Hard Times is one of those novels where everyone knows the start (tyrannical schoolmaster Gradgrind and the definition of “horse”), but no-one seems to know the ending. Icon Theatre’s production remedies…

A married couple live with their son in a wholesome gated community. The neighbours are polite, there are facilities for the whole family, and at night the streetlamps play violin…

Euripides’ Alcestis, a not-quite-tragic Greek tragedy, centres upon a wife’s self-sacrificing decision to die in her doomed husband’s place. Ted Hughes’ version of the play is a visceral and uncompromising…

In Aristophanes’ The Birds, a city in the clouds is the background to an ambivalent satire on utopianism and realpolitik. Cloudcuckooland, a musical for children, re-imagines Aristophanes’ comedy as a…

“If everyone is out looking for a myth, how can they find reality?” This sentence occurs towards the end of Christopher James’ new play at the Courtyard. On the surface,…

Making new writing accessible is Paines Plough’s business. Later is a new writing ’salon’ in which playwrights curate playwrights to showcase work in progress, previews, experiments and rehearsed readings. At only…

Annamation are a trio of wise women, with the voices of angels and a taste for low comedy. In their current show Tongue and Groove, fantastical, sometimes terrible tales are…

Christopher Shinn has so much to say about American politics, Islam, homosexuality, freedom of expression and life in the public eye that his play Now Or Later, at the Royal…

365 from the National Theatre of Scotland follows a series of teenagers emerging from care, and taking their first steps towards independence in ‘practice flats’. David Harrower’s drama explores the instabilities…

In December 1978, with the Winter of Discontent in full swing, three generations of a working-class family gather in a living-room in Hull. Patriarch Dad is in denial about his…