It’s pantomime season, which is as good a time as any to pay tribute to the fine British traditions of smutty humour, sexual confusion, homosexual panic and coming over a bit funny when you think about women’s legs. All of the above get a good working over in The Roaring Girl (1611), a Jacobean city comedy in which Thomases Middleton and Dekker fit a real-life gender renegade into a giddy mesh … [Read more...]
Archives for December 30, 2016
12 Plays of Xmas: 3 Ruined by Lynn Nottage
I can’t remember how I missed the Pulitzer-winning Ruined when it played in London in 2010. It was at a favourite theatre (the Almeida) and starred favourite actors (Jenny Jules, Lucian Msamati). Maybe I was busy, or distracted. Maybe I didn’t feel great urgency simply because Lynn Nottage’s 2008 play sounded too much like an adaptation of Mother Courage, taking Brecht’s dogged anti-heroine from … [Read more...]