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It seems as if they live in an egg timer. So said the woman next to me as we took our seats for Berenice, Racine's rarely seen neo-classical tragedy, directed [...]

It looks like a prism, with one glass plane seen through another. In Ibsen's Hedda Gabler - directed by Anna Mackmin - the morning sun is initially shining in at [...]

Now that's what I call storming. A gigantic mainsail is thrashing overhead, as if in a hurricane. One man clings to the yardarm while, down below, a sailor appears to [...]

It's as if the ancient world's heroes and heroines have been subjected to an acid attack in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. Time and cynicism have corroded the reputations of Greece [...]

It's seven years since the former artistic director of the Globe strutted on its stage, but Mark Rylance is back - as Richard III, an obvious heir to Jerusalem's Johnny [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett Titus Andronicus is notoriously the most carnage-spattered play in the Shakespearean canon. Yes, this is the one where the titular Roman general, in revenge for stacks of [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett Fifteen years ago, Cheek By Jowl staged an unforgettable all-male As You Like It with the young Adrian Lester as Rosalind and the Forest of Arden evoked [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett The adulterous fallen heroine Beatrice, caught up in the dark twisted heart of Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling, cries out that she is in a labyrinth. And [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett The Overwhelming National Theatre, London Some 800,000 people lay dead in Rwanda in July 1994 after three months of genocidal slaughter, Hutu against Tutsi. That racial hatred [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett Coriolanus Globe LONDON This Roman tragedy is a tricky one. Or so I've always thought. Its titular warrior hero all too often seems cold, hard and impenetrable. [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett Hay Fever Haymarket Theatre Royal LONDON This house party from hell comedy by Noael Coward may be a piece of fluff, but it is a delightfully tickling [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett The Royal Hunt of the Sun NT Olivier LONDON After enduring about an hour of Trevor Nunn's excruciatingly pass revival of this conquistador Asaga, penned by Peter [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett When Tom Murphy's first full-length play - a strong domestic drama about brutalised Irish AmigrAs - hit the stage in 1961, it caused a nationalist furore and [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett In some ways, this new West End play starring Dawn French and the pop singer Alison Moyet (of Yazoo fame) is no great shakes. In some ways, [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett Julian Crouch has been biding his time. True, this fantastic stage designer hasn't been lying entirely doggo since Shockheaded Peter, the crankily macabre West End hit for [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett Best of Friends Hampstead LONDON Have you heard the one about the Englishman, the Irishman and the nun? Hugh Whitemore's biodrama portrays a meeting of minds which [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett Sinatra is alive and well and crooning just off Oxford Street. Or rather, in this tribute show, Ol' Blue Eyes glides in and out like the godhead [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett This is the one by Howard Brenton that enraged Mary Whitehouse. The notoriously fundamentalist defender of family values never actually saw the NT premiere in 1980, but [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett Hampstead Theatre needs the image of a sinking ship, stuck centre stage, like a hole in the hull. Standards have been listing alarmingly since this venue was [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett I thought I must have been imagining things but Ralph Fiennes really is - as had been rumoured - starring in a revival of Brian Friel's (arguably) [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett Even with Frank O'Connor's short story, 'The Late Henry Conran', serving as inspiration, it took Sam Shepard 10 years (1989-99) to complete this haunted drama about a [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett David Farr's first family show as artistic director of the Lyric draws on fantastical world of the Arabian Nights, also weaving in elements from Native American and [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett A scientific experiment goes badly wrong here, and I'm not just talking about the storyline of this futuristic three-hander, co-created by the neuropsychologist and author Paul Broks [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett It's quite a coup. Woody Allen hasn't only been filming his latest movie in London and performing with his New Orleans jazz band in Brighton. Slope off [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett One of the most notorious stage directions of recent times ' up there with Shakespeare's 'Exit pursued by a bear' ' occurs in Peter Shaffer's The Royal [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett Fingers crossed. It must be third time lucky. The West End in recent years has revived two woefully rusty comedies by Broadway's old fave, George S Kaufman. [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett The iguana can be heard wildly scuffling under the decking in this drama by Tennessee Williams, played out on the verandah of a decaying hotel in tropical [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett The Emperor Jones Gate, London You're looking down into a lion pit. That's what it feels like in this potently claustrophobic revival of Eugene O'Neill's hallucinatory, guilt-haunted [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett The Hypochondriac Almeida, London Life played a fantastically sick joke on MoliAre when he was starring in the title role of his comedy, Le Malade imaginaire ' [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett The Rubenstein Kiss Hampstead LONDON This new espionage drama and tragic romance ' strongly cast with Samantha Bond and Will Keen ' tells the story of a [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett Blue Man Group New London Theatre, London Ah, the New London, Drury Lane, where Cats played for 21 years. Now this concrete bunker of a theatre has [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett Florence Foster Jenkins raised the roof and thousands of eyebrows when she sang at New York's glittering Carnegie Hall in 1944. This eccentric homegrown soprano was, quite [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett This one-man bio-drama arrives from New York piled high with awards: a Pulitzer Prize, Obies and Tonys for Doug Wright's script, MoisAs Kaufman's directing, and Jefferson Mays' [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett It's been a week of delusions (at least, I think so). Reportedly, Christians have been protesting about the National Theatre resurrecting Howard Brenton. No, hang on, that's [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett Simon Hench has got it all ' or so it appears ' in Simon Gray's darkening comedy, now enjoying a 30th-anniversary revival. This stars Richard E Grant [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett Next week the slaughterous military hero Tamburlaine invades the Barbican's Young Genius season. Obviously, the sheep-stealer turned conqueror of Iran, Syria and Delhi was awe-inspiring, and this [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett Ibsen has his finger on the pulse. Watching Pillars of the Community, you would swear he'd been tuned into this week's news. Of course, the Norwegian's drama [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett And Then There Were None Gielgud, London Agatha Christie has, from the grave, enticed a surprisingly classy troupe to enact her hoary old whodunnit: the homicidal equivalent [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett God of Hell Donmar Warehouse, London Sam Shepard's new political satire ' set on a Wisconsin farmstead in Bush's paranoid USA ' is, at its best, hilarious [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett As You Desire Me Playhouse LONDON Not to be confused with As You Like It, this is Pirandello's psychological teaser-cum-detective drama of mistaken identities, Come tu mi [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett This is clearly meant to be the West End's new replacement for Art. Produced by David Pugh, Yasmina Reza's comic three-hander ran for six years at Wyndham's, [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett Having moaned about cheesy moments in Heroes, I merrily confess to having a hoot at Ducktastic, also produced by David Pugh. A knowingly kitsch extravaganza spoofing Las [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett What a difference a night makes. Ian Talbot's production of Cole Porter's musical romcom was, reportedly, stiff and low on fizz at its official press performance this [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett Playwright Gregory Burke got off to a flying start with Gagarin Way, his Edinburgh Fringe debut that transferred to the National Theatre and combined a bungled heist [...]

Byline: Kate Bassett Unemployed actors often know all about building and decorating. It's their means of surviving 'between jobs'. But now here we have four top Irish thesps ' including [...]