You have no items in your cart. Want to get some nice things?
Go shopping
Fences: How Do You Adapt A Play By August Wilson?
How successfully does Denzel Washington translate August Wilson’s claustrophobic domestic drama to the big screen?
A Womb With a View: Three Novels Narrated By A Foetus
A foetus feels like a new narrative perspective – but, in the space of a year, three foetus-narrated novels have arrived at once.
London Film Festival: Nocturnal Animals and the Novel Behind It
Austin Wright’s tricksy novel Tony & Susan didn’t make much of a splash in 1993 – but now Tom Ford has given it the Hollywood treatment.
Close, But No Cigar: Vamos Cuba! at Sadler’s Wells
We all like a good story. The reliable arch of a narrative is what impels us to read, to go to the theatre, to write. For this reason I will ...
The Post-Fact World: The Truth at Wyndham’s Theatre
Florian Zeller’s latest is a play for our post-fact, Brexity age.
Filtered Truth: A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa
Agualusa’s novel is an episodic, poetic and raw treatment of Angolan independence.
Life Is Like This: A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk
One can’t help but leave Pamuk’s novel feeling a little disconcerted.
Life’s True Sadness: A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler
I want to press this book aggressively into people’s hands. But its language, its length and the inclinations of its central character all call for restraint.
The Ministry of Truth: The Four Books by Yian Lianke
Xenobe Purvis on Chinese novel about totalitarian madness: the third of her Man Booker International Prize reviews.
Story of an Erasure: The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
Xenobe Purvis reviews Elena Ferrante’s contender for the Man International Booker Prize.
Plot vs Character: The Vegetarian by Han Kang
In the run-up to the Man International Booker Prize announcement on May 16, Xenobe Purvis will be reviewing each of the sixth shortlisted books. First, The Vegetarian by South Korea’s ...
What Would Genet Think?: Deathwatch at the Print Room
Sitting in Notting Hill’s Print Room, watching Deathwatch on the thirtieth anniversary of Genet’s death, Xenobe Purvis couldn’t help but wonder: what would Genet have made of this production?
Power and Irony: The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes
Xenobe Purvis reviews Julian Barnes’s impressionistic biography of Dmitri Shostakovich, his first novel since 2011’s Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending.
Poetic Warfare: Pink Mist at the Bush Theatre
While Owen Sheers’ verse drama about soldiers in Afghanistan has a troubling tendency to tell rather than show, it has moments of real poignancy.
How Room and Florian Zeller’s The Mother Dissect Motherhood
Xenobe Purvis looks at how Florian Zeller’s The Mother, currently at the Tricycle Theatre, and Lenny Abrahamson’s film Room portray both the joy and claustrophobia of motherhood.
The Quintessence of Ibsenism: Little Eyolf at the Almeida Theatre
Ibsen is considered a father figure for today’s realist theatre. But this canonisation loses sight of the originality of his voice, argues Xenobe Purvis.
A Problem Play No Longer: Measure For Measure at the Young Vic
How does Joe Hill-Gibbins’ bold new production of Measure For Measure deal with Shakespeare’s “problem play”? Unproblematically, says Xenobe Purvis.
Your Life and Mine: The Cocktail Party at the Print Room
When Alec Guinness starred in the original 1949 production of T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, he said: “I don’t know what it means. In fact, I don’t know what meaning ...
Opera and Translation: Verdi’s La Traviata at the Tricycle Theatre
Should opera be translated at all? Opera Up Close’s English-language version of La Traviata is currently at the Tricycle – but what it gains in clarity it loses in ...
The Fierce Imagination of Yukio Ninagawa: Hamlet and Kafka on the Shore at the Barbican Theatre
This year, the great Japanese theatre director Yukio Ninagawa turns eighty. Xenobe Purvis reviews two of his productions at the Barbican