Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Harley Granville Barker is hardly a household name, but he was a huge influence on British theatre today. During the Edwardian era, he promoted new writing at the Royal Court; he wrote plays…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Thursday, March 1, 2012
What's it like to be young, British and Muslim in the age of austerity? In an era of global financial crisis, high unemployment and shrinking pay packets, what can this country offer British…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Jerwood Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court: This year sees the biggest Royal Court Young Writers Festival in the theatre's history. Celebrating 39 years of good work in discovering and…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 04:44AM[SHARE]Monday, February 27, 2012
The Royal Court has been finding and developing young writers for four decades. Its Young Writers Festival has helped launch the careers of a variety of talents such as Simon Stephens (winne…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Thursday, February 23, 2012
Royal Court, Jerwood Downstairs, London: David Eldridge returns to the Royal Court for the first time since 2000, when his Under the Blue Sky was at this venue, with a new drama set in Essex…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:51AM[SHARE]Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Is there a more evocative location than Essex? In his 2000 play Under the Blue Sky, one of David Eldridge's characters shouts the unforgettable words: "I'm from Essex and I'm dancing!" Now b…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Thursday, February 9, 2012
Science rocks. In the theatre, this is a subject that offers to provide powerful experiments in metaphor. Most recently, in Nick Payne's Constellations - and most classically in Tom Stoppard…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Twentysomething emotional confusion is fertile ground for drama. In this new play, Stefan Golaszewski - writer of the BBC Three sitcom Him & Her and star of BBC Four's Cowards - explores…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Rose Theatre, Kingston: Before his huge West End success with the musical Matilda, Dennis Kelly's most popular play was DNA, first performed at the National Theatre's Connections y…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 04:58AM[SHARE]Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Critics can also be historians. In my opinion, the great new wave of 1990s British theatre starts not with Sarah Kane's Blasted in 1995, nor with Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking a year…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Friday, January 27, 2012
Write what you know, the cliché goes, and in his new drama the playwright Chris Lee draws on his day job as a social worker to create a tense two-hander about a middle-class social worker a…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PM[SHARE]Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Some theatre openings will be legendary for all time. One such was the Parisian evening of 10 December 1896 when Alfred Jarry's character Père Ubu stepped onto the stage at the Théâtre …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Suddenly, it seems as if the brawling youngster that was once new writing for the British theatre has grown up. Now, all it wants to talk about is the family, about having babies, and about …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Till death do us part: love and death are, like the fingers of a couple holding hands, perfectly intertwined in this play by Abi Morgan, which has been touring the country since autumn and o…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Thursday, January 5, 2012
Absent or abusive fathers are a staple of British drama. As such, they are both an explanation for ferocious male violence and a metaphor of a paternal state which, in an age of austerity, s…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 10:56AM[SHARE]Sunday, December 25, 2011
At its best, theatre is enthralling, and this year's offerings were led by one brilliant musical and one amazing comedy. With the West End immune to the chills of the recession, its profits …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:21PM[SHARE]Sunday, December 11, 2011
Loneliness is hard to put on stage. There is something about the feeling of unwanted urban solitude which is so repetitive and, let's face it, boring, that writing a play about it risks send…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:19AM[SHARE]Thursday, December 8, 2011
Can you replace a wife with a doctrine? Under normal circumstances, the question would be absurd, but given that Joe Penhall's new play, which opened last night, is the latest of a crop that…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Wednesday, November 23, 2011
This play has a deliberately evocative title: not only does it suggest overabundance ("everything but the kitchen sink"), but also a whole genre of playwriting (Kitchen Sink Drama). At the s…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Ever since 9/11, political theatre has mobilised the techniques of verbatim drama, and the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, north London, has an impressive reputation for its tribunal plays, oft…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Friday, November 18, 2011
It's the God factor. Although, until very recently, most British playwrights - being a secular bunch - have shied away from tackling questions of religious belief in their work, their Americ…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:01PM[SHARE]Friday, November 11, 2011
Some plays are so weird they defy description. Well, almost. One of these must surely be the late James Saunders's deeply absurdist play, whose first outing in 1963 launched the career of th…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Family occasions can be fraught affairs, as playwrights from Harold Pinter to Alan Ayckbourn have convincingly proved, but the mother of all family meltdown dramas must be Thomas Vinterberg'…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 12:53PM[SHARE]Friday, November 4, 2011
Journalism is often used to create compelling true-life plays. This drama, written by award-winning actor Nichola McAuliffe, has both a journalistic writing style and a journalist " actually…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 10:52AM[SHARE]Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Is it nostalgic to constantly revisit the history of the royal family? In this new play by Nicholas Wright, which opened last night, we travel back in time to 1980 when the aged Wallis Simps…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 10:36AM[SHARE]Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Spooky coincidences make good drama. Mike Bartlett's epic follow-up to his highly successful 2010 play, Earthquakes in London, begins with a mind-bogglingly weird situation: every morning in…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:46AM[SHARE]Monday, October 24, 2011
At the newly renamed Harold Pinter Theatre (formerly the Comedy), the inaugural show is a special tribute to the Nobel-Prize-winning playwright, who died in 2008. The subject matter of Ariel…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:45AM[SHARE]Wednesday, October 19, 2011
"Why does anyone ever have kids?" By the time that a character in April De Angelis's new comedy utters this exasperated exclamation, there are many in the audience " whether parents or child…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 10:34AM[SHARE]Tuesday, October 18, 2011
John Osborne was the great founding father of contemporary new writing for the theatre. In 1956, his Look Back in Anger changed British drama for ever, and his subsequent work explored the s…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 10:28AM[SHARE]Friday, September 30, 2011
It's a strange fact that very few plays look at the subject of contemporary British royalty. The past yes, but today very seldom. A notable exception is 1990s playwright Sarah Kane's viscera…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:47PM[SHARE]Wednesday, September 21, 2011
A new play by Mike Leigh is always an event. So there was a palpable excitement in the air at the Cottesloe Theatre (the smallest and most intimate of the three National Theatre auditoria) w…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:26AM[SHARE]Loading more stories…
