Friday, September 27, 2024
Lyndsey Turner's fast-paced production doesn't let the audience engage with its hero
The National's new production of Coriolanus has to be one of the most handsome to appear on the Olivier s…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:18AM[SHARE]Friday, September 13, 2024
Timberlake Wertenbaker's updated version takes particular aim at colonialism
The latest Greatest Hit to land at the Lyric is Timberlake Wertenbaker's 1988 award-winning play about a performa…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:12AM[SHARE]Thursday, August 29, 2024
A wealth of musical talent keeps this gig musical afloat
The signs in the Peacock's foyer warn that this show features "very loud music". Exactly what Janis Joplin fans want to hear. This is…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:36AM[SHARE]Thursday, August 22, 2024
Patrick Barlow's brand of silly still delivers a sly Hitchcock spoof
Before the Plays That Went Wrong and the multi-role six-hander Operation Mincemeat, there was Patrick Barlow's adaptat…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:54AM[SHARE]Thursday, August 15, 2024
Roy Williams and Clint Dyer's protagonists rage against the limits of their lives
Two boys in east London, one Black, one white, grow up together, play pranks at school, then decades later h…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:44AM[SHARE]Friday, August 9, 2024
The National's finely acted staging of Steinbeck's grim classic is a tough watch
It's a brave company that embarks on a staging of John Steinbeck's award-winning 1939 novel The Grapes of Wra…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:08AM[SHARE]Tuesday, August 6, 2024
Michael Bennett's 1975 hit has plenty of pizzazz but not enough emotional oomph
A Chorus Line reigned supreme on Broadway from 1975 to 1990, a bold, bare-bones piece that for once put musica…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:54AM[SHARE]Monday, July 22, 2024
Timely arrival for Lucas Hnath's play about the cost of winning
Before Lucas Hnath wrote Red Speedo, he had heard a 2004 speech at a hearing investigating baseball doping that declared the p…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:36AM[SHARE]Saturday, July 20, 2024
Nassim Soleimanpour's latest 'cold read' work is a unique experience
The Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour is many things, some seemingly contradictory: a) a clever, poetic playwright w…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:02PM[SHARE]Monday, July 15, 2024
Cardboard Citizens shine an unforgiving light on poverty in the UK
A stark end-title at the end of this collection of short films sums up the dire situation the UK is in: one in five people,…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:06AM[SHARE]Friday, July 12, 2024
Christopher Hampton's love of Stefan Zweig's text becomes a drawback
Who was Stefan Zweig? It's likely that it's mostly older folk who studied German literature at A-level who have encounter…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:48PM[SHARE]Tuesday, July 9, 2024
Two awkward science nerds and a violent alcoholic father are oddly likeable company
Sarah Power, the writer of Grud, now in the Hampstead's smaller space, is a self-confessed geek who…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:36PM[SHARE]Monday, July 8, 2024
A fine cast spell out the cost of survival in today's ailing industries
For a long stretch of its first half, Dominique Morrisseau's 2016 award-winner, Skeleton Crew, seems a conventional…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:32PM[SHARE]Saturday, June 29, 2024
Fans of the film will love it, but it's like being in a pink fever dream
Nothing anybody over the age of 30 says about the new Mean Girls musical, spawn of Tina Fey's witty script for the 20…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:48PM[SHARE]Friday, June 28, 2024
A production with a green message for younger audiences
It's a bold move by Regent's Park Open Air Theatre to tackle Frances Hodgson Burnett's children's classic, a story that's been notably…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:54AM[SHARE]Thursday, June 20, 2024
'Brush Up Your Shakespeare' brings the house down in a strongly cast lineup
Lincoln Center's Bartlett Sher is back in town to direct the Barbican's latest summer blockbuster, Cole Porter's c…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:54AM[SHARE]Monday, June 10, 2024
Alice Childress's 1962 play about interracial love has lost none of its richness and fire
Alice Childress's Wedding Band has arrived at the Lyric Hammersmith like an incendiary bomb, a weapo…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:42AM[SHARE]Wednesday, May 22, 2024
Giles Terera excels leading a livewire cast in an irreverent look at Black identity
From New York's Public Theater, the venue that nurtured Hamilton, comes another estimable pocket musical, …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:32AM[SHARE]Monday, April 22, 2024
Superb cast deliver Van Badham's anti-incel barbs and feminist wit with gusto
What would happen if a notorious misogynist actually fell in love? With a glacial Danish librarian? And decided …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:12AM[SHARE]Sunday, April 14, 2024
Ian McKellen's Falstaff thrives in Robert Icke's entertaining remix of the Henry IV plays
Shakespeare's plays have ever been meat for masher-uppers, from the bowdlerising Victorians to the m…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:12AM[SHARE]Tuesday, April 9, 2024
A five-women team spell out a feminist message with humour and strong singing
Many an Edinburgh Fringe transfer has struggled when it moves to the big city, but the Dirty Hare company's Gunt…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 01:24AM[SHARE]Friday, March 29, 2024
It's a great song and dance evening, but the story is an empty one
In a secret chamber somewhere, the producers of MJ the Musical may be keeping a portrait of the King of Pop that has ac…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:12AM[SHARE]Friday, March 22, 2024
Director Rachel O'Riordan finds lighter moments in a tale of grief
Brian Friel's Faith Healer isn't noted for its laughs, but Rachel O'Riordan has found more than most directors do in this …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:48AM[SHARE]Thursday, February 29, 2024
Lucy Kirkwood's latest mixes the birth of the NHS with a Brief Encounter-ish romance
Keeley Hawes onstage is something to look forward to, so rare are her appearances there. In Lucy Kirkwo…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:02AM[SHARE]Wednesday, February 28, 2024
The rise of fascism in the 1930s East End is given a human face
Hot on the heels of Brigid Larmour's updating of The Merchant of Venice to the East End in 1936, a spirited new musical acr…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:48AM[SHARE]Sunday, February 25, 2024
Tracy-Ann Oberman turns Shylock into a heroic Jewish anti-fascist
It's an unhappy time to be staging Shakespeare's problematic play, given its antisemitic content, so hats off to adaptor-dir…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:48PM[SHARE]Friday, February 23, 2024
Felicity Huffman, heading a superb cast, is a force of nature
In 2017, two years after Hir premiered, Taylor Mac was awarded a "Genius Grant" and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for drama. Th…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:24AM[SHARE]Saturday, February 17, 2024
Sarah Snook gives a virtuoso performance amid a dazzling display of tech wizardry
Oscar Wilde's 1890 novella The Picture of Dorian Gray has given the world a trope built for flattery, along …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:42PM[SHARE]Thursday, February 8, 2024
Age has not withered one jot the FAs' fury at the absurdities of modern life
You don't expect a couple of septuagenarian contraltos, aided by a spring chicken of a soprano in her fifties, t…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:32PM[SHARE]Saturday, February 3, 2024
Ingenious twists can't give Sam Holcroft's play a vital sense of danger
Take dollops of Orwell and Kafka, with a sprinkling of Pirandello for a lighter texture, then bake. That could be the …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:06AM[SHARE]Tuesday, January 30, 2024
Bartlett Sher's intelligent reading is gorgeously staged and winningly performed
The giant crinolines are back, and the winsome little royal children with miniature temples on their heads, a…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:02PM[SHARE]Loading more stories…
