Michael Billington

A year or two into the new millennium HP began to get indigestion and to feel weak and exhausted. An endoscopy revealed oesophagal cancer. He planned for chemotherapy, then surgery. In February 2002 he learned...

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...

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.

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,...

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...

Most reviewers preferred the first part. Michael Billington , reviewing for The Guardian, praised the play as less an anti-war diatribe than a feeling of the texture of ordinary lives.

Some reviews (from Michael Billington , for instance) were favourable; others were stinkers, complaining of melodrama and missed opportunity. Since the critics' night followed the Evening Standard theatre awards (a notoriously boozy mid-day occasion),...

Nearly forty years on, critic Michael Billington wrote that Owners had announced the arrival of a major talent I signally failed to recognise.

LP was so moved that she wept as she wrote this play. She later perceived an autobiographical element in it. Reviewers were on the whole less impressed than they had previously been by Page...

In 2018 critic Michael Billington described the play as insightful, honest, and shocking. Its shock was topical: audiences gasped when a character told he can escape deportation by securing his citizenship for fifty pounds bitterly...

Reviewer Michael Billington thought highly of this exciting, provocative play, in which he discerned the same epic reach as in TW 's recent radio adaptation of War and Peace.

Michael Billington wrote that Wine in the Wilderness is about the moral value of personal truth, while Wateris about the commercial value of artistic lies.Kate Kellaway discerned in this play a rage over...

Michael Billington wrote that Slovo's skillfully edited pieceasks the right questions in a way that is clear, gripping and necessary. He also wrote: It is fascinating. But is it theatre? He then answered his...