Reviews by Dan Booth
No Exit
Dan Booth
Sartre's 90-minute play is an intense and occasionally uncomfortable dialogue between three souls damned to suffer each other's company for all eternity. After being led into a sparse room by a ...
10 years ago
No Exit
Arcadia
Dan Booth
Tom Stoppard's 1993 masterpiece covers a startling amount of ground in just over two hours, including, inter alia, Byronic poetry, landscape gardening, carnal embrace, the second law of ...
11 years ago
Arcadia
Top Hat
Dan Booth
Once upon a time, Hollywood stars had names like ‘Fred' and ‘Ginger'. The films they appeared in were light, frothy confections in which the stars acted a bit, and sang a bit… but danced as ...
11 years ago
Top Hat
Don Q
Dan Booth
After their barnstorming debut with last year's The Government Inspector, Flintlock Theatre return with an original piece: Anna Glynn's Don Q. Wisely deciding against a straight retelling of ...
11 years ago
Don Q
The Alchemist
Dan Booth
Wealth, sex and status - and how to get hold of them - have been the primary obsessions of the human race since we first came down from the trees. This is why Ben Jonson's satire on human folly and, ...
11 years ago
The Alchemist
Twelfth Night
Dan Booth
Twelfth Night, as its title suggests, takes its original inspiration from post-Christmas revels. Feasting, drinking, and subversion of social norms were the order of the day, and all feature in the ...
12 years ago
Twelfth Night
Entertaining Mr Sloane
Dan Booth
Kath, an outwardly simple woman in her 40s, invites a young man she meets in a library – the eponymous Mr Sloane – to live with her and her elderly father as a lodger (or, as she prefers ...
12 years ago
Entertaining Mr Sloane
Hearts by Luke Norris
Dan Booth
Hearts is a new short play by Luke Norris, staged by Pangbourne College as part of the National Theatre Connections programme for young actors. Set in a cramped changing room, it tells the story of ...
12 years ago
Hearts by Luke Norris
Heritage by Dafydd James
Dan Booth
It is May Day in the village of Northbridge, and a group of children gathers in an electrified cage. Ostensibly they are there to rehearse their performance of the village anthem while, out of sight, ...
12 years ago
Heritage by Dafydd James
This May Hurt A Bit
Dan Booth
Stella Feehily's This May Hurt a Bit is a play with an agenda; one might even say, a mission: to save the National Health Service. From its opening monologue – an almost verbatim reading of ...
12 years ago
This May Hurt A Bit
Farcicals
Dan Booth
Farcicals – a new pair of one-act comedies by the prolific Ayckbourn – is a conscious attempt by the playwright to find “some sunnier places” in contrast to what my fellow ...
12 years ago
Farcicals
Doctor Faustus
Dan Booth
In his programme notes for the Oxford Theatre Guild's production of Dr Faustus, Director Mike Taylor hopes that the show will be, “loud, funny, shocking, rude and provocative”. To ...
12 years ago
Doctor Faustus
The Government Inspector
Dan Booth
The initial publication of Gogol's satire in 1836 was greeted by such uproar that the author was forced to leave Russia for a while. His unflattering depiction of endemic corruption among the ...
12 years ago
The Government Inspector
Winston on the Run
Dan Booth
1899, and on the outbreak of the second Boer War, 24-year-old Winston Churchill – ex-soldier, failed politician, and disappointment to an illustrious father – is sent to South Africa as ...
12 years ago
Winston on the Run
The Jester's Tomb
Dan Booth
The Jester's Tomb is a short verse play by actor/playwright Mary Glaspole. It has been performed at several venues in Oxford since its premiere in 2012, including the Old Fire Station and ...
12 years ago
The Jester's Tomb
