Toby Young

In the five years that I’ve been The Spectator’s drama critic, one of the nicest afternoons I’ve spent was in the company of my fellow critics. No, not at a matinée, but at a lunch for John Gross, who was retiring as the Sunday Telegraph’s man in the stalls after 16 years. Charles Spencer made

Some playwrights mellow with age, but not David Hare. His sense of righteous indignation knows no bounds. According to press reports, the reason he decided to open his latest play on Broadway is that he still bears a grudge against Nicholas Hytner for refusing to schedule more performances of Stuff Happens at the National. Alas,

Connie Fisher, the winner of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s search-for-a-star reality TV show, hits the ground running in The Sound of Music. Indeed, she’s so high energy, it’s as if she’s starring in an infomercial rather than a West End musical. She overdoes everything, right down to the smallest hand gesture. As contestants in reality shows

Listing page content here I can’t make up my mind about Shared Experience. Since 1988, this company has been adapting classic works of literature, transforming some of the greatest books in the Western canon into visceral pieces of physical theatre. The results are distinctly mixed. On the one hand, the plays are rarely more than

The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Peter Shaffer’s 1964 play about the conquest of the Incas The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Peter Shaffer’s 1964 play about the conquest of the Incas, contains one of the most famous stage directions in modern drama: ‘They cross the Andes.’ On the face of it, these four words

Listing page content here At the matinée performance of Donkeys’ Years I attended, Michael Frayn was seated in the row behind me. Seeing this revival of a sex farce he wrote in 1977 must have been an odd experience for him, not least because he more or less single-handedly killed off the genre with Noises

According to theatrical lore, no play can be considered an out-and-out masterpiece unless it’s initially rejected. The most famous example is Look Back in Anger, which received a critical mauling in the dailies and was only saved from closure by Kenneth Tynan’s rave in the Observer. The second most famous is The Birthday Party, which

The Old Country, an Alan Bennett play that dates back to 1977, covers much the same ground as An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution. The central character is clearly based on one of the Cambridge Spies — in this case, a former Foreign Office official called Hilary, who is rotting away in the

Has Harold Pinter become too dominant a figure? I’m not just talking about the trophies he’s picked up in the past 12 months — the Wilfred Owen prize, the Franz Kafka prize, the Nobel prize, the Europe Theatre prize — but, more worryingly, the fact that so many new British playwrights seem content to ape

Blackbird is the kind of play critics absolutely adore. Indeed, the reason it has managed to secure a berth in the West End — a rarity for a new straight play — is that it got such rave reviews at Edinburgh last year. For one thing, it’s about paedophilia, and that enables the critics to

It’s been 44 years since Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? made its debut on Broadway, but it still seems extraordinarily fresh. Why? The obvious answer is that the subject matter — the battle of the sexes — is timeless. Anyone in a heterosexual relationship will experience a shudder of recognition at certain points

When I started writing this column in 2001 I didn’t have much time for the theatre. As a child of the Thatcherite Eighties, I regarded state funding of the arts as a ruse cooked up by the liberal intelligentsia to obtain cheap tickets, and thought of theatre people as effete intellectual snobs who spent their

Since taking on this job four years ago, I’ve reviewed 289 plays of which, perhaps, 50 have been worth seeing. Of these, only about ten have been truly outstanding and, of these, only five as close to perfection as it’s possible to get in the theatre. Pillars of the Community, a full-scale production of one

One of the hardest things about being a drama critic, at least for me, is that so many plays stubbornly resist categorisation — and Shoot the Crow by the Northern Irish writer Owen McCafferty is a prime example. Is it a comedy or a tragedy? Is it a proper, grown-up piece that wants to be

Mike Leigh’s new play, Two Thousand Years, isn’t quite up to his usual standard. It’s not terrible, but it feels as though it was yanked from the director’s improvisatory workshop when it was still in the development stage. It’s about a family of secular north London Jews, and, from the first, everything about them is

Poor Robin Soans. His new play, Talking to Terrorists, opened just three days before the bombs exploded last week. Most playwrights hope that their work will have ‘some’ contemporary resonance, but not quite that much. Talking to Terrorists is a ‘documentary play’ in which actual terrorists explain why they’ve committed various atrocities. Anyone going to

I had quite high expectations when the curtain went up on The President of an Empty Room. The writer, Steven Knight, produced the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Dirty Pretty Things and the director, Howard Davies, was responsible for Mourning Becomes Electra, one of my favourite productions of 2003. Nor was I the only one who thought