Friday, January 25, 2013
Gate Theatre, London: This is the first time the work of US playwright Rajiv Joseph, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, has been seen in the UK. Directed by Justin Audibert, who is this year's r…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:11AM[SHARE]Wednesday, January 23, 2013
When feminism was really cool, female playwrights would write flatshare dramas about a group of women, each of whom was representative of a certain way of life. The play title would just be …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Thursday, January 17, 2013
Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, Royal Court, London: Polly Stenham's third play for the Royal Court - after her award-winning debut That Face (2007) and follow-up Tusk Tusk (2009) - is billed…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:22AM[SHARE]Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Most of us would love to live in a happy family, but it's the unhappy ones that make the most compelling drama. And few playwrights do familial tensions as instinctively as Polly Stenham, wh…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Thursday, December 13, 2012
Jerwood Downstairs, Royal Court Theatre, London: Martin Crimp's latest work is his most innovative since his 1997 masterpiece Attempts on Her Life, and the first at this venue since The…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:39AM[SHARE]Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Christmas plays are a seasonal curse of British theatre. But there are alternatives to pantos and Dickens monologues. At the Royal Court Theatre, there is a tradition of more edgy Christmas …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:11PM[SHARE]Monday, December 10, 2012
Playwright Martin Crimp defies labels. He has been called obscure and oblique, too difficult and, worst of all, too Continental. But although he is feted on the European mainland " George Be…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:30AM[SHARE]Friday, November 30, 2012
Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, Royal Court, London: One of the great achievements of outgoing artistic director Dominic Cooke's regime at the Royal Court has been his loyalty to some of the …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:41AM[SHARE]Thursday, November 29, 2012
Is discretion really the better part of valour? This question arises in a particularly acute form in this new play, which looks at Danny, a gay primary school teacher who decides to come out…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Thursday, November 22, 2012
Soho Theatre, London: Following its success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last year, and again this year, as well as at the Latitude Festival, this all-male version of Anthony Burgess…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:05AM[SHARE]Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Cottesloe, National Theatre, London: Billie Piper plays a star-crossed lover as she makes her debut at the <a href="http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/the-effect">Nation…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:35AM[SHARE]Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Science thrives on stage. In play after play, various scientific ideas seem to flourish in the warm, well-lit environment of the theatre, fed by a crew of artists and despite the threats of …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Thursday, November 1, 2012
London theatre loves plays about the media. Is this because we spend so much time flicking through magazines, visiting websites or watching television? Or is it because this venue's trendy m…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:01PM[SHARE]Monday, October 29, 2012
Finding the mythic echoes of the ancient Greeks in stories about the modern world is not just confined to past greats such as TS Eliot, but is also used by contemporary adapters of old trage…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:01PM[SHARE]Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, Royal Court, London: How do you follow a massive success? Playwright Jez Butterworth has had to face that question twice in his career so far. In 1995, his Mojo was…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 08:15AM[SHARE]Wednesday, October 24, 2012
In the past few years, without any fanfare, the veteran playwright Howard Brenton has not only made a comeback, but also become the chief chronicler of the nation's past. One year he is tell…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Wow, what a lot of debuts. Adrian Lester (Hustle, Bonekickers, Merlin) makes his Tricycle Theatre debut in this new play about a black actor in Regency London, and it's written by his wife, …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Over the past few years, the 1970s have made a cultural comeback. On television, there's been Life on Mars and White Heat, in the bookshops tomes by Dominic Sandbrook, in the theatre revival…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PM[SHARE]Thursday, October 4, 2012
Walkouts are always intriguing. When audience members leave before the final curtain, it's usually a sign that the play is too powerful, or too scandalous or maybe just not very good. After …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Friday, September 28, 2012
The West End seems to be recession-proof, with rising profits, rising ticket prices and few empty theatres. But is this because commercial theatre is becoming increasingly formulaic? How abo…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:03PM[SHARE]Monday, September 24, 2012
Bush Theatre, London: Every year, the HighTide Festival in Suffolk helps to develop young playwrights and their latest discovery is Essex-born Vickie Donoghue, whose powerful debut play was …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:14AM[SHARE]Friday, September 21, 2012
The popular image of the state-of-the-nation play is that of a large-scale, big-cast drama that has an epic time span and lots of highly articulate speeches that analyse the way we are. But …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Friday, September 14, 2012
In the non-Olympic sport called "Name Britain's greatest living playwright", most of the entries have always been men. Nowadays, that is all changed and the odds-on favourite must be Caryl C…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, Royal Court, London: Some American playwrights are embraced by British theatres, which often produce their work more readily than venues across the Atlantic. Among …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:47AM[SHARE]Monday, September 10, 2012
With the American presidential election campaign now in full swing, the search is surely on for cultural expressions of the two nations that the candidates represent: white rich people versu…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Wednesday, September 5, 2012
After years spent in the dark alleyways of abuse, where the only optimistic light is the sickly glow of neon, some new playwrights are emerging into the sunnier meadows of romantic comedy. T…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PM[SHARE]Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Since 2004, the Ambassador Group's Trafalgar Studios has done sterling work in staging West End transfers for some of London's most promising fringe talents. Kieran Lynn's An Incident at the…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PM[SHARE]Monday, June 25, 2012
The Arab Spring has arguably been the most important international event after the credit crunch, yet it seems to be of little interest to British playwrights. Parochial, obsessed with writi…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Tuesday, June 19, 2012
When does an urgent new trend become a theatre cliché? Over the past couple of years, the idea of generational conflict between the have-it-all baby boomers and the have-nothing-but-debts y…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Friday, June 15, 2012
Mary Shelley and all her works have dogged the footsteps of contemporary theatre " in a way that's a bit reminiscent of her most famous creation. Last year, there was Frankenstein at the Nat…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Tuesday, June 12, 2012
A powerful trend in contemporary theatre is the family play. But the families usually depicted tend to be of the standard two-point-five variety, while other more complex forms " families as…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:01AM[SHARE]Loading more stories…
