Michael Billington

Beecham called the play a ferocious Geordie drama thick with dialect, diatribe and an unsparing depiction of the brutalities of the industrial north at the turn of the century. Its recent director, Jonathan Miller ...

In April 2003 CC participated in a series of events at the Royal Court entitled War Correspondence. She composed her documentary piece Iraqdoc, out of actual remarks from a website chatroom frequented by...

In November, the next number of Poetry London (edited by Tambimuttu ) confessed in a footnote to having transposed, by printer's error, the concluding passages of these very interesting poems. It reprinted the first poem...

According to Michael Billington , this mesmerizing play . . . starts as a domestic inquisition and opens up to admit the horrors of twentieth-century history. It ends on a note of savage despair.

Antonia Fraser called The Rooma savage, melancholy play which ends in appalling on stage physical violence. None of Pinter's other mature plays do this: he learned to keep the violence either offstage or in...

Michael Billington in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography wrote that Pinter here staked out his own particular theatrical territory, dark with the unexplained threat of violence. The room of the title, a bedsitter occupied...

In this play's three apparently naturalistic acts, a man named Stanley is tracked down in a seaside boarding-house by two strangers, the Jewish Goldberg and the Irish McCann. They turn up on his birthday and...

Trevor Nunn , director of Frozen, says that BL picks the most difficult subjects and faces them head-on, and finds that the writing is wonderfully spare and wonderfully poetic. In England Frozen won two...

Michael Billington judged that this play felt like cramming a trunkload of ideas into a tiny case; that being too compressed for its own good made it less successful than the dazzlingLove and Information.

Nevertheless, reviews in the daily and Sunday papers were bad (including those of Bernard Levin and, more surprisingly, Michael Billington ).Benedict Nightingale in the New Statesman provided an appreciative notice and called...

English-speaking critics are divided on the play's politics. Margaret Llewellyn-Jones thought it ideologically somewhat questionable in the way that it combines Brechtian distancing techniques with encouragement for the audience to cheer during the wrestling matches,...

Michael Billington suggested in the ODNB that Pinter's reputation and career might have developed differently had this play been seen by the public at the time of its completion.

Reviewer Michael Billington felt that the plot of Blackbird had a traditional feel—that using a death to precipitate a dispute over physical and emotional ownership was, along with other elements in the play, derivative...

Reviewer Michael Billington especially admired the vigour and irony of O'Brien's language.

The reanimation of FB 's comedies is a happy story. Tara Ghoshal Wallace edited A Busy Day in paperback in 1984. A fringe production performed in Bristol in 1993, then in Islington, London, in...