Episode Details

We have a pretty special guest interview this week: somehow we got Willem Dafoe on the phone from Venice, where he's now in his second year as artistic director of the Biennale Theatre Festival. Long before Spider-Man villains and Wes Anderson ensembles, Dafoe was a downtown New York theatre kid, spending four decades with the experimental Wooster Group, and he is as brilliant on the subject of live performance as you'd hope. He also tells Nick Curtis why he's 'very turned on right now'...

In reviews, the Old Vic's all-female Glengarry Glen Ross gives us plenty to chew over — is gender-swapping David Mamet's toxic-masculinity classic illuminating or just a clever exercise? — while A Fine Idea at the Arcola tackles the murky world of international aid with righteous research.

The delightful and ridiculously versatile Paul Chahidi talks about playing opposite Sandra Oh in Martin Crimp's reimagined The Misanthrope at the National.

And we dig into a stacked week of theatre news: a new James Graham play about Keynes (John Maynard, not Milton), the Shaftesbury Theatre's renaming in honour of Judi Dench, and Ian McKellen's much-anticipated return to the stage at The Yard.

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