Alice Birch

Violet review – Coult’s debut opera opens Aldeburgh with assurance

Alice Birch’s elliptical story of a wife finding freedom as society disintegrates is opaque but Tom Coult’s confident and varied score gives the work power

Andrew Clements

05, Jun, 2022 @2:13 PM

‘I like being a maker of wonderful things’: composer Tom Coult on his opera Violet

With a libretto by Alice Birch, who adapted Normal People, this Aldeburgh festival opener revolves around a collapsing world. Apt, given that – with the pandemic – its creators didn’t know it would ever make the stage

Erica Jeal

26, May, 2022 @5:31 PM

Normal People review – Sally Rooney's love story is a small-screen triumph

This BBC/Hulu adaptation of the hit novel about the on-again, off-again relationship between two Irish teenagers captures the beauty and brutality of first love perfectly

Lucy Mangan

26, Apr, 2020 @5:00 AM

All the world's a page: the joy of scripts during theatre's shutdown

As venues close due to Covid-19, there’s a world of published drama to savour, from text that falls off the page to Alan Ayckbourn’s ‘undirectable’ collage

Mark Fisher

19, Mar, 2020 @4:32 PM

Carla Gugino: 'Sexuality is a primal part of who we are but it's been misused'

The star of Jett and Sin City is back on stage in Alice Birch’s raw Anatomy of a Suicide. She talks about the play’s emotional toll, how she unwinds and American puritanism

Alexis Soloski

12, Feb, 2020 @3:18 PM

Star debuts and happy returns: theatre, dance and comedy in 2020

Tom Stoppard gets personal, Cush Jumbo does Hamlet, Hollywood names bring everything from tragedy to comedy … plus dance confronts shame and there’s standup open heart surgery

Arifa Akbar, Lyndsey Winship and Brian Logan

02, Jan, 2020 @9:00 AM

The week in theatre: [Blank]; Lungs; Vassa – review

Alice Birch searches for hope in the criminal justice system, Claire Foy and Matt Smith bring wit to eco angst, and Siobhan Redmond makes a fine Gorky antiheroine

Susannah Clapp

26, Oct, 2019 @1:59 PM

[Blank] review – Alice Birch's build-your-own-play experiment

The playwright throws down the gauntlet to directors, and the result is a show full of ideas but lacking unity

Michael Billington

18, Oct, 2019 @9:51 AM

La Maladie de la Mort review – clinical dissection of male gaze

Katie Mitchell and Alice Birch’s stage adaptation of a Marguerite Duras novella is skilfully designed but strangely dulling

Kate Wyver

17, Aug, 2018 @6:00 PM

A desire for Duras: Katie Mitchell and Alice Birch on the writer's erotic, existential mystery

Part philosophical meditation, part fantasy, Marguerite Duras’s 1982 novella La Maladie de la Mort comes to the stage in a hi-tech Edinburgh festival show

Mark Fisher

01, Aug, 2018 @7:00 AM

'How does the internet feel?' Chloe Lamford's astounding stage designs - in pictures

Hacktivists in ball pools, teenagers riding unicorns and a world powered by actors on bikes … Chloe Lamford’s playful sets take audiences by surprise. She explains how she creates them

David Jays

12, Jul, 2017 @11:46 AM