Why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed in fairies
Sherlock Holmes fans will be delighted to know that there is a new play featuring the great man. In it…
‘I couldn’t afford loo roll’: Bruce Robinson on being skint, Zeffirelli’s advances and Withnail’s return
Bruce Robinson is ramming a huge log into the grate of his ancient fireplace in mud-clogged Herefordshire. He’s 77 and…
Great Dane
Robert Gore-Langton on John Gielgud and Richard Burton’s fraught, botched, triumphant Hamlet
Oh yes she is!
There is nothing more panto than a dame. The grandmother of today’s dames is Dan Leno (1860–1904), a champion clog…
Fall from grace
Robert Gore-Langton explores the remarkable life of televangelist Tammy Faye, and its descent into chaos
One to spare
Why I donated my kidney
All the world’s a stage
A neglected little town in Merseyside is the natural home for Shakespeare North, says Robert Gore-Langton
Go down, Moses
Robert Gore-Langton on the man who wrecked New York
West End pearl
The newly renovated Theatre Royal Drury Lane has seen it all and staged it all, says Robert Gore-Langton
In defence of George Bernard Shaw
What has happened to Rada? The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art is the latest arts establishment to have gone mad.…
All About Eve was all about bitching – off-screen as well as on
In 1950, Bette Davis had a string of recent flops behind her. She was 41, married to an embarrassing twerp…
Moor and more
In 1824 an ambitious teenage actor fled to England from his native New York where he had been beaten up…
Tail-end Terry
It is often said that Terence Rattigan’s ‘thing’ was his homosexuality and that his disguising of it coloured everything he…
All white on the night
Shakespeare’s ‘Wars of the Roses’ will have no ethnic minority actors in the cast when the shows (two Henry VI…
North Cornwall
In a documentary filmed at the end of his life, Sir John Betjeman, who lived in the village of Trebetherick…
