Thursday, October 26, 2023
Lynn Nottage and Lynette Linton reunite to deliver a rollicking evening
Lynn Nottage's second London opening this year, the Donmar premiere of Clyde's, is a comedy about a sandwich, the p…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:04AM[SHARE]Tuesday, October 24, 2023
Alexander Zeldin creates a complex portrait of a woman's struggle for self-esteem
How to describe Alexander Zeldin's latest, The Confessions? It is almost a kitchen-sink drama, but also a pi…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 12:37PM[SHARE]Friday, October 20, 2023
James Graham's play works like a big joke that a whole nation is in on
It was interesting, in the same week that the England football team trounced Italy 3-1 in a Euros qualifier, to see Dea…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 10:25PM[SHARE]Thursday, October 19, 2023
Mustapha Matura's 1981 play set in modern Trinidad is superbly served up
Mustapha Matura's 1981 play, Meetings, is still a knockout. Supply the characters with mobile phones and it could be…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 12:33PM[SHARE]Maggie O'Farrell's inventive retelling of the Shakespeares' love story needs a more inventive production
The RSC apparently has a hit on its hands with its West End transfer of Hamnet. Box o…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:49AM[SHARE]Tuesday, October 3, 2023
Big Broadway show with a pleasing British accent
The Sondheim gala show Old Friends is a must for fans of the master, naturally, but its quality would knock anybody who loves musical theatre…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:25PM[SHARE]Friday, September 29, 2023
Ben Elton has written an odd musical-documentary, part comic-strip, part lecture
The Biba dresses are way too colourful, the shop's interior about 10 times too bright… and did anybody real…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:55AM[SHARE]Friday, September 22, 2023
Adrian Edmondson and Nigel Planer have muddled aims for a tale of warring actors
An impressive performance by Samuel West as one of two warring hams stuck on-set in a trailer over a not-so-d…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:55AM[SHARE]Lynn Nottage's 2018 play gets an exquisite staging with moving performances
The work of the double Pulitzer-winning Black American dramatist Lynn Nottage has thankfully become a fixture in t…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:49AM[SHARE]Saturday, September 16, 2023
The affable American humourist proves death becomes him
Few comedians are such good company that you never want them to stop. The young Billy Connolly was one such; affable American Mike Bi…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:55AM[SHARE]Saturday, September 9, 2023
Yasmin Reza's savage study of the middle-classes becomes a farce lacking in danger
Yasmin Reza's God of Carnage (2008), like her British megahit, 1994's ART, is not strictly a comedy. The Fr…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 01:19AM[SHARE]Thursday, August 31, 2023
Twin miseries of bipolar disorder and grief are given an unusual treatment
The journey from off-Broadway to central London has taken 15 years, but the multi-award-winning musical Next to…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 12:19PM[SHARE]Wednesday, August 30, 2023
The Public Acts project creates a model mix of high and low for a modern ensemble
One of the great wonders of Western literary history is one of the earliest, Homer's The Odyssey, an epic po…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:55AM[SHARE]Saturday, July 22, 2023
Gillian Slovo's incendiary play points a finger at the bureaucrats at the heart of the tragedy
The shadow of Grenfell Tower has already produced Nick Kent and Richard Norton-Taylor's dispass…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:04AM[SHARE]Tuesday, July 4, 2023
Two students clash over changing the world with a playlist
The revolution in the title of AJ Yi's new play at the Bush is the one activists hoped to set in motion in Hong Kong in 2019, when …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 01:07AM[SHARE]Monday, July 3, 2023
Will Young brings sweetness to a thin scenario
Lucky Will Young: the production of the Simon Stephens monologue Song from Far Away that he is delivering at the Hampstead Theatre is directed…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:08AM[SHARE]Saturday, July 1, 2023
Michael R Jackson's writing talent finds a claustrophobic outlet
If you are going to see A Strange Loop, the new American musical trailing a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize that has arrived …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 01:07AM[SHARE]Thursday, June 22, 2023
A star turn from Gabriel Vick powers a lively but loud adaptation
The heart sinks (mine does, anyway) as the latest film-to-musical adaptation rolls into town, all with similar sound-worlds,…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:55PM[SHARE]Tuesday, June 20, 2023
Pupils at an elite Ghanaian school learn home truths about their country
The alternative title of Jocelyn Bioh's 2017 play School Girls, The African Mean Girls Play, might indicate that it's…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:04AM[SHARE]Friday, June 16, 2023
Easy targets and predictable jibes let down an ambitious production
There are flashes during Idiots Assemble: Spitting Image The Musical of the old mordant humour from the show's…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:07AM[SHARE]Tuesday, June 13, 2023
A winning ensemble led by Jamie Parker deliver a refreshing piece
The short story F Scott Fitzgerald wrote as a challenge, of a man born 70 years old whose body gets younger as the years pas…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 01:43AM[SHARE]Saturday, June 10, 2023
A bravura turn from Andy Karl propels a tricky piece over its self-created speed bumps
Groundhog Day, appropriately, is back where it started. The hit film about a TV weatherman's endlessly …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:55AM[SHARE]Thursday, June 8, 2023
Forgotten Miles Malleson play deserves its revival
Miles Malleson, known as an inter-war character actor who popped up in numerous small roles on stage and screen, was also a surprisingly p…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:49AM[SHARE]Thursday, June 1, 2023
The Master's life seen close up but with no warts
Devoted fans may not learn anything that new about Noel Coward from Barnaby Thompson's documentary Mad About the Boy, but they will doubtles…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 11:06AM[SHARE]Dickie Beau creates a tribute to past Hamlets, one in particular
Lip-syncing has become the hobby of many a young TikToker, but only an intrepid professional would contemplate using the tech…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:18AM[SHARE]Tuesday, May 30, 2023
Nikhil Parmar delivers his play with passion and wit
The Bond film theme plays and the lights go up at the Bush's Studio space to reveal, not a tuxedoed superspy, but a slim figure in casua…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:12AM[SHARE]Thursday, May 11, 2023
Five actors plus loads of silly hats and accents add up to a hilarious evening
It's back yet again, Operation Mincemeat, a gift of a story that goes on giving. It surfaced as the 1956 film T…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:12AM[SHARE]Monday, May 8, 2023
The Windrush scandal embodied with wrenching power
Reggae hits are already playing over the speaker system at the Bush when the audience enters, some jigging to the sounds as they find their…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:36AM[SHARE]Saturday, April 29, 2023
Bizarre directorial choices derail the play's serious content
There was a jolting eco-themed work onstage in London recently, but sadly A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction, a Headl…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:36AM[SHARE]Tuesday, April 25, 2023
Lynn Nottage and a faultless cast offer a story that's a hymn to hope
The cast of The Secret Life of Bees first parade onto the Almeida stage hefting big glass storage jars full of a golden …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:54AM[SHARE]Saturday, April 22, 2023
Giles Terera delivers a dramatic lecture on the legacy of slavery
There's a moment in the opening stretch of Giles Terera's The Meaning of Zong where you think the former Hamilton star has …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:12AM[SHARE]Loading more stories…
