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...

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...

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 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.

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...

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...

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.