Dzifa Benson

Nov 1, 2024 | telegraph.co.uk | Dzifa Benson

Siân Phillips in Table Number Seven Credit: Manuel Harlan Terence Rattigan achieved success relatively young, becoming one of the most popular dramatists of the postwar period and, at one stage, he was the highest-paid screenwriter in the world. The tide changed for his career as a playwright when John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and the theatrical cult of the Angry Young Men came along in the late 1950s and 1960s and dealt a cultural broadside to Rattigan’s brand of genteel drama examining...

Oct 3, 2024 | telegraph.co.uk | Dzifa Benson

Ellora Torchia and Billy Howle as Alison and Jimmy in Look Back in Anger Marc Brenner In the 1950s, plays such as Arnold Wesker’s Roots and John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger tipped post-war British theatre out of the doldrums of polite drawing room dramas into grittier affairs featuring working-class characters. Look Back In Anger even engendered the phrase “angry young men” and in so doing launched the wave of kitchen-sink realism that transformed British theatre. These groundbreaking...

Sep 27, 2024 | telegraph.co.uk | Dzifa Benson

Keith Allen as O’Brien in 1984 Simon Annand Most people will remember him as a hellraiser with an incendiary comic talent from the 90s but Keith Allen has been steadily crafting a portfolio of theatre roles over the years, including Pinter’s brutal patriarch Max in The Homecoming here in 2022. His latest harnesses the explosive energy that fuelled his past notoriety into a mesmerisingly sinister turn as a bespectacled O’Brien, Big Brother’s apparatchik in 1984, Ryan Craig’s adaptation of...

Aug 28, 2024 | telegraph.co.uk | Dzifa Benson

Sharon Duncan-Brewster and Erin Doherty Credit: Helen Murray Death of England: Closing Time, the final instalment of Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’s ambitious state-of-the-nation trilogy is a ferocious way to bring the cycle to a close. The plays are standalone pieces but each story references the others and becomes richer in juxtaposition. The West End transfer sees all three being performed together for the first time – as the writers intended – and makes for the most layered and satisfyingly...

Aug 23, 2024 | msn.com | Dzifa Benson

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