Toby Young

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

I was in a troubled mood when I sat down to watch Guys and Dolls and, alas, it didn’t do much to raise my spirits. Before I started reviewing plays four years ago, I had no time for musicals. I have a tin ear for music and almost no visual sense, and the only pleasure

Well, it wasn’t quite the theatrical event of the year I was expecting. Theatre of Blood is an adaptation of the 1973 cult film in which a disgruntled actor murders a group of drama critics and I was hoping that members of the current crop, like the Standard’s Nicholas de Jongh, would be instantly recognisable.

I walked into The Philadelphia Story with a real spring in my step. Admittedly, I’d never seen this play before, but how bad could it be given that the film — surely one of the two or three greatest romantic comedies ever to come out of Hollywood — was so closely based on Philip Barry’s

It’s quite hard to enjoy Shakespeare’s history plays these days if you have any sympathy for Blair’s decision to throw in Britain’s lot with America in the Iraq war. First, Nicholas Hytner gave us a revisionist version of Henry V in which the young king was portrayed as a shallow glory-seeker willing to embark on

Towards the end of his Diaries, Kenneth Tynan complains that the older he gets, the more estranged he feels from his glamorous persona. In a sense, this is a rift that still exists today. Tynan’s posthumous reputation grows ever more glorious with each passing year, yet if you bother to read anything he wrote —

One of the cardinal rules of theatre reviewing is that you’re not supposed to talk about the play until you’ve left the venue. This is ostensibly to stop critics influencing one another’s opinions, to force them to make up their own minds, but there’s another — better — reason, as I discovered last week. On

Since 25 October, I’ve been appearing seven times a week on stage, so getting to see anything has been extremely difficult. My last night is 15 January, so I’ll be able to resume my full reviewing duties after that, but in the meantime I thought I’d bring you up to date on the only three