In mythology, Alcestis is the model wife, willing to give up her own life for her husband’s. In Katharine Beutner’s lyrical retelling, the truth is more complex.

The smell of sawdust, misplaced props, shouts about lights: Steve Brachmann reports on a play going up and the ways in which several real people play their parts.

John Goodman, John Glover, and Nathan Lane are currently starring on Broadway in Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece; Andrew Martin’s got an aisle seat, and reports back on a surprisingly sunny Waiting for Godot.

Harold Pinter, a giant of 20th century literature, is dead, but the legacy of his work lives on. In a letter from London on a recent performance of Pinter’s No Man’s Land, Bryn Haworth takes a look at how the poet and playwright prepared his own memorial.

For decades, Oscar Hammerstein transformed the world of musical theater, writing the lyrics for such blockbusters as Showboat, Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music. Michael Adams gives us front row seats for a tour through the master’s many moods.

Euripides’ Medea has been explained, performed, and debated for the last 2000 years. Panagiotis Polichronakis looks at Robin Robertson’s new translation and ponders whether it’s fit for scholars, dramaturgs, or the all-elusive common reader.

Neuroscience? In Elsinore? Lianne Habinek has Hamlet on the brain and goes at the question in book and volume. You may never think about Hamlet, or think about thinking, in the same way again.

William Shakespeare lived under the Tudors for most of his life, but he only wrote about them once, in his play The History of the Life of King Henry VIII – or did he? In our latest One Encounter, and also the new installment in his “Year with the Tudors,” Steve Donoghue takes a look at that play and the fractious theories attendant.

A comprehensive new theater book, London Stage in the 20th Century, leads Honoria St. Cyr to reminisce on performances magnificent and disastrous staged in the world-famous West End.

The only trouble with Sean O’Casey’s brilliant plays is that they overshadow
his magnificent memoirs. In our monthly feature, Steve Donoghue
tries to even the scales.

In a review of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s restoration of the famous First Folio, Garrett Handley investigates the maddening vagaries that have always confronted the Bard’s editors.