News

Exclusive: Slow Horses star Gary Oldman is stepping back on stage in April 2025 for the first time after an absence of nearly four decades to star in Samuel Beckett’s celebrated one-man play Krapp’s Last Tape for a limited season at the British theatre where the actor began his professional career in 1979.

Oldman, who won an Oscar for Darkest Hour, is in London shooting season 6 of the acclaimed Apple TV+ spy drama Slow Horses. He will play Beckett’s famous old-timer, struggling to listen to a tape he recorded 39 years ago, at York Theatre Royal in North Yorkshire from April 14 through May 17.

There are no plans to transfer the production to London’s West End or Broadway, Douglas Urbanski, the actor’s longtime business partner and manager, told me when I tracked him down in the early hours of Wednesday in London.

In performing Beckett’s 1958 classic, Oldman retraces...

New York’s Public Theater announced its upcoming season at their Astor Place home as well as Central Park’s to-be-reopened Delacorte Theater where the Public will stage Twelfth Night, directed by Saheem Ali, in summer 2025.

In its 2024-25 season, the Public will feature productions by playwrights Caryl Churchill, Lisa Sanaye Dring, David Finnigan, James Ijames, John Purugganan and S. Shakthidharan. The line-up will include partnerships with theater companies Belvoir St Theatre, Kurinji, and NYU Skirball; Elevator Repair Service; and Ma-Yi Theatre Company and La Jolla Playhouse.

See the entire line-up below.

“In my 20th season at The Public Theater, I’m overjoyed to share programming that is as bold and ambitious as The Public’s mission,” said Artistic Director Oskar Eustis, adding, “The season finishes with the reopening of The Delacorte Theater. We’re counting down the minutes until we can celebrate our revitalized home with a joyful production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

Benign and trusted agent who represented writers and directors in film, television and publishing

Jenne Casarotto, who has died aged 77 after a short illness, created in Casarotto Ramsay what Hollywood likes to call a boutique agency. But any business that deals both with the estate of Tennessee Williams and with the films of Steve McQueen clearly exercises a benign cultural reach beyond that of many more self-important addresses. Who else could be effortlessly skilled at doing the best for a playwright such as Caryl Churchill and for a movie director such as Stephen Frears?

Jenne was always dedicated to the interests of her clients with a self-effacement that was quiet, calm and authoritative. It was amazing how completely she could give you her attention, given the number of others queueing at the switchboard. All her clients – Oscar winners or Oscar dodgers – were worthy of her time, regardless of fortune. For...

Tony McNamara was a voracious reader as a kid growing up in a rural town outside Melbourne, Australia. But he never once considered becoming a writer. “I was always failing English,” he says. “I couldn’t get my head around grammar. Still can’t.”

And yet today, McNamara, 56, is the Oscar-nominated screenwriter behind some of the most sharp-witted, intricately verbal projects of the past five years, including 2018’s “The Favourite,” for director Yorgos Lanthimos; the 2020 Hulu series “The Great,” with Elle Fanning; and 2021’s “Cruella,” starring Emma Stone. Most recently, McNamara reunited with Lanthimos and Stone for “Poor Things,” which premiered at the Venice Film Festival to a rapturous reception and opened in limited release on Dec. 8. It tells the fantastical story of Bella Baxter (Stone), a Victorian woman transplanted with an infant’s brain who launches on an odyssey of sexual and intellectual self-discovery.

The common thread in all...

Exclusive: There’s some seriously scary stuff going on at London’s National Theatre as the venue prepares for a musical version of Roald Dahl’s The Witches that will feature book and lyrics by playwright Lucy Kirkwood, who’s also an executive consultant on Succession.

Music and lyrics are by Dave Malloy, who won acclaim for the book and score he wrote for Broadway show Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812.

The show is a co-production between the National and the Roald Dahl Story Company.

Katherine Kingsley (The Larkins) will play the Grand High Witch, whose only objective is to eliminate all children from the planet and turn them into mice. “She’s a tyrannical narcissist, truly she’s really evil. There’s no escaping the fact that she’s a bad person,” Kingsley told us.

“It’s a great role,” she laughed. “There’s a lot of fun to be had with her,...

Theatre is the quintessential art of reinterpretation. Every time a play is revived it is “remade”. With something so joyously provisional, why would you want to be definitive? And so with that in mind, let’s be clear that what follows is not some Olympian effort to decree “the best plays of all time”. Instead, it is a selection of pieces we find continually rewarding.

Inevitably, such a list reflects the work that’s staged, celebrated, and studied in the UK; it draws on a western canon. There are more men than women, more white writers than people of colour, although limiting ourselves to a single work by any author – dead white male or not – should help to widen the scope a little; yes, that means only one play by Shakespeare. We hope you will check out these plays – ideally in performance but, if you can’t find one, by reading the text.

Musician and actor David Bowie has topped a Sky Arts list celebrating the 50 most influential British artists of the last 50 years.

Bowie was named most influential by judges as they commended his influence across the industry and ability to transcend a variety of mediums including music, film and fashion.

A team of judges across music, film and TV, performing arts, literature and visual art were asked to create the list by TV channel Sky Arts in a celebration of British artists past and present and their influence on global culture. The 15-person judging panel, led by DJ, presenter and author Lauren Laverne, included Mobo Awards founder Kanya King, writer Bonnie Greer, film critic Ali Plumb and theater critic Lyn Gardner.

The top 10 also includes artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen (“Small Axe”) in second place; Russell T. Davies in third; fashion designer Vivienne Westwood fourth; playwright Caryl Churchill fifth; dancer-choreographer Michael Clark...

Click here to read the full article.

Lenny Von Dohlen, star of Twin Peaks and Electric Dreams, has died. He was 64.

He died Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles after a long illness, according to his longtime manager Steven J. Wolfe.

Von Dohlen made his film debut in Bruce Beresford’s Tender Mercies, a performance that landed him the leading role in MGM/UA’s Electric Dreams.

He also scored leading roles for Under the Biltmore Clock, Blind Vision, Jennifer 8, Ed Zwick’s Leaving Normal, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and the title role in Billy Galvin, where Von Dohlen starred opposite Karl Malden.

Born in Augusta, Georgia and raised in Goliad, Texas, Von Dohlen grew too tall to realize a childhood dream of becoming a jockey.

So after majoring in drama at the University of Texas, he turned to theater. In New York, he created roles in Asian Shade,...

A Brontosaurus and a Woolly Mammoth taking up residence among the mid-century modern trappings of a middle-class New Jersey household will now and forever make a theatrical impact – that, at least, hasn’t changed since playwright Thornton Wilder’s days – but so much else has, not least of all the ability of The Skin of Our Teeth, a seminal post-modern avant-garde winner of the 1943 Pulitzer Prize, to beguile merely on the strength of the post-modern avant-gardeness of it all.

Lincoln Center Theater’s major new revival of the play, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, with additional material by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the tireless efforts of an exemplary cast, does, in fact, afford some newfound vitality for a work so often more admired than loved. An exercise in endurance – for the cast, for the audience – The Skin of Our Teeth long ago passed along the novelty of its time-tripping, allegorical flourishes to subsequent heirs, from Caryl Churchill to Tony Kushner to the Wachowskis, so any attempt to meet and rise above the play’s inherent challenges would seem to require a vision, maybe a ruthlessness and certainly a firm grasp of the play’s continued reason for being.

Blain-Cruz does in fact display occasional moments of just those things, and so this Skin of Our Teeth, in fleeting sequences, lifts itself from the play’s traditional slog.

With a Black cast, loving references to bell hooks and allusions to youthful rage that seem as ferociously essential as the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Blain-Cruz reshapes Wilder’s universe just enough to encompass the Black experience, placing it firmly within the sweep of Wilder’s epoch-spanning tragicomic history of humanity.

As always, The Skin of Our Teeth opens with Sabina, maid to the upwardly mobile Antrobus family of Excelsior, New Jersey. Sabina nervously tidies the attractive house while catching us all up on the who’s who and what’s what – Mr. Antribus (James Vincent Meredith) has been very busy at the office of late, consumed as he is with inventing the wheel, while Mrs. Antribus (Roslyn Ruff) fusses protectively over the kids, little Gladys (Paige Gilbert) who is picking up some bad lipstick habits from the girls at school and young Henry (Julian Robertson) who just can’t keep his hands off rocks and other boys’ skulls any more than he can outrun the real name – Cain.

And on top of everything, the Ice Age is heading toward New Jersey, and not even the friendly

Bronto who lumbers around the living room – a marvelous and massive hand-operated puppet designed by James Ortiz – or the orange mammoth who romps like a puppy are likely to survive.

And so they don’t. Come Act II, when the action and the Antrobus Family finds itself on the boardwalk of Atlantic City during what appears to be both the 1920s and the Biblical Flood, the mammoth and the dinosaur will not be among the chosen two-by-twos to take refuge on that big boat just off the Jersey Shore. Violent Henry is still causing trouble, Sabina now calls herself Lily and Mrs. Antrobus has all but had it with her pathetic excuse for a husband, but, hey, family’s family, and that storm is coming hard.

When Skin finally arrives at Act II, the Antrobuses have been torn asunder by war – the blue and gray uniforms and antebellum dresses leave no doubt which war – and the long-in-coming, but never resolving, conflicts between father and son, husband and wife, mother and daughter, reach both a zenith and, Wilder suggests, a sort of equilibrium that can only exist in forgiveness. The next calamity is always in the offing, so stop squabbling.

Except of course that Wilder couldn’t have imagined nuclear holocaust or existential climate change, so The Skin of Our Teeth is always going to feel a bit, well, quaint in its ancient disasters and feel-good proposals. As theater, the Lincoln Center staging makes impressive use of the puppetry and the projections of hurricanes and a gorgeous evocation of the Atlantic City boardwalk as a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah – which, by the way, looks like terrific fun, with loads of cool people, not least the all-knowing fortune teller played, in a relatively brief but wonderfully commanding performance, by the great stage star Priscilla Lopez. In a lovely final image, human wanderers follow the sun through distant fields. Here’s hoping they get where they are going – it’s been a long hike.

James C. Nicola, whose tenure as artistic director of Off Broadway’s New York Theatre Workshop included the development of such prominent stage works as Rent, Once, Hadestown, What the Constitution Means to Me, Slave Play and David Bowie’s Lazarus, will leave the post next year, the company announced today.

“In July of 2022, I will reach the age of 72,” Nicola said in a statement. “In my mind, that has always been the moment to interrupt whatever patterns there might be in my life, and to leap off a cliff into reinvention. So that is my plan.”

Nicola will depart Nytw on June 30, 2022. He has been the artistic director since 1988.

Under his stewardship, Nytw has cemented a reputation as an important force in the production and development of new theater work, many of which have gone on to Broadway runs. A partial list of important works developed at the Nytw includes Jonathan Larson’s Rent,...

It’s now or never for “BoJack Horseman” to win the Best Animated Series Emmy, and there’s no better representative than the penultimate episode, “The View from Halfway Down.” This summary statement, about titular horse BoJack (Will Arnett) encountering everyone who’s died in the series at a dinner party, forces him to confront the reasons behind his substance abuse and bad behavior. Rather than a dream, the surreal episode turns out to be a near-death experience, with BoJack apparently drowning in his swimming pool, making good on the prophetic image in the main titles.

For director Amy Winfrey, who oversaw 21 episodes throughout the six seasons, “The View from Halfway Down” was a particularly satisfying conclusion. Winfrey not only got to dabble in the ultimate expression of surrealism, but she also got to participate in fun callbacks with some of her favorite characters, including “Horsin’ Around” sitcom creator Herb...

The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain has decided to cancel its 2021 awards, as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. The guild’s chair Lisa Holdsworth said the industries its members work within face an “existential threat,” and the guild needed to focus on protecting their rights.

The red-carpet, gala event was due to take place at London’s Royal College of Physicians in January in a special ceremony to mark their 60th anniversary.

Holdsworth said: “Our awards happen because of two things: the generous support of our loyal sponsors, and the same collective strength our union is founded on. Wggb members, all working writers, volunteer their time and energy to sit on juries, shortlist entries, and pull endless strings behind the scenes to make the event the glittering success it is every year.”

“This year, those same members are working tirelessly to protect writers’ rights in industries which are facing an unprecedented,...

Daniel Craig, the once and future James Bond, will star in a one-night-only benefit reading next month of Caryl Churchill’s A Number as part of New York Theatre Workshop’s 40th anniversary.

Directed by Sam Gold (Tony Award winner in 2015 for Fun Home), the reading is set for Sunday March 10 at 7 pm at Nytw. Tickets go on sale today, and the reading will benefit Nytw’s Artist Workshop and Education programming.

Craig, who is set for the upcoming installment of the James Bond movie franchise Bond 25, appeared in the world premiere London production of A Number in 2002. This one-off reading reunites the actor with director Gold after their sold-out 2016 production of Othello at Nytw. Additional casting will be announced shortly.

Churchill’s A Number is set in the near future when cloning has become commonplace. The story focuses on a 60something man who, having regretted his neglectful parenting of his only son,...

New York Theatre Workshop Nytw has announced that they will present a special one-night-only reading of A Number, by Nytw Usual Suspect and five-time Obie Award winner Caryl Churchill Love and Information A Number, directed by Nytw Usual Suspect and Tony Award winner Sam Gold Fun Home, Othello and featuring Daniel Craig Othello, Spectre. The reading will benefit Nytw's Artist Workshop and Education programming and will take place at New York Theatre Workshop 79 East 4th Street Sunday, March 10, 2019 at 7pm.

Fifty years after his play “Forty Years On,” Alan Bennett is still pining for the England of old. Just as his first play lamented the slipping standards of an old public school and, by extension, the nation at large, so “Allelujah!” sees an ailing National Health Service hospital as symptomatic of a wider national malaise. The show, now playing at Nicholas Hytner’s Bridge Theatre, is full of all the playwright’s signature elements — warmth, wry humor, faith in humankind — but at some point, you have to ask whether his idyllic, old England ever really existed. His nostalgia’s seductive, but mighty sentimental — and maybe, in this misty-eyed political climate, dangerous too.

Set in the geriatric wing of a Yorkshire hospital at full stretch, its future hanging in the balance, “Allelujah!” throws up a collage of characters and a criss-cross of subplots. Among the patients, singing in the hospital’s in-house Oap choir,...

As her horror comedy Blueberry Toast is staged in London, the Texan talks about how Christianity informs everything she writes

It’s a sunny Sunday morning in a middle-American kitchen. Walt wants some good, old-fashioned blueberry toast, and his chirpy wife, Barb, is only too happy to oblige. When she serves it to him, though, there’s a problem: he claims he asked for pancakes. With that minor discrepancy, the blissful facade of Blueberry Toast begins to splinter. “Perhaps we should start saying what we think,” suggests Barb. “That’s no way to live,” Walt replies. By the time this highly concentrated 70-minute play is over, every spotless surface is spattered with blood.

This is the sort of heightened comic horror for which the 32-year-old Texan Mary Laws is quickly becoming renowned. “It’s always where I end up,” she admits over coffee in Soho theatre’s bar. She is...

Apocalyptic wastelands aren’t often presented on Broadway stages, but Lucky Kirkwood’s “The Children” presents audiences with life in the countryside after a nuclear fallout. Unlike most end-of-the-world dramas, this play stays indoors and focuses on the inhabitants of a seaside cottage. It’s the intense focus on character that provide Deborah Findlay the opportunity to score a Tony Award nomination for Featured Actress in a Play.

Findlay portrays Hazel, a retired nuclear physicist. She lives with her husband Robin (Ron Cook) in a run down cottage just outside the “exclusion zone,” the area ravaged by earthquakes, tidal waves, and radiation after the power plant which employed the couple experienced a Fukushima like disaster. She has settled nicely into a hippie-fied retired life, full of yoga and living off the land, when an old friend and co-worker Rose (Francesca Annis) appears after a 38-year absence.

Rose’s sudden resurgence shakes Hazel.

Over 100 well-known names – including writers, actors, directors and musicians – have signed a pledge supporting Lorde's decision not to perform in Israel.

The statement was published in The Guardian following backlash over the Kiwi singer’s cancellation of her concert in Tel Aviv. It is a direct response to a full page ad published in the Washington Post on January 1 which called Lorde a bigot and also attacked her homeland of New Zealand.

“We deplore the bullying tactics being used to defend injustice against Palestinians and to suppress an artist’s freedom of conscience. We support Lorde’s right to take a stand,” reads the letter in The Guardian. "Shmuley Boteach, the author and promoter of the advert, supports Israel’s illegal settlements and wrote last month on Breitbart to thank Donald Trump for “electrifying the world” with his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in defiance of international law.

Playwright Stoppard wins outstanding contribution award.

Tom Stoppard was presented with the outstanding contribution to writing award at the 2017 Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Awards.

Stoppard accepted the honour from fellow playwright David Edgar at the ceremony on Monday (January 23), held at the Royal College of Physicians.

He said: “For a writer, no award can compare to an award from other writers. The Writers’ Guild is a bright spot in a dark world and I feel very grateful to it.”

Stoppard has written extensively for the stage, TV and film. His plays Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, Travesties, and The Real Thing all won Tony Awards.

He also co-wrote Shakespeare In Love (which won him an Oscar) and Brazil.

Presenting him the award, Edgar said: “Like the BBC, he [Stoppard] has educated and entertained. Like no one else, he has challenged, dazzled, and amazed.”

The event’s best first screenplay award went to Rachel Tunnard for Adult Life Skills while...

To glimpse the future of our nation’s theater, look no further than the Humana Festival of New American Plays. In its first-ever iteration in 1977, after all, the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Kentucky, produced “The Gin Game” by D.L. Coburn, a play that would go on to a successful Broadway run and win a Pulitzer Prize. The 40 years since have seen this new plays festival launch nearly 400 playwrights from relative unknowns to trailblazing visionaries. “It’s recognized locally, nationally, and internationally,” Actors Theatre artistic director Les Waters told Backstage. “It’s one of the places people look at for who’s writing the great plays in the country at the moment.” Waters, a prolific director in his native England as well as at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, has championed rising playwrights from Caryl Churchill and Charles Mee to Anne Washburn, Lucas Hnath, and Sarah Ruhl. He’s in the business of...

Harold Pinter wrote Old Times (which opens tonight at the Roundabout) in 1971, only eight years before Caryl Churchill wrote Cloud Nine (which opened last night at the Atlantic). Though both are English plays about sex and subjugation, the two revivals demonstrate just how differently classics can fare as time laps around them. Cloud Nine has grown larger, almost as if it had predicted and made room for its future relevance. Old Times, on the other hand, seems to have contracted, especially in a production that makes too much of a case for its cosmic importance.Not that Old Times is unimportant. It is, among other things, one of those works that helped establish the adjective Pinteresque as a troubling and cool thing for a play to be: It is mysterious, pregnant, and hostile. The action consists entirely of conversation that is alternately cryptic and banal, as two of the characters...

The first American production of Cloud Nine opened off Broadway on May 18, 1981, a few weeks before the Times ran its first account of what would later be known as AIDS. That’s pure coincidence, of course; Caryl Churchill’s play about the necessity and cost of all kinds of liberation had already been produced in England, two years before. But one way of understanding what might be meant by a great work is to look not only at what it offers as a reflection on its immediate past (which is the way we judge most new plays) but also at what it anticipated and what it continues to anticipate decades later. Many timely dramas shrink and buckle with age, their laudable politics as passé as their loud clothes. But Cloud Nine, now in a superb revival at the Atlantic, has only grown fuller, meatier, sadder, funnier, sexier, and more provocative...

Actor Nigel Terry has passed away at the age of 69.

Famed for playing King Arthur in John Boorman's Excalibur in 1981, opposite Helen Mirren, Terry passed away from emphysema on April 30.

He made his big-screen debut in 1968's The Lion in Winter alongside Peter O'Toole, Katharine Hepburn and Anthony Hopkins.

The actor took lead roles in Caravaggio (1986) and War Requiem (1989) and a number of others, but most of his work was on the stage.

He worked extensively at the Royal Court in the '70s in productions such as Edward Bond's The Fool and Caryl Churchill's Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, and for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and Julius Caesar.

Terry continued his stage work throughout the '80s under the direction of the likes of Danny Boyle and Max Stafford-Clark.

His last film was 2004's epic Troy starring Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom,...

When you enter the East 4th Street home of New York Theatre Workshop, you can never be sure what you’re going to find. The blank-slate interior has been turned into an amphitheater for Caryl Churchill’s A Number, an Irish bar for Once, a television studio for The Little Foxes, and a multiplex for Scenes From a Marriage. This is not only a radical extension of “form follows function” but a message to playwrights (and audiences) that change is good — even if, on occasion, it fills you with dread. Dread is in fact the main feeling you get as you walk into the theater as it’s currently configured for Ayad Akhtar’s The Invisible Hand. You would not mistake the designer Riccardo Hernandez’s arrangement of concrete slabs and bare fluorescent fixtures in low, corrugated ceilings that fly over your seats for the set of, say, a sprightly comedy.

Today we are talking to one of the most powerful directors on Broadway, in the West End and in Hollywood all about the breathtaking screen-to-stage-to-screen adaptation of his Tony Award- and Olivier Award-winning Best Musical Billy Elliot The Musical, coming to Fathom movie theaters nationwide this week, the affable and gifted Stephen Daldry. Discussing originally adapting the hit British indie alongside composer Elton John and screenwriterlyricist Lee Hall into the worldwide sensation that the musical eventually became, Daldry reflects on how many iconic elements of the original production came to be as well as comments on the enduring impact of the musical since its debut more than 10 years ago. Additionally, Daldry sheds considerable light on how the Fathom filming of Billy Elliot was designed to showcase the exceptional entertainment value of the enterprise and its incredible cast of actors, as well as overseeing the unforgettable finale staged especially for this special 10th anniversary performance,...

The last time Carmen Zilles worked with renowned Flemish director Ivo van Hove at New York Theatre Workshop, the circumstances were rather different. “He was around when I was an intern,” said Zilles, who can currently be seen onstage in van Hove’s production of Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes From a Marriage.” “I got him coffee. He had no idea who I was.” Zilles’ trajectory is proof that an internship, especially one at a well-connected and established theater like Nytw, can really pay off. After a year of sitting in on artistic meetings, attending dozens of new play readings, and getting to know the people who run the New York theater community, Zilles felt fully equipped to pursue her acting goals. “It wasn’t a corporate environment, so there was a lot of freedom in the internship for me to make it what I wanted it to be,” she told Backstage.

Us actress best known for her work in Coen Brothers’ movies including Fargo to receive talent award.

Us actress Frances McDormand is to be awarded the Persol Tribute to Visionary Talent Award 2014 at the 71st Venice International Film Festival (Aug 27 - Sep 6).

The prolific actress is best known for her collaborations with the Coen Brothers in films including Fargo, Raising Arizona, Burn After Reading and her first ever film role, Blood Simple.

McDormand will receive the honour on Sept 1 in the Sala Grande (Palazzo del Cinema) and will be followed by the out of competition screening of Olive Kitteridge directed by Lisa Cholodenko.

The four-part HBO miniseries adaptation of the eponymous Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Elizabeth Strout co-stars Richard Jenkins, Bill Murray, John Gallagher Jr. and Zoe Kazan.

The Playtone / As Is production will debut on HBO in the Us in November and is executive produced by McDormand alongide Gary Goetzman, Tom Hanks and [link...

Bronx Bombers has just announced a closing date of March 2, proving yet again that sports fans and Broadway do not make good bedfellows. There’s already a whisper in the air that the soon-to-be-vacant Circle in the Square might see Audra McDonald in a production of Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill a staple of regional theaters about Billie Holiday (not to be confused with last fall’s Off Broadway show Lady Day). That would complicate the Tony race for Best Actress in a Musical, which is already shaping up as a showdown between Sutton Foster (Violet), Idina Menzel...

Minutes after getting home from Love and Information, the new Caryl Churchill play at the Minetta Lane, I found a piping-hot thread called “Love and Information Just Awful” on one of the theater chat boards. “What an excruciatingly boring evening,” wrote the virtual commenter. Respondents quickly chimed in to complain about the pretension and pointlessness of the play — if it was a play — and its likelihood of receiving raves (like this one) from critics. Nor was this strictly an online hate phenomenon. At the theater, even in the dark, I could see some people fuming, little clouds of blood-red hostility hovering over their heads and obscuring my view. (There were also walkouts.) I certainly recognized the feeling; how often have I fumed at what others were enjoying? It’s a scandal, the way people have different taste!A scandal and, in a way, Churchill’s subject, if I dare discern...

The Judge John Deed star remembers the 60s at the Royal Court, and being discovered by the great auteur

By 1969 I'd done a few roles for Sidney Bernstein's Granada Television, which was the place for new, dangerous drama, and a couple of plays at the Royal Court. I was in their first revival of Look Back in Anger. John Osborne came along to rehearsals a lot – he was shocked at how gritty and visceral we'd made the production. It was an incredibly exciting time – I felt part of a movement of dissent. I did the premiere of David Storey's The Contractor, with the great Lindsay Anderson, and then I did a play called Cancer, which was later renamed Moonchildren.

Cancer was based on the experiences of its writer, Michael Weller. It's about a group of students who rent a flat. It's a very funny and very realistic play,...

On stage, Philip Seymour Hoffman excelled playing characters driven by desire. As a theatre director, he pushed his actors towards abandon

Although best known for his Oscar-nominated turns in films such as Capote and The Master, Philip Seymour Hoffman was also a visceral stage actor and a sensitive, vigorous theatre director. On stage, he had a savage, vital and vulnerable presence that his film appearances approached, but never really equalled. He traded in a kind of heightened naturalism that made even the most absurd scenarios seem likely. Doughy, slouchy, unhandsome and unkempt, Hoffman distinguished himself with his fierce commitment to preparing roles and his lack of vanity in playing them.

A graduate of New York University, he cut his theatrical teeth downtown, in plays including Caryl Churchill's The Skriker and Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking, before assuming more high-profile roles. He alternated with John C Reilly as Austin...

Yale Repertory Theatre presents Owners, the savagely funny play by groundbreaking English playwright Caryl Churchill, author of Cloud Nine and Top Girls. Directed by Obie Award winning resident director Evan Yionoulis, Owners will be performed at Yale Repertory Theatre 1120 Chapel Street, now through November 16. Opening Night is tomorrow, Thursday, October 31. The cast of Owners includes Anthony Cochrane, Joby Earle, Sarah Manton, Brenda Meaney, Tommy Schrider, and Alex Trow. Get a sneak peek at the show in the video below...

Yale Repertory Theatre presents Owners, the savagely funny play by groundbreaking English playwright Caryl Churchill, author of Cloud Nine and Top Girls. Directed by Obie Award winning resident director Evan Yionoulis, Owners will be performed at Yale Repertory Theatre 1120 Chapel Street, now through November 16. Opening Night is tomorrow, Thursday, October 31. The cast of Owners includes Anthony Cochrane, Joby Earle, Sarah Manton, Brenda Meaney, Tommy Schrider, and Alex Trow. BroadwayWorld has a first look at the cast in action below...

Noël Coward; Donmar; Royal Court, London

The Michael Grandage plan is working. Stars and cheap tickets are bringing new audiences to his West End season, with 25% of the tickets going to first-time bookers.

Now Harry Potter fans are confronted with a gloriously perverse writing talent. The Cripple of Inishmaan is Grandage's most unlikely combination to date. Smooth-faced Daniel Radcliffe takes the title role in provocative Martin McDonagh's 1997 play. The neat, adored boy wizard plays a shambolic youth no one wants to kiss. As directed by Grandage, this looks like a cunning wheeze.

You would not pick Radcliffe out as a soaring talent if you saw him with an innocent eye on the stage. Yet neither would you mark him down as a star who has blundered on to the boards. More assured than he was in his last stage appearance, in Equus, he is restrained and controlled in a...

Yale Repertory Theatre James Bundy, Artistic Director Victoria Nolan, Managing Director, dedicated to the production of new plays and bold interpretations of classics that make immediate connections to contemporary audiences, announces its 2013-14 season, which will begin with A Streetcar Named Desire, the Pulitzer Prize winning masterwork by Tennessee Williams, directed by Mark Rucker. Obie Award winning resident director Evan Yionoulis will mark her thirteenth production at Yale Rep with Owners, the dark comedy by Caryl Churchill. Director Christopher Bayes and actor Steven Epp return for Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Nobel Prize winner Dario Fo.

New York Theatre Workshop Nytw Artistic Director James C. Nicola and Managing Director William Russo just announced that its 2013-2014 subscriber season will include What's It All About Bacharach Reimagined, with musical arrangements by Kyle Riabko and directed by Steven Hoggett Fetch Clay, Make Man written by Will Power and directed by Des McAnuff and Love and Information written by Caryl Churchill and directed by James Macdonald. In the coming weeks Nytw will announce an additional production that will round out the season.

The Royal Court in London, one of the most important new-writing theatres in the world, has over the years been crucial in making the names of writers including Arnold Wesker, Christopher Hampton, Caryl Churchill, Hanif Kureshi, Sarah Kane, Martin McDonagh and Simon Stephens. Hell, it was even where "The Rocky Picture Horror Show" started out. And in the last few years, it's been on as impressive a run as any in its history, premiering the acclaimed likes of Jez Butterworth's "Jerusalem," Lucy Prebble's "Enron," Polly Stenham's "That Face," Bruce Norris' Pulitzer Prize-winning "Clybourne Park" and Nick Payne's "Constellations," all of which went on to ecstatic reviews, and often transfers to the West End or the U.S. So far, though, none of this recent batch have made it to the screen, though several are in development: George Clooney picked up the rights to "Enron," while...

National Theatre's Nicholas Hytner joins in condemnation of Tories' stance on the arts at conference on regional theatre

Two leading lights of Britain's cultural life – Danny Boyle, who directed the Olympics opening ceremony, and Nicholas Hytner, chief of the National Theatre – have launched an uncompromising attack on the government's stance on culture.

Speaking after an event that brought together the heads of 23 of England's leading regional theatres, Boyle told the Guardian that the lack of attention to the arts shown by the culture secretary, Maria Miller, was "outrageous".

"Not one of those [artistic directors, including Hytner] has been even approached by this woman," he said. "That is outrageous. This is cultural life of our country. She is the minister of fucking culture. I mean, come on."

He added: "It's a disgrace: it is these artistic directors that are spending the taxpayers' money. And she's not met them. They are the people spending the money...

Cate Blanchett has been nominated for the 'Natasha Richardson Award' at the London Evening Standard Theatre Awards. The actress has received a nod in the 'Best Actress' category for her role in Big and Small and is up against Eileen Atkins (All That Fall), Laurie Metcalf (Long Day's Journey Into Night) and Hattie Morahan (A Doll's House). [L: Cate Blanchett, R: Nick Payne's Constellations] Other nominations include husband and wife team Adrian Lester and Lolita Chakrabarti for 'Best Actor' and 'Most Promising Playwright' respectively for Red Velvet. Up for 'Best Play' are Constellations by Nick Payne, Love and Information by Caryl Churchill and This House by James Graham. Editor of the Evening Standard Sarah (more)...

Young writers James Graham and Nick Payne vie with Caryl Churchill, while actor Hattie Morahan goes up against Cate Blanchett as Young Vic gains five nominations

Young playwrights James Graham and Nick Payne will compete with the legendary Caryl Churchill for best new play at this year's Evening Standard theatre awards.

Churchill, who won her first Evening Standard award 25 years ago for Serious Money, is shortlisted for Love and Information at the Royal Court, London, while Graham, 30, is up for political thriller This House, and Payne, 28, Constellations, currently previewing in the West End.

By a strange quirk of fate, Graham and Payne are younger than two of the nominees for the Charles Wintour most promising playwright award: actor Lolita Chakrabarti, 43, and screenwriter John Hodge, 47, both of whom saw their first plays staged this year in Red Velvet and Collaborators respectively. That category is completed by Tom Wells, author of The Kitchen Sink.

From Batman to Spider-Man, Wireless to Green Man and Carousel to Götterdämmerung, the Observer's critics pick the season's highlights. What are you most looking forward to? Post your comments below

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July

1 Pop The Stone Roses

The third resurrection of the Roses has already swung from thrill to farce. Fans gibbered with joy at their surprise Warrington gig in May, but by Amsterdam Ian Brown and Reni were at loggerheads. This last of three homecoming gigs at Manchester's Heaton Park will not be uneventful.

3 Film The Amazing Spider-Man

Marvel Comics' flagship superhero, the red-and-blue clad "web-slinger" Spider-Man, gets a Hollywood reboot not 10 years after the character was last blockbuster-ised. Impressive Brit Andrew Garfield plays Spidey this time; Marc (500 Days of Summer) Webb directs. Early reviews: amazing.

4 Dance Dance Gb

English National Ballet, Scottish Ballet and National Dance Company Wales join forces in a high-velocity...

In 1987, the actor wasn't keen on theatre audiences eating chocolates

In 1987 I met Gary Oldman backstage at Chelsea's Royal Court, where he was playing a corporate raider in Caryl Churchill's Serious Money. Oldman provided tea and cheese sandwiches, then let me watch his makeup being applied.

"Mentally I'm not in London at the moment, I'm in North Carolina working on Nic Roeg's Track 29," he admitted, Cheshire cheese crumbling on to his battered corduroy trousers. "This morning I discovered a shooting schedule in the mail. I'd been hoping the scene in which I assault Theresa Russell would be in week six, but it's the first scene on the first day."

Prick Up Your Ears, in which he played Joe Orton, was shortly to be released, and he explained how he'd "spent many an evening in curry houses drinking Guinness" to look "older, fatter and queenier", whereas to portray...

Royal Court; Lyttelton; Theatre503, London

Every now and then the Royal Court does this. It throws up a small-cast, depth-charge production that makes bigger dramas look over-stuffed and under-nourished. It did so metaphysically with Caryl Churchill's A Number and emotionally with Mike Bartlett's Cock. It has done so again with Nick Payne's wiry new play.

Constellations is a love story that investigates ideas about time. Or it's a look at theories about time that takes the form of a love story. It tells us that we may have no such thing as free will, but leaves its audience to make up its own mind. Following the lead given 14 years ago by Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, in which a scientific theory is demonstrated in the structure of the play that discusses it, Constellations embodies its doubts and questions. It quizzes the notion of destiny by giving alternative versions...

Our Smiths-loving Pm has delivered another headscratcher in claiming to like Lindsay Anderson's anti-establishment standard

Like his claim to dig the music of the Smiths, David Cameron's professed admiration for the Lindsay Anderson film If … is either a fantastically canny attempt to deflect attention from his unswervingly patrician background or an act of cultural self-delusion on a massive scale.

I incline towards the latter. If … is without doubt the flag-bearer for the British end of the cinematic counter-culture in the late 60s, with its incendiary, anti-establishment finale of schoolboys machine-gunning their teachers, but it's also a film that could only have been made by products of the public-school system. Screenwriter David Sherwin – he originated the project with another writer, John Howlett, who subsequently backed out – went to Tonbridge School; Anderson himself was a pupil at Cheltenham College, where If … was largely filmed.

If … caught the flavour of the times when it was screened,...

With British theatre looking backwards, even the one new play that almost everyone enjoyed was a skilful reworking of an 18th-century classic

The British theatre is living off its past. Just think of the plays that left a strong impression in 2011: Caryl Churchill's Top Girls (1982), Harold Pinter's Betrayal (1978), Edward Bond's Saved (1965), Arnold Wesker's The Kitchen (1959) and his Chicken Soup With Barley (1958), and Terence Rattigan's Flare Path (1942). Even the one new play that almost everyone enjoyed, Richard Bean's One Man, Two Guvnors, was a skilful reworking of an 18th-century classic.

I admired Mike Bartlett's 13 at the National and Alan Ayckbourn's Neighbourhood Watch in Scarborough for their ability, in very different ways, to reflect the tenor of the times. Two other old hands, David Hare with South Downs and David Edgar with Written on the Heart, turned in highly accomplished pieces. But, even...

HollywoodNews.com: Alan Cumming, Garret Dillahunt, and Frances Fisher star in the poignant period drama Any Day Now, written, produced and directed by filmmaker Travis Fine (The Space Between). The film recently completed principal photography in Los Angeles and is currently in post-production. Produced by Kristine Hostetter Fine (The Space Between) and Chip Hourihan (Frozen River), the film is executive produced by Anne O’Shea (The Kids Are Alright) and Maxine Makover (The Space Between.

Set in the 1970s and inspired by a true story, the film chronicles a gay couple who take in a teenage boy with Down Syndrome who has been abandoned by his drug addicted mother. As the teen discovers the strong bonds of family for the first time in his life, disapproving authorities step in to tear the boy from the only stable environment he has ever known. As the gay men fight to adopt this extraordinary special needs child,...

On a trip to New York in the '80s with my classmates to check out what was then called the University and Regional Theater Auditions, I wandered off by myself to see my first New York production all alone. It was a rainy Wednesday and I decided to check out a matinee at the Lucille Lortel Theatre of "Cloud Nine," a play by Caryl Churchill described as "a cautionary expedition into the cuckooland of sexual role-playing." My life was forever changed by that play. It was a hilarious trip filled with all kinds of sexual innuendo and gender confusion.Now, please bear in mind that this was years before the idea of gender confusion was even discussed in polite society. In the second act, a female character of "a certain age" delivered a deeply touching and laugh-out-loud-funny monologue about discovering the joys of masturbation very late in life. I left the.

Character actor who was an ensemble player to the core

John Burgess, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 77, was a versatile and highly intelligent character actor who appeared in several productions at the National Theatre in London. He joined the National in 2000 for Romeo and Juliet, directed by Tim Supple, and appeared in Remembrance of Things Past, co-adapted by Harold Pinter, with whom John enjoyed a friendship. He also performed in Trevor Nunn's The Relapse (2001) and The Alchemist (2006), but was injured out early in the run.

It was at the National that John and I collaborated joyously. I had much enjoyed working with this direct, drily humorous man back in 1978, when he was in my abandoned RSC Aldwych project Ice Cream (not to be confused with Caryl Churchill's later piece of the same name). So when Nick Hytner invited me to create a play for the National's...

Oliver Stone's Wall Street defined the 80s culture of greed, but the sequel fails to the examine the calamity that followed

The record for the gap between an original film and its sequel is probably held by Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money, which came 25 years after Robert Rossen's The Hustler, thus replacing Psycho II which followed Hitchcock's masterpiece 23 years on. Now coming in equal second is Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Oliver Stone's belated follow-up to his 1987 stock exchange saga, the interval being explained, as in the case of Psycho II, by the incarceration of its unforgettable leading character.

The original Wall Street was a Faustian fable of an ambiguously moral kind. In Platoon, the movie that had made Stone's name the previous year, Charlie Sheen as a GI in Vietnam had two role models: the dull, Christ-like good sergeant (Willem Dafoe) and the charismatic...

Same language, different cultures. It's the conclusion Broadway producers often have reached when hit plays have been shipped from London to New York, either intact or in recast incarnations struck from the same template, only to suffer premature deaths at the U.S. boxoffice.

For every "The History Boys" there has been a "Coram Boy," for every "Frost/Nixon" a "Democracy," for every "Red" an "Enron."

Even star casting, that fail-safe of every Broadway investor, has proved unreliable.

Jude Law propelled last fall's "Hamlet" transfer to the biggest weekly grosses yielded by Shakespeare on Broadway, but when Daniel Radcliffe doffed his "Harry Potter" cloak to frolic naked with horses in 2008's "Equus" revival, the excitement in New York never quite matched the production's sellout West End business.

Rave reviews often are not enough to pay for transatlantic passage.

The regal smackdown last season between Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter in "Mary Stuart" had critics swooning,...