We are in a dowdy shoe store - it could as easily be Ireland as the American south. The light is dusty and brown as a pair of brogues. Two women are talking loudly; there is a rhythm to their voices that could fool you into thinking their conversation harmless. But it is alive with warnings. They are gossiping about violence.

Tennessee Williams's Orpheus Descending (currently at the Donmar Warehouse, [...]

Women who rule the roost are a tradition in Irish writing. In Frank McGuinness's tremendous new play - his first for five years - men are, without exception, the weaker sex.

Dolly West's Kitchen is dominated not by Dolly, but by her mother, Rima, who looks like a queen out of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland and is a sort of self-appointed royal: tipsily majestic. She does not, she admits, know what [...]

What is Michael Gambon doing reclining on a cloud? He is chatting about death and likening it to some "hideous long soliloquy". It takes a while to establish that we're in the 17th century, sharing the thespian hallucinations of John Shank, a dying actor. The clouds are no more than a sick man's scenery and will soon give way, for there's nothing overcast about Nicholas Wright's imagination. His new play, [...]

Here it is - a showcase of Harold Pinter's career. His first play, The Room, written in 1957, and his new play, Celebration, are at the Almeida Theatre together, directed by the man himself. But would it prove a celebration? "I am so glad not to be reviewing this," someone murmured behind me, "because you could never say what you really thought of it." The implication was clear: Pinter has [...]

Summertime and the living is uneasy. In the Deep South, in the heat, the cotton is high and tempers are, too. Archie Lee Meghan is deep in debt; he has lost out in business as operator of the town's cotton gin (the machine that separates the cotton from the seed) to Sicilians, and he is about to lose everything from his pay-as-you-go furniture to his wife, the Baby Doll of [...]

A prisoner on Robben Island complains when his cellmate tries to teach him the story of Antigone. Greek legend, he protests, is useless. Only history is of value. It is an arresting moment in The Island which was first played over 20 years ago at the Royal Court Theatre and is now at the Lyttelton with the same cast and directed by Peter Brook. The play was a collaboration between [...]

Who could have predicted that Conor McPherson's The Weir, set in an Irish bar filled with voluble failures and a strange, bereaved young woman, would become one of the most critically acclaimed plays in London? It was a hit on Broadway, too, and is still playing - in a slightly stale way - in London's West End. Ian Rickson, the director of the Royal Court theatre in London, must be [...]

George Bernard Shaw sets the scene for Widowers' Houses as follows: "In the garden restaurant of a hotel at Remagen on the Rhine, on a fine afternoon in August in the eighteen eighties. Looking down the Rhine towards Bonn, the gate leading from the garden to the riverside is seen on the right. The hotel is on the left . . ." Shaw's stage directions read like bossy little novels. [...]

I was shocked when the American playwright Wallace Shawn, whom I was interviewing a few weeks ago, told me sadly that the people most likely to appreciate his work in the States never see it. Was he suggesting that intellectuals stay away from the theatre? And could this, I wondered later, happen here? Might theatre by the end of the next century - or much sooner - have become terminally [...]

Above, a man is swimming towards us. The audience and the stage are the deeps. His projected image is upside down - the black surface of the piano below him shines like a pool. He is larger than life and lost. Love is his element. The young man in the Czech composer Leos Janacek's Diary of One Who Vanished has fallen for a gypsy girl. "Everything is up-ended," he complains. [...]