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]Friday, January 26, 2024
Zoe Cooper's queer reading is a tonic: clever, funny and seriously silly
What Zoe Cooper has concocted in her loving rewiring of Jane Austen's first completed novel looks at first sight like…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:06AM[SHARE]Saturday, December 23, 2023
Jonathan Spector is a Stoppard fan, but might Mamet have been better?
How do you make a play out of Stalin's defecting daughter Svetlana, the psycho-economic theories of Daniel Kahneman and …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:12AM[SHARE]Sunday, December 17, 2023
Les Enfants Terribles can't work their usual magic at the QEH
There are probably two distinct audiences for the latest adaptation from Les Enfants Terribles, The House with Chicken Legs: the…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:24PM[SHARE]Friday, December 15, 2023
Monsters of ego clash in David Ireland's demolition of posturing theatre types
David Ireland's Edinburgh Fringe hit Ulster American is essentially a play about a play that a Hollywood big…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:24PM[SHARE]Beautiful Elvis Costello songs and stirring music underpin a fine adaptation
There's a touch of Dr Zhivago about director PaweÅ‚ Pawlikowski's screenplay for his 2018 film Cold War. It…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:24AM[SHARE]Monday, December 4, 2023
Terrific showcase for writer-director Kwame Owusu and his performer
Kwame Owusu's 55-minute one-hander does just what it says on the tin: it features a young student who dreams he is drowni…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:36PM[SHARE]Sunday, December 3, 2023
Annie Baker delivers a richly satisfying piece about hungry women
A sun deck with seven pale-green padded loungers is the latest setting for the latest National Theatre premiere from Ame…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:24AM[SHARE]Friday, December 1, 2023
Mischief Theatre's sight gags are faultlessly timed, though the verbals need a trim
Mischief Theatre set themselves a big challenge when they evolved their brand of knowing slapstick. And n…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:18AM[SHARE]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]Loading more stories…
