Arts Reviews

Pinero’s comedy The Magistrate is a marvellous confection of shameful secrets and multiplying concealments. Agatha, a beautiful widow of 36, has trimmed five years from her age in order to bag her second husband, Aeneas Posket, an agreeably pompous magistrate. Her subterfuge is imperilled by her 19-year-old son who must pretend to be 14 in order to make the maths work. To please his mother, the young buck behaves like a child at home. But elsewhere he pleases himself. He keeps a private room at the racy Hotel des Princes in town. One evening, he persuades his weakling stepfather to accompany him for a night of drunken antics. The police

Next time someone bores on about the so-called decline of the British literary novel you might consider pointing out to your dinner-party companion that this is not such a bad thing. It suggests, if the thesis is true, that there aren’t too many problems in this realm that are still worth exploring, far less solving. Consider, by contrast, the twin and warring agonies of Israel and Palestine. Is there a better, bigger, subject for any novelist working today than this? I suspect not which is one reason why the likes of Amos Oz and David Grossman (and, doubtless, others too) are vital in every sense of the word. These dual

There was some TV stardust at Stephen Fry and Mark Rylance’s all male production of Twelfth Night at the Apollo on Friday night. Gary Lineker and his wife Danielle were part of an ecstatic audience that gave a standing ovation to the players in this wildly successful show, which has recently transferred from the Globe to the West End. For those of you who are surprised to find that the perma-tanned resident of the Match of the Day sofa and his good lady wife take in Shakespeare of an evening, I hear that the Linekers count themselves as massive Mark Rylance fans after seeing him star as Jonny ‘Rooster’ Byron in

When I first began rehearsing a musical, I discovered to my genuine surprise that I was breaking an unwritten rule…that directors of serious ‘legitimate’ theatre should not dirty their hands by contact with such a lower form of entertainment! Since that time, it’s become almost impossible to name a leading play director who has not been successful and influential with musicals. It’s just possible that, back in 1986, our Royal Shakespeare Company show Les Misérables, which survived a universal critical drubbing in this country, was a vital step forward in proving that a musical could actually be about something — poverty, injustice, revolution, religious fundamentalism, that sort of thing. But