Michael Billington

6 results

A new play seeks to challenge Samuel Beckett’s instructions that only men may appear in Waiting for Godot. Photograph: Ali Wright
Waiting for Gobnait? Beckett’s ban on women challenged
  • Stage
  • October 19, 2020, 13:27

A dead man’s voice can travel a long way. In 1988, Samuel Beckett sued a Dutch theatre company for casting women in his existential drama Waiting for (...)

John Laurie (Private Frazer) and Arthur Lowe (Captain Mainwaring) during an episode of ‘Dad’s Army’. Photograph: McCarthy/Getty Images
Dad’s Army at 50: the secret history of ‘comedy’s finest half-hour’

To explore the history of Dad’s Army, you have to enter a near-military environment. Speed bumps, vehicle checks and CCTV impede the route to the buil(...)

Footlights: Tyrone Guthrie in the early 1960s. Photograph: Hulton-Deutsch/Corbis via Getty
Rise Above! Letters from Tyrone Guthrie review: an admirable collection

In 2012 the Guardian’s veteran theatre critic Michael Billington named TyroneIn 2012 the Guardian’s veteran theatre critic Michael Billington named Ty(...)

Sculptor Donnacha Cahill’s giant pop-up audio visual sculpture, The Gramophone, at the market outside St Nicholas’ Collegiate Church as part of Galway International Arts Festival. Photograph: Joe O’Shaughnessy
Cheap seats are the future of theatre

1. Name-checking Galway’s designation as Capital of Culture works every time. ]Elvis Costello is on stage at the Big Top tent on Friday, the night (...)

Where are the women?: Queen Maeve in the woodcut that WB Yeats commissioned from Elinor Monsell for what became the Abbey Theatre. Photograph courtesy of the National Library of Ireland
Beyond the Abbey: the trouble for women in theatre

In the foyer of the Abbey Theatre a small plaque commemorates the staff and company members who participated in the 1916 Rising. Of the seven names(...)

Whose side is time on, anyway?

This column lasts approximately two minutes (without an interval). If I tell you this in advance, as some online publications have worryingly begun to(...)