★★☆☆☆ Back in the day, before well-known actors were ‘celebrities’, a producer with a bit of clout could persuade a star to risk their reputation on the road for six weeks. Prior to the rise in popularity and ubiquity of TV the summer tour would be the only means whereby the provinces could get a good gawp at the folk they had read about or perhaps seen at the movies.
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★★★★☆ From its first English run some twenty years ago the play has attracted strong casts; each character is allowed to run the gamut from indignation to pathos with a good dose of self-indulgent anger and self-pity on offer. The present cast of well-seasoned and likeable favourites, Messrs. Tompkinson, Havers and Lawson all rise to the challenge with nicely delineated characters.
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Charlie is an online English tutor, living alone in a small Idaho town. Charlie is morbidly obese almost to the point of caricature. We are directed (we might say led by the nose) to the meaning of the metaphor that sits at the heart of the piece by a short essay about Moby Dick . . . This is another of those plays we can put on the shelf marked ‘Ustinov Wonders’
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★★★☆☆ When you have a couple of top drawer actresses each capable of playing either lead in such a play as this the opportunity arises for the added novelty of spinning a coin to decide which of the two will play which role on the night. Last night Lia Williams was Mary and Juliet Stephenson, Elizabeth.
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★★★☆☆ Written early in Granville Barker’s career at the turn of the last century and only recently rediscovered amongst his papers, this is a play that feminists could happily put on the shelf marked, ‘On the side of the angels’. It explores a woman’s search for autonomy and fulfilment. Agnes Colander is an artist trying to escape ‘the loneliness of marriage’.
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