Theatre

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The Mock Appeal with Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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The Mock Appeal with Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Four years ago I was privileged to be a spectator in a very unique courtroom. The setting? Venice Ghetto. The case? Shylock v Antonio. The Mock Appeal – held as part of the ghetto's 500th anniversary celebrations, during which…

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Sir Ronald Harwood 1934-2020

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Sir Ronald Harwood 1934-2020

Born Ronald Horwitz in Cape Town, 1934, Harwood is best known for the stage shows and the screenplays of The Dresser (for which he was nominated for an Oscar) and Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, for which he won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He was…

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Leopoldstadt ★★★★

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Leopoldstadt ★★★★

My Stoppard journey began more than 40 years ago with the heady cocktail of verbal fireworks, erudition and wit that is his 1966 play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Now it seems it is to end, with what the great playwright suggests is his last play, as he navigates his own…

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Rendezvous in Bratislava ★★★★

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Rendezvous in Bratislava ★★★★

“We had the biggest party in the darkest time,” declares one of the gloriously evocative numbers in Miriam Sherwood's self-styled ‘grandad cabaret’. Rendezvous in Bratislava is a love letter to her late grandfather Jan ‘Laco’ Kalina, a Slovakian Jewish satirist, joke collector, cabaret creator…

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Falling in Love Again ★★★

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Falling in Love Again ★★★

There’s a pleasing synchronicity to Ron Elisha’s take on the abdication of Edward VIII and how no less a femme fatale than Marlene Dietrich might have tried to change history by getting him to ‘fall in love' again. The play arrives onstage just as royals seeking to abdicate their duties…

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Interview: Patrick Marber

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Interview: Patrick Marber

“I consider myself a Jewish writer, like all my heroes: Tom Stoppard, David Mamet, Philip Roth, Arthur Miller, Woody Allen,” said director Patrick Marber in an interview in 2015. Now he is directing a play from one of those “heroes”, Tom Stoppard – a play which might be…

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Rags the Musical ★★★★

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Rags the Musical ★★★★

With book by Fiddler librettist Joseph Stein (sympathetically revised by David Thompson), it’s clear that Rags might represent the future of Anatevka’s plucky emigrants. Designer Gregor Donnelly loads piles of battered suitcases around the action as another boatload of…