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Michael Billington

Michael Billington has written about theatre for the Guardian since 1971. His books include The 101 Greatest Plays and State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945

August 2024

  • Sir Ken Dodd.

    Sir Ken Dodd’s new ‘happiness centre’ tickles me but should be taken seriously

    Michael Billington
    A £15m, four-storey space in Liverpool is to be dedicated to the man once known as Professor Yaffle Chuckabutty. Let’s hope it will delve as deeply as he did into comedy’s infinite variations
  • Soul vendor … Dominic West in rehearsal for The Marlowe Sessions.

    Dominic West is a fabulous Faustus but this movie marathon plays the devil with Marlowe

    Michael Billington
    West joined a starry cast for script-in-hand readings of Christopher Marlowe’s complete works in Canterbury. The resulting films are frustrating
  • A mere three … Ian McKellen in Henceforward (1988); Michael Gambon in A Chorus of Disapproval (1985); Jane Asher in The Things We Do for Love (1997).

    ‘My first play was terrible!’ Alan Ayckbourn on his dazzling career – and writing his 90th play

    As he hits an extraordinary landmark, the playwright relives his first drama, which made him £30, and recalls bouncing back from the stroke that left him desolate and devoid of ideas

July 2024

  • Ian McKellen as Estragon and Patrick Stewart as Vladimir in Waiting For Godot at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in 2009.

    The waiting is over! Have the times finally caught up with Godot?

    Samuel Beckett’s groundbreaking play is back again, this time starring Ben Whishaw and Lucian Msamati. Its tragicomic take on existence may match our cultural moment
  • Avita Jay reads to a patient in St Thomas's Hospital, London.

    ‘As good as playing to a packed theatre’: the actors who perform for stroke survivors

    In hospitals around the UK, InterAct provides bespoke readings tailored to individual patients’ tastes. Practitioners explain how they benefit too
  • Christopher Villiers and Nancy Carroll

    Actors’ show-stopping art exhibition: ‘We’re used to rejection so nothing was turned down!’

    More than 250 works by 40 stage talents are on display in London for an impressively wide-ranging event that supports the Theatre Artists Fund

June 2024

  • Blind Runner by Amir Reza Koohestani.

    Venice Biennale theatre: running from UK immigration and revisiting Chekhov

    A welcome glimpse of what is playing beyond Britain, this year’s programme includes a deeply moving drama of migrant jeopardy and an intriguing Three Sisters

May 2024

  • Lucy Tregear as Meg Page, Richard Cordery as Sir John Falstaff and Claire Carrie as Alice Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Old Vic, London, in 2003.

    Need proof who wrote Shakespeare’s plays? See The Merry Wives of Windsor

  • ‘An ideal play’ … The Two Gentlemen of Verona in rehearsals led by Greg Doran at St Catherine's College, Oxford.

    ‘They’re teaching me’: Greg Doran on staging Shakespeare’s unloved Two Gents with students

April 2024

  • Trevor Griffiths, playwright

    Trevor Griffiths: Mancunian Marxist whose political plays deserve revival

    Griffiths, who has died aged 88, explored the conflict between reform and revolution in plays and scripts from the film Reds to dramas such as Occupations, The Party and Comedians

March 2024

  • John Savident (Horatio Hobson) in "Hobsons Choice" @ Chichester Festival Theatre (opening 2-08-07) (©Tristram Kenton 07-07) 3 Raveley Street, London NW5 2HX. Tel: 02072675550 mobile: 07973617355. email: tristram@tristramkenton.com

    Letters: John Savident obituary

    Michael Billington writes: John Savident urged me to sharpen my prose style and improve my dress sense
  • Edward Bond

    Edward Bond: a phenomenal talent who upturned theatre with his explosive plays

    Michael Billington
    One of the greatest dramatists of the 20th century, Bond – who has died aged 89 – confronted audiences with ‘the crisis in the human species’
  • Simon Callow in The Mystery of Charles Dickens at the Comedy theatre, London, in 2000.

    Great expectations and a bleak house: the promise and perils of staging Dickens

    London Tide at the National Theatre is the latest in a flood of Dickensian adaptations. Few have captured the novelist’s surreal imagination – are solo shows the most successful?

February 2024

  • Timothy West and Prunella Scales in Long Day's Journey Into Night at Bristol Old Vic in 1991.

    Long Day’s Journey Into Night: a grand masterpiece and an ordinary family drama

  • A new adaptation of Hamlet, starring two-time Academy Award nominee and Shakespearian titan Ian McKellen, will be heading to UK Cinemas for One Night Only on 27th February.

    The film’s the thing: Ian McKellen’s new Hamlet shows the screen can outdo the stage

    Michael Billington

January 2024

  • Fine performance … David Warner as Falstaff and Geoffrey Streatfeild as Prince Hal in Henry IV Part I in 2008.

    The many faces of Falstaff: Shakespeare’s tragicomic knight is as complex as Hamlet

    Ian McKellen follows in the footsteps of David Warner and Antony Sher as he takes on a character who has been played as wittily jovial and cruelly cunning
  • Doon Mackichan, James Corden, Martin Savage and Lloyd Hutchinson in A Respectable Wedding at the Young Vic, London, in 2007.

    Front row at the wedding from hell: a toast to theatre’s marital ding-dongs

    Party punch-ups, brides in disguise, simmering family rancour … playwrights have cordially invited audiences to some nightmarish nuptials
  • Michael Hastings, aged 18, working at his mother's council flat in Brixton, London, in February 1957.

    Seeking Michael Hastings, the missing man of British theatre

    Best known for writing Tom and Viv, Hastings made his debut as a teenage dramatist in the 1950s. Now, his vivid ‘young man’s play’ Don’t Destroy Me is back

December 2023

  • Director Michael Blakemore.

    From Joe Egg to Noises Off, Michael Blakemore was a superb craftsman of theatre

    Michael Billington
  • Audra McDonald performs in My Favorite Things at Theatre Royal Drury Lane

    Oh, what a beautiful evening – but this ritzy Rodgers and Hammerstein tribute could have been radical

    Michael Billington
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