolina Main) – have gathered at their mother’s home ahead of her funeral.
Libby Purves is tempted to see The Memory of Water at Hampstead Theatre again, just to feel a more solidly packed audience laughing and gasping around her. That’s how much fun it was.
Not a lot happens, yet everything happens, as Big Big Sky’s premise is about ordinary people living ordinary lives. Under Tessa Walker’s direction – she has collaborated with Wells before – the drama is handled with dignity, clarity, and charm.
Love London Love Culture rounds up what the critics have had to say about Sam Yates’ production of Tennessee Williams’ The Two Character Play at Hampstead Theatre.
The Two Character Play at London’s Hampstead Theatre was at times interesting and enjoyable and at others frustrating and perplexing.
This rare revival of The Two Character Play at Hampstead Theatre proves an interesting addition to works that reassess Tennessee Williams’ impact as a dramatist – an intellectual exercise if not an emotive one.
Some say that the tight, 80-minute three-hander Raya tackles too many things at once – middle aged reawakening of old liaisons, the menopause, grief, haunting, student sexual accusations, therapy, parenthood and the unwisdom of defining yourself round sex. But hey, that is adult life. Hassles do not arrive neatly separated and convenient for the dramatic unities.
Love London Love Culture discovers what critics have had to say about the revival of Alfred Fagon’s play The Death of a Black Man at the Hampstead Theatre.
Alfred Fagon’s fascinating two act drama opened at the venue in 1975 and while some of its gender attitudes may have dated, so much of Death of a Black Man feels as fresh and challenging now as it did 46 years ago.
