Georges Seurat’s seascapes offer a quietly mesmerising encounter with one of the most distinctive imaginations in modern art. Immediately recognisable, his pointillist technique remains as striking now as it must have been when it first appeared. Rather than blending colour on the palette, Seurat places tiny touches of pigment on the canvas and allows the viewer’s eye to complete the image. The effect is both precise and atmospheric, creating paintings that feel calm, detached and radiant with light. This exhibition is especially rewarding because it shows Seurat working through his method from sketch to finished canvas. That progression makes clear how carefully he observed the sea, the sky and the shifting conditions of light before translating them into paint. The preparatory drawings and studies reveal an artist patiently refining composition and colour, while the completed works display a controlled harmony that never feels mechanical. The two studies (nos. 19 and 20) for "Th...

In 1879, Henrik Ibsen first staged A Doll's House . The play was a social provocation, and the breakdown of Nora and Torvald’s marriage was widely seen as an attack on patriarchy and a challenge to the roles imposed on women in marriage and society. It shocked audiences and provoked moral outrage across the ideological spectrum. In Anya Reiss’s twenty-first-century adaptation, however, the concerns are markedly different. Both partners are recast as mean-spirited, materialistic narcissists, and the collapse of their marriage stems less from structural injustice than from their own shallow values. It is more likely to leave audiences despairing at the state of the contemporary world that has produced such self-absorbed individuals. The tentative hopefulness present in Ibsen’s original, the sense that society might be reshaped for the better, is entirely absent. Instead Reiss offers a bleak, almost fatalistic vision, and her reworking of Ibsen’s characters and plot carries a tone of ...

He is an astronaut with the European Space Commission, while she works with a documentary film-maker. Both have emerged from deeply dysfunctional childhoods. At one point, we are given a catalogue of the cruelties he has endured since youth. She, meanwhile, has been shaped and manipulated by her father, a horror film director who cast her as a child actress. Given the backgrounds of these two characters, this is not a love story likely to end well, and its dark trajectory is signalled from the outset. We first meet Daniel Defoe on his space mission, his actions framed by a chorus who also comment on the couple’s later interactions. However, because the narrative is structured in this way, and because the conclusion is never in doubt, it becomes difficult to invest fully in the relationship. The process of falling in love also feels only lightly sketched in, as though of secondary importance. Instead, the drama centres on the pair’s fierce and often exhausting arguments. Emily unleashes...

In 1941, the physicist Werner Heisenberg, best known for formulating his uncertainty principle, visited his mentor Niels Bohr in occupied Denmark. The purpose of that meeting remains mysterious and, even with access to the later letters of the two men, their recollections of what took place differ considerably. At the heart of the matter lies the failure of Germany’s efforts to develop a nuclear weapon and Bohr’s role in the Allies’ success in this endeavour. Questions of patriotism and the moral neutrality of scientific inquiry are explored in the context of the individual’s broader ethical responsibility to humankind, set against the temptations of personal ambition. These are complex issues, and coming to terms with them is not made easier by the fact that the scientific territory itself remains opaque to most of us. Michael Frayn’s play attempts to render the physics more accessible, while also reflecting some of its underlying principles. As Frayn observes in the programme notes, ...

In The Print chronicles a turning point in the history of Britain’s labour movement. In 1984, when Brenda Dean became the first woman to head a British union, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was already advancing an agenda to curb the power of organised labour. On becoming general secretary of SOGAT, the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades, Dean found herself navigating not only bitter internal struggles between rival unions, but also the growing influence of Rupert Murdoch, owner of four of Britain’s most powerful newspapers. The play capably traces this complex conflict between management-driven modernisation and a union determined to protect its members’ pay and conditions. However, it too often tells rather than shows. Excessive narration drains the drama of urgency, with scenes feeling less like lived experience and more like illustrative fragments in a historical lecture. Much of this narration falls to Claudia Jolly as Dean, and while she brings intelligence and flashes of ...

Spoilt, rich people whose sole occupation is scheming to destroy the lives of the naïve and gullible. No, this is not a dramatised version of the Epstein files. Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ eighteenth-century epistolary novel, depicting amoral aristocrats on the brink of the French Revolution, has inspired many incarnations, yet it continues to shock and, at times, to delight. Christopher Hampton’s stage adaptation, first presented in 1985, streamlines the narrative, focusing on the rivalry and tangled emotional connection between the two master manipulators: the Marquise de Merteuil, played by Lesley Manville, and the Vicomte de Valmont, portrayed by Aidan Turner. Together they engage in a vicious game, with Valmont attempting to seduce both the innocent Cécile de Volanges and the devout Madame de Tourvel. It is wickedly entertaining material, and it proves just as intriguing in this context as it does in the well-known teen film, Cruel Intentions . There are, however, some issues with...

When some 18th-century diaries written by the founder of Harford House are discovered, his descendant Fenella calls in two academics, Abi and Marva, to examine them. The manuscripts, which detail Harford’s involvement in the slave trade, soon prove to be far more than a mere catalogue, and the complex history of Britain’s role in the enslavement of Africans acquires a distinctly human face. The subject is a fraught one, with strong, often ahistorical and unnuanced opinions drowning out the complicated reality. Winsome Pinnock has written a fascinating and richly funny play that shows how this heritage touches three women, each in a very different way. Pinnock manages to explore the complexity of her subject with extraordinary humour and humanity. This is theatre at its finest, taking on a difficult subject, humanising it, making it dramatically compelling and avoiding the needlessly didactic. There is much to learn and much to ponder in this play, but it is also deeply entertaining. Sy...

When a class of students meets to study The Crucible , the play takes on a radical new interpretation and some small town secrets begin to surface. Kimberly Belflower has crafted a work that updates Arthur Miller’s allegory, in which the Salem witch trials prefigure 1950s America’s obsession with communism and Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare, a period that smeared the reputations of many innocent people. Set in 2018, at the height of the #MeToo movement, John Proctor is the Villain explores sexual exploitation and the challenge of persuading others to believe what cannot easily be proven when the powers that be are not on side. While Miller’s commentary focused on mob hysteria, which reinforced the prevailing orthodoxy, Belflower examines the other side of the question. How do the voiceless assert themselves in the face of entrenched authority? Dónal Finn is utterly compelling as the cool young English teacher Mr Smith, who draws the best from his class. It is a performance that will reso...

When the timid and impecunious Miss Beringer moves into her new lodgings, she is warmly received by her sympathetic and kindly landlady, Mrs Amorest. However, her relationship with her fellow lodger soon proves far more fraught. It becomes clear that the formidable, almost malevolent, Mrs Payne covets Miss Beringer’s sole possession of value, a piece of amber given to her by a friend who has moved to India. Written in 1935 by Rodney Ackland and adapted from Hugh Walpole’s earlier novel, the play is a slender Gothic thriller that faintly echoes the macabre sensibilities of a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. The narrative itself is insubstantial, and the piece relies heavily on atmosphere and sharply etched characterisation. In both respects, this production proves strikingly effective. Juliette Demoulin’s set design conjures a vivid sense of shabby, faintly sinister decay, while Carla Joy Evans’s costumes are impeccably judged, ranging from the frayed gentility of Mrs Amorest and the uno...

Written in 1979, David Hare’s tale of a 1960s rock icon who has watched the summer of love dissolve into a nightmare of drugs and disillusionment is potent stuff. Maggie Frisby, inevitably reminiscent of Janis Joplin, drinks to excess and has been reduced to performing at a spring dance at Jesus College, Cambridge. The singer is at her lowest ebb, bitter, volatile, and narcissistic. When her sober, sensible ex-husband, who wrote most of her songs, and her cynical, exploitative agent arrive nothing bodes well for this gig. With Frisby and her agent, Saraffian, Hare evokes two of the most enduring stereotypes of the rock 'n' roll world, and Rebecca Lucy Taylor, aka Self Esteem, and Phil Daniels inhabit them with relish. Taylor is mesmerising as the drunken, unpredictable Maggie, while Daniels could rival Uriah Heep in sheer unctuousness. Both performances are captivating, and when Taylor strides onstage to belt out her hits, the energy is nothing short of explosive. The rest of t...