Offended that the director would think her such a natural fit for the role of a faded movie star, the faded movie star Mae West famously turned down the role of Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard; a role that Gloria Swanson ended up inhabiting so thrillingly precisely due to the ironic self-reflexivity of [...]

At the clowning climax of The School for Scandal, the first production of Bath Theatre Royal’s summer season, a devious aristocrat feverishly skits around the stage in an attempt to keep the woman he has been impertinently flirting with hidden behind a screen from her husband and his brother. In Terry Johnson’s Hysteria, the second [...]

The contemporary theatrical climate poses a threat to playwrights such as Richard Brinsley Sheridan. His works concern themselves with artifice, gossip and profligacy; The School for Scandal specifically details the problematic marriage of the elderly Sir Peter Teazle and a young gold-digger, as well as a contest for love and legacy fought between the slickly [...]

  At a time when every passing month yields another blog post bemoaning the number and diversity of roles for women in the theatre, this revival of Miriam Margolyes and Sonia Fraser’s 1989 one-woman show, performed by Margolyes, makes for a strident rebuttal. Here are 23 such roles, taken from the life and works of [...]