This is a fairly complete collection of the theatre (/comedy/cabaret/dance/opera) reviews I've written, and been paid for, since my first excrescences for The Independent while still a student in 1989.  Every so often a computer crash lost me a few days' or weeks' worth of files, and some blatant duplications/rewrites as between different outlets have been omitted, but the vast majority are here.

The updating process ran out of steam some time in 2006, but it is my firm intention that steam shall be reacquired.  But there are something of the order of 350 pieces waiting to be collated, converted and cross-indexed.  Now, I know I'm anal (I've got a chit from Counselling to that effect), but that's a bit much even for me at one easy sitting.  In the meantime, most of the reviews I've written can be found (if you're devious enough with your search terms) on the web site of the Financial Times, for which I've written since 1994 and where I became the (joint) senior theatre critic in the spring of 2007.

Gaps occur and/or review formats go briefly haywire around April each year (when I've attended the National Student Drama Festival) and also in August (Edinburgh International Festival and Fringe); where available, pieces about these festivals are also included.  (The reviews I've written of exclusively musical events, however, aren't in this collection.)

Moreover, a number of duplicate reviews are not reproduced here, except generally when a show is reviewed both in its own right and as part of a round-up column.  Where I've reviewed a show singly for more than one outlet, the review published on this site is the... well, the "weightier" one: in practice, this means I have favoured Financial Times pieces over those written for the now-defunct listings Web site divento.com or for ITV's Teletext service.

Each piece is marked with the name of the newspaper/magazine/etc. by which it was originally commissioned.

Where possible, each piece carries the date of the show's opening night (or the press night for a particular cast change, as appropriate), as listed in Theatre Record; this is usually, though not always, the night on which I saw the show in question – the occasional schedule clash sometimes leads to a "slippage" of a night or two.  Pieces seen at festivals have no such formal opening date, so no date is given beyond the month in question.  Nor is one given for many Christmas shows, simply because the schedule's too bloody crowded at that time of year to keep track!

A couple of general things to bear in mind:

• The length of these reviews varies wildly: the majority of pieces (certainly from the period 1995-early 2003), having been commissioned by the Financial Times, are in the 400-600 word range, whereas some Edinburgh reviews for The Independent were hacked to fewer than 50 words!  Likewise, the tone can vary a fair bit depending on the original target readership; in a number of instances in 2004–05 you can compare a review of a show written for the general readership of Teletext, or written for but unpublished by the FT, with the more discursive context (even when it may recycle much of the same material) of a Theatre Record editorial.
• For some years the Financial Times over-commissioned reviews, so that not every piece written for the paper has actually been printed in it.  Nothing to do with the quality either of the shows in question or of my reviews, honest, guv; it's more a matter of advertising space eating into the arts page or famous people inconsiderately dying on the wrong day so that their obituary gets run instead of my review (I'll never forgive Burt Lancaster!).

• In the case of reviews commissioned but unprinted (see above), I'm assuming that the paper won't mind my now making available for the first time my reviews of a couple of hundred shows which have long since closed.
• City Limits magazine, on whose staff I worked from 1991, closed in 1993.  I have no idea where its intellectual property rights now reside, but as with unprinted pieces, I'm working from the assumption that, frankly, nobody gives a stuff about my reproducing reviews from that period.
• The same applies to the website divento.com, which folded in autumn 2002.  I have now added a couple of hundred or so reviews I wrote for this site subsequent to signing an exclusivity clause with them over the material in question in mid-2001, on the assumption that I'm not doing site owners Vivendi-Universal, the second biggest media corporation in the world, out of significant amounts of goodwill they might bring in by selling on the stuff I wrote for them.
• Teletext continues, but with its dedicated Stage section now defunct; I never signed a contract with them, so I'm assuming that the general convention applies regarding my rights in the pieces I wrote for that service.

This index – see links in table below – is arranged year by year.  Within each given year the default arrangement is alphabetically by play title (or performer surname or festival name, where that's more salient), but from there you can also access one arranged chronologically by opening date.  There's also an alphabetical index covering the entire collection letter by initial letter, and – who knows? – maybe I'll even get round to putting hyperlinks in the text, so you can follow people's careers from one review to another.  But gimme a chance...!

I know it's possibly incredibly vain and/or foolhardy posting all these pieces up in one place, so people can see almost at a glance how wrong I've been on various occasions, and how prone to over-using certain turns of phrase (give me a pound for every "over-egged", every "moves too fast for its mistakes to catch up with it" or every "Daddy, what's that man for?", and I could retire now).  But, also, it might actually prove useful as a resource, and that's the spirit in which I've bunged it all up.  So here's hoping it turns out to have some value, and I don't just come over as a prize twonk.

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