Philip Ridley’s new monologue about spine-tingling love and trauma is a dazzling masterclass in storytelling

One woman’s journey to explore the legacy of the slave trade is brilliantly personal and provocative

New monologue about rage, racism and national identity is magnificent in its fury and perception: grreeaatt!

More overviews of British new writing from the In-Yer-Face Theatre archive.

Calling all drama teachers and students: let’s bring theatre history alive!

Well-deserved West End transfer for French playwright and novelist Florian Zeller’s powerful portrait of dementia

David Greig’s much-lauded mountaineering survival story fails to reach the dizzy heights

Gloriously surreal monologue about everyday anxieties in extraordinary circumstances: welcome back the glittering dark!

Ten prompts for writing about the year 2020

New epic about mothers and daughters in the age of oil is wonderfully ambitious, but deeply unhistorical

Quote of the day: “‘So was it all for England, then?’”

Triumphant, if crude, West End transfer of a heartfelt account of a Renaissance woman who has been hidden from history

Censorship appears to be simple, but is actually quite complicated.

Mike Bartlett explores Englishness with enormous metaphoric zeal — and only a touch of preposterousness

Playwright or director? Who is ultimately responsible for a piece of theatre? Our Critic attempts to find out

New play from Nick Payne is a brilliantly written study of love and loss, with some cosmology also thrown in

New play about attraction, the universe and time stopping comes to London: it’s a fab science fantasy hymn to love

Explore the work of a handful of British theatre’s brightest and most exciting writing talents

The death of David Bowie provokes the Critic to take a trip down the motorways and side alleys of memory

Can the stranglehold of naturalism and social realism in British theatre ever be broken?

Feminist account of British imperialism is energetic and passionate, but rather slender — is it a play or a lecture?

New debut play is a heartfelt account of the black lesbian experience — party on!

Sample a couple of paragraphs from the introduction to my latest book on postwar British theatre history

Film version of the Oscar Wilde classic is a brilliant critique of the digital age and an ace adaptation

In the Brexit era, this site-specific revival of Agatha Christie’s 1953 courtroom drama works like a treat

In the absence of live theatre during lockdown the Critic is obliged to review his own domestic daily life — with puzzling results

A festival of monologue responses to the Black Lives Matter campaign is personal, political and so powerful

The poet laureate’s verbatim play about Brexit sinks into journalistic and untheatrical banality

One from the archives: theatre criticism in an age of marketing

How can theatre respond to the racist shit that’s going down?

From the archives: the Critic takes an angry look at London’s West End theatre

This time, I have taken a critical look at about 75 years of British theatre history.

New touring play from Eclipse is a wonderfully complex and emotionally powerful account of race and Empire

Link to a short review of the multi-authored Living Newspaper: A Counter Narrative at the Royal Court

Super-star James McAvoy triumphs in Martin Crimp’s magnificent makeover of the French classic: a jaw-dropping success!

This time, I have time travelled with my companion Lia Ghilardi, crossing four hundred years of British theatre history.

The longest-running play in world history is in good shape, despite the lackluster and mechanical cast

Bad stuff and change in a time of pandemic: a derivative lockdown poem

Fear, fury and fun in a new monologue that is a shout out for trans and non-gender-conforming rights