The almost complete works. 

   
    The Hothouse. 
      At The National Theatre 
Moore’s sing-song delivery and distracted air make his random cruelty and psychotic unpredictability all the more disturbing. And his Churchillian Christmas message – honouring the men who sacrificed themselves in the War so that we might continue – has a wonderfully hollow ring now we know all about incarceration units from the Gulag to Guantanamo Bay.
Michael Coveney. The Observer. 
  
     The look and sound of the production beautifully summon  both institutional sterility and the threat of things unspeakable in the shadows. And the performances, particularly from Stephen Moore as the rattled megalomaniac in charge, pricelessly illuminate the brutality in slapstick and the Abbot and Costello-style absurdity in circular bureaucratic lingo. Before "Beyond the Fringe" and Monty Python, there was Harold Pinter.
Ben Brantley. New York Times.
 

 aThe History Boys
     At The Wyndhams Theatre, London, West End.

I was  moved, disturbed and exhilarated last night. Nicholas Hytner's original production makes a far stronger impact, thanks to Stephen Moore, giving the performance of a lifetime as an old, gay teacher. Moore's Hector, a teacher to his roving fingertips, all ruminative in grey -green, buoyed up by irony and the pleasures of elucidating poetry, achieves an overwhelming pathos when sexually downed and outed.
Nicholas de Jongh. The Evening Standard

Stephen Moore, nattily clad in bow tie and suede shoes, invests Hector with a dapper solitariness. This is a man who has spent all his life, sexually and academically, on the margins, and who loves the poets Hardy and Larkin for their "diffidence or shyness". This makes it overpoweringly moving when he finally breaks down in front of his class.
Michael Billington. The Guardian. 

He's best at the quiet moments - spell-binding in the superb sequence in which Hector expounds on a Hardy poem to the troubled, gay Posner, revealing the depth of his own loneliness and stoicism, and transmitting subtle empathy to a pupil who looks likely to share such a fate.
Paul Taylor - The Independent
       
 

 

An Enemy of the People  
first performed at the Olivier at the Royal National Theatre
and subsequently at the Ahmanson Theater Los Angeles.

Mr. Nunn has made Stockman's relationship with his brother the production's emotional center, and Mr. McKellen and Mr. Moore bring a deep familial ambivalence to their scenes together that goes beyond the dichotomy of their different moral attitudes. From the moment they first greet each other in the first act, with a guilty wary silence before embracing, it is obvious that these two men have never learned to deal with each other. Mr. Moore's Peter Stockman, a man who embodies the status quo of compromise and self interest, occasionally rips open his character's traditional buttoned up mien to reveal a welter of mixed affection and resentment.
Ben Brantley. The New York Times

The excellent Stephen Moore plays Peter Stockman, who is not only mayor, chief of police, chairman of the board of the spa, but also Tomas Stockman's  brother. His apple cheeked, gray haired demeanor and wire rimmed glasses give him the look of a kindly grandfather, which he uses brilliantly to hide his ruthlessness. His creeping fascism is indeed harrowing.
Laurie Winter. Los Angeles Times

Stephen Moore is wonderful as Tomas's brother Peter. In attitude, gesture and every other conceivable  detail, Moore conveys an intolerant man used to getting his own way.
Paul Hodgins. The Orange County Register

... the wonderfully superior, solidly bourgeois and peevishly jealous Stephen Moore.
Robert Hurwitt. San Francisco Examiner

...a drably authoritarian bureaucrat who could pass for a Soviet commissar, Moore's crusty embittered portrayal is every bit as impressive as McKellen's more flamboyant turn.
Reed Johnson. L.A Daily News.

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A Doll's House for the Royal Shakespeare Company,  
at The Pit Theatre, Barbican, London

.... his treatment of Nora is seen less as an exhibition of male chauvinism than as an element in a huge pathetic irony: his confidence that he possesses the secret of a shared cosy happiness turns into baffled incomprehension. Stephen Moore plays Torvald with great emotional versatility, ranging from arrogance to pathetic despair. He gains his effects with fine precision - an inane smile, a rasping tone of anger, a whining sentimentality, an unctuous sentimentality....
Gareth Lloyd Evans. Drama Quarterly.

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The Alchemist  
at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, London.

....Subtle, the Alchemist himself is played gloriously by Stephen Moore, looking and behaving like a slightly improbable pantomime Prospero....
Giles Gordon. Plays and Players.

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The Wild Duck  
for the Royal National Theatre at the Olivier Theatre.

Stephen Moore offers a mesmerizing portrait of the vain, shambling Ekdal, a man who can stuff himself with salt-beef sandwiches while declaring his heart is breaking. And it is one of the beauties of Christopher Morahan's production that Ekdal is so convincingly the son of his pottering, useless old father, given a masterly performance by Ralph Richardson.
John Barber. The Daily Telegraph. London.

The Chief virtue of the National Theatre's production of The Wild Duck  is the truthfulness with which it's leading characters, Hjalmar Ekdal and Gregers Werle, are played by Stephen Moore and Michael Bryant. The realism of Ibsen's concepts of these two is beyond question: anybody who has passed through life so far without encountering people like Hjalmar and Gregers can indeed consider himself lucky. Yet both of them must be devilishly difficult to act..... The balance is especially commendable in Moore's interpretation of Hjalmar, a creature deplorably ineffectual, yet able to convince himself that he is otherwise.....
Plays and Players.

Peer Gynt  
for the Royal National Theatre at the Olivier Theatre.

Moore plays the limpid loafer and time traveler as a Norwegian Doctor Who, knocked into ghostly senility while peeling the onion in the coffin of the young boy who cut off his finger to avoid the call-up. All the world's an onion - it's enough to make you cry. The vastness of the Olivier theatre comes into it's own, as does Moore's wonderful performance, which expands in size, ease and gesture as melt -down beckons in the Button Molder's ladle.
Michael Coveney. The Observer. London.

..Stephen Moore's powerful portrayal of this ageing anti-hero, where there are deep echoes of a terrible reality: of a man who has sacrificed self in pursuit of self-interest, self-gratification and self delusion.
Moore gives us both the ruthless, rugged adventurer and the bewildered oaf, the two sides of the coin Ibsen sends spinning in this picaresque tale of a man half Faust, half Walter Mitty...
Jack Tinker Daily Mail. London.

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