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Kathryn Hunter

May 2026

  • LADIES FIRSTLadies First. (L-R) Sacha Baron Cohen as Damien Sachs and Rosamund Pike as Alex Fox in Ladies First. Cr. Rob Youngson/Netflix © 2026.

    Ladies First review – Sacha Baron Cohen and Rosamund Pike come last in one-joke Netflix comedy

    A misogynist is made to learn the error of his ways in this painfully dated and embarrassingly star-packed sexism comedy

February 2026

  • Philippe Gaulier

    Philippe Gaulier, clown guru and mentor to theatre and comedy greats, dies aged 82

    Sacha Baron Cohen pays tribute to teacher who ran school outside Paris and was a formative influence on countless comedians and actors

December 2025

  • Comic swagger … Kathryn Hunter, right, with Arinzé Kene in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo at the Young Vic, London.

    Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo review – wild horror and sharp-toothed comedy from the Iraq war

    Rajiv Joseph’s surreal tale of a captive animal that returns from the dead after the 2003 invasion is bracingly unconventional

October 2025

  • Tessa Thompson as Hedda in low-cut dress, choker and long white gloves.

    Hedda review – Ibsen meets Downton Abbey in Nia DaCosta’s exotic rendering of classic play

    High society in 1950s Britain is the setting in which the free-spirited but manipulative Hedda marries for money. Cue jaded pleasure and absurdity

June 2025

  • Scott Karim in Storehouse.

    Storehouse review – an exasperating wander through the internet’s ‘arkive’

    While Liana Patarkatsishvili’s gargantuan immersive show looks spectacular, too many ideas are thrown about without being tethered to a story

September 2024

  • A woman dressed in black gazes doubtfully into the eyes of her husband

    The Front Room review – Brandy Norwood shines in muddled camp horror

    The actor-singer returns to horror as a new mother confronted with the hell of living with her creepy and boundary-crossing mother-in-law

September 2023

  • Brilliantly brought out the character’s volatility … Glenda Jackson (King Lear) in King Lear.

    Is King Lear a mountain or molehill? How to play the tragic monarch and ‘stupid old fart’

    Paul Scofield, Ian McKellen and Glenda Jackson have all redefined Shakespeare’s unpredictable ruler – a role in which actors usually succeed

October 2022

  • Complicite's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead Research Trip to Poland, Simon McBurney, director, and Olga Tokarczuk, writer

    Mud, murder and homemade schnapps: eco-thriller Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead roars back

    As Complicité’s Simon McBurney brings Olga Tokarczuk’s feminist detective story to the stage, the pair discuss its eccentric sleuth, isolated landscape and climate alarm

September 2022

  • Marcello Magni in The Valley of Astonishment, written and directed by Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne, at the Young Vic in London in 2014.

    Theatre world pays tribute after death of Marcello Magni

    Italian actor, who often worked with his wife Kathryn Hunter, was a co-founder of Complicité, a gifted clown and a voiceover artist for Pingu

July 2022

  • Tom Hollander as Boris Berezovsky in Patriots.

    The week in theatre: Patriots; The Tempest; King Lear

    Tom Hollander excels in Peter Morgan’s incisive oligarch drama; Deborah Warner directs a fine Tempest; and Michelle Terry plays both the Fool and Cordelia to Kathryn Hunter’s Lear

June 2022

  • A sense of everything ending … Kathryn Hunter in King Lear at Shakespeare’s Globe, London.

    King Lear review – Kathryn Hunter’s frail, fond old ruler almost unbearably affecting

    Back in the role she first played in 1997, Hunter uses her extraordinary transformative powers to show us the king as a geriatric child at the head of a disintegrating nation

February 2022

  • Safiyya Ingar and Anoushka Chadha in Two Billion Beats at the Orange Tree.

    The week in theatre: Two Billion Beats; Running With Lions; The Forest; The Chairs – review

  • Marcello Magni and Kathryn Hunter in The Chairs.

    The Chairs review – slapstick sadness from a spine-shiveringly good duo

December 2021

  • Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand in The Tragedy of Macbeth, which premiered at the New York film festival.

    Peter Bradshaw's film of the week
    The Tragedy of Macbeth review – Denzel Washington delivers a noirish nightmare

  • Actor Kathryn Hunter. London 29/11/21

    Observer New Review Q&A
    Actor Kathryn Hunter: ‘I gravitated towards male roles because men are given more interesting things to do’

July 2020

  • Come, Been and Gone at the Barbican

    Tristram Kenton at the Guardian
    Caesar, Cilla and a superstar cast: Tristram Kenton's stage archive – in pictures

    Tristram Kenton’s photographs have accompanied reviews in the Guardian for more than 30 years. Ahead of a series of themed galleries, we open up his archive with 40 fabulous shots
    Gallery40

January 2019

  • Jerzy Grotowski

    Kathryn Hunter: how theatre guru Jerzy Grotowski changed my life

    They never met but the brilliant Polish theatre-maker and theorist had a huge influence on Kathryn Hunter. On the 20th anniversary of his death, she celebrates his radical methods

December 2018

  • RSC - Timon of Athens 2018 Press publicity production image Credit: Simon Annand

    Timon of Athens review – Kathryn Hunter lays waste to wealth worship

    A searing central performance lays waste to Shakespeare’s men’s-club vision in this searing study of human greed

November 2018

  • Katie West as Ophelia and Maxine Peake as Hamlet

    All the women players: cross-gender Shakespeare – in pictures

    Kathryn Hunter is about to play the RSC’s first Lady Timon of Athens and next year the Globe is staging Richard II with a company of women of colour. Here’s a look back at some of the many actresses who have taken major male roles in Shakespeare’s plays
    Gallery17

September 2018

  • Sophie Okonedo and Ralph Fiennes in Antony and Cleopatra

    Cleopatras comin' atcha: queens of the Nile on stage and screen - in pictures

    Sophie Okonedo plays Cleopatra in a new production at the National Theatre in London. From Liz Taylor to Mark Rylance, here’s a reminder of the other stars who have ruled as the Egyptian leader
    Gallery21
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