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Michael Billington

Michael Billington has written about theatre for the Guardian since 1971. His books include The 101 Greatest Plays and State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945

January 2025

  • from left, Avril Elgar, Marianne Faithfull, Glenda Jackson, George Cole and Alan Webb in Three Sisters, 1967.

    Fury and denunciations: when pop idol Marianne Faithfull took to the stage – and silenced her critics

    Michael Billington
    Faithfull’s casting in Chekhov’s Three Sisters in 1967 caused a perfect storm, yet she held her own against the vastly more experienced cast including Glenda Jackson. It was the start of many such triumphs
  • Cate Blanchett plays Arkadina in the Barbican production.

    In The Seagull, Cate Blanchett and Thomas Ostermeier could make small details seismic

    Michael Billington
    The Oscar winner stars in the German director’s production of the Chekhov classic where ‘everything is open to interpretation’

    • Joan Plowright was a dynamic force for change in British theatre

    • Electra-fying! Captain Marvel’s Brie Larson brings back an ancient avenger

    • Death and the King’s Horseman: the return of Wole Soyinka’s enduring mystery

December 2024

  • Alan Hollinghurst

    Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel is a sharp account of British theatre – and even pastiches my criticism

    Michael Billington
    Our Evenings follows an actor through 60 years of treading the boards and holds up a mirror to how society has shapeshifted

November 2024

  • Rupert Goold.

    Rupert Goold is an audacious innovator. He will make waves at the Old Vic

    Michael Billington
    Having worked his magic as director of the Almeida theatre, the gifted Goold is bound for greater glories: the National had better watch out
  • The Shakespeare Portraits

    Lend me your ears: great Shakespearean actors given hi-tech talking portraits

    A radical new exhibition celebrates stars including Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart by combining subtly moving artworks with their own voices. The results are uncanny

    • Sigourney Weaver’s West End debut as Prospero evokes a storm of past Tempests

    • Timothy West: a modest maestro who embodied the best of British theatre

    • The importance of freeing Earnest – without bursting Oscar Wilde’s ‘delicate bubble of fancy’

      Michael Billington

October 2024

  • Leonard Rossiter as Brecht’s Arturo Ui.

    Leonard Rossiter’s manic physicality was a revelation in British theatre

    Michael Billington
  • Almeida Theatre Look Back in Anger Ellora Torchia and Billy Howle

    John Osborne and Arnold Wesker captured the 50s but remain playwrights for the ages

    Michael Billington

September 2024

  • Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens in Noel Coward’s Private Lives

    Maggie Smith found a clarity on stage that in some ways surpassed her screen work

    Michael Billington
  • Not so much eating biscuits in the small hours with the laptop, then … Ian McKellen as Jimmy Erskine in The Critic.

    ‘I filed my copy from Waterloo station loos’: the Guardian’s theatre critics assess The Critic

August 2024

  • Sir Ken Dodd.

    Sir Ken Dodd’s new ‘happiness centre’ tickles me but should be taken seriously

    Michael Billington
    A £15m, four-storey space in Liverpool is to be dedicated to the man once known as Professor Yaffle Chuckabutty. Let’s hope it will delve as deeply as he did into comedy’s infinite variations
  • Soul vendor … Dominic West in rehearsal for The Marlowe Sessions.

    Dominic West is a fabulous Faustus but this movie marathon plays the devil with Marlowe

    Michael Billington
    West joined a starry cast for script-in-hand readings of Christopher Marlowe’s complete works in Canterbury. The resulting films are frustrating
  • A mere three … Ian McKellen in Henceforward (1988); Michael Gambon in A Chorus of Disapproval (1985); Jane Asher in The Things We Do for Love (1997).

    ‘My first play was terrible!’ Alan Ayckbourn on his dazzling career – and writing his 90th play

    As he hits an extraordinary landmark, the playwright relives his first drama, which made him £30, and recalls bouncing back from the stroke that left him desolate and devoid of ideas

July 2024

  • Ian McKellen as Estragon and Patrick Stewart as Vladimir in Waiting For Godot at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in 2009.

    The waiting is over! Have the times finally caught up with Godot?

  • Avita Jay reads to a patient in St Thomas's Hospital, London.

    ‘As good as playing to a packed theatre’: the actors who perform for stroke survivors

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