Saturday, November 30, 2024
Oscar Wilde speaks just as strongly to the 21st century as he did to his own
If Harold Pinter's work represents, as he slyly joked, the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, then Oscar Wilde…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:18AM[SHARE]Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Kubrick's humour doesn't always detonate as it should in Armando Iannucci's version
Even by Stanley Kubrick's standards, Dr Strangelove went through an extraordinary evolutionary process. Af…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:02PM[SHARE]Wednesday, June 19, 2024
This 'Shrew' has many fine elements but ultimately they don't coalesce
A recent Crime Survey for England and Wales estimated that 2.1 million people in the UK had been victims of domestic ab…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:02AM[SHARE]Monday, September 4, 2023
A production that feels as if it could erupt into cabaret at any moment
To proclaim that you're playing gender games with Shakespeare's As You Like It seems a little like announcing that you…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:19PM[SHARE]Monday, June 19, 2023
The scenes overlap so that characters are besieged by their past, present and future
Rebecca Frecknall's Romeo and Juliet burns like ice, paring back and tightening the script so that love a…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:07AM[SHARE]Saturday, November 26, 2022
The play is stripped down to expose sinister undercurrents of nationalism and honour-culture
It begins in darkness. All that can be heard is the sound of a human struggling painfully for bre…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:36AM[SHARE]Thursday, October 6, 2022
Engaging adaptation and sympathetic playing still leave viewers longing for more detail
It's particularly poignant to watch this story in the knowledge that a little over a year after US-led…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:19AM[SHARE]Friday, September 16, 2022
The central character is put in the dock but has ample evidence to get out
Hell hath no fury like a teenager scorned. In this perplexing play, we see a highly successful doctor put on trial …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 10:03AM[SHARE]Friday, September 2, 2022
The fact is that Joan of Arc was, by anyone's standards, unique
This raw, joyous, irreverent take on Joan of Arc made headlines before opening night for its depiction of the fifteenth-centur…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:25AM[SHARE]Thursday, July 28, 2022
Multi-talented musical cast delivers va-va voom in Sally Cookson's reimagined Narnia
This bold reimagining of Sally Cookson's innovative 2017 production of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardro…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:42PM[SHARE]Wednesday, July 13, 2022
Tom Hollander as powerbroker Boris Berezovsky switches between brazen charm and hubristic rage
To watch a Peter Morgan drama is to have a fly-on-the-wall's perspective of modern history. Ove…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:54AM[SHARE]Saturday, July 2, 2022
How physical transition is etched into the story of our world
Pinocchio is one of our most irreverent metamorphosis stories, and in this visually ingenious blend of film and stage performanc…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:33PM[SHARE]Monday, June 20, 2022
The disconnect between rhetoric and genuine meaning feels very contemporary
Kathryn Hunter's performance as Lear forges its heat from contradictions. She is as frail as she is strong, as det…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:24AM[SHARE]Friday, June 10, 2022
Gecko boldly sculpts surreal alternative realities to our predicted worlds
You never forget your first Gecko production. I experienced mine almost 20 years ago at the Battersea Arts Centre, …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:24AM[SHARE]Friday, May 27, 2022
A ten-foot golden phallus is launched from the musicians' gallery
Boris Johnson was of course not the first British leader to engineer a split with Europe for personal gain. This strikes you…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 12:18PM[SHARE]Wednesday, May 18, 2022
Inter-generational story from a Northern mining town melds naturalism and tragedy
Anne-Marie Duff blazes across the stage like a meteorite in Beth Steel's excoriating drama about the changes…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 11:06PM[SHARE]Monday, May 16, 2022
Naomi Wallace's writing is brave and uncompromising
Jude is the kind of girl that no-one would want to mess with " she can dance like a demon to Eric Clapton, skewer an ego in seconds and hi…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:24AM[SHARE]Monday, May 2, 2022
This production carries as much emotional heft as it exudes riotous comedy
Lucy Bailey's joyous, visually ravishing Much Ado About Nothing opens on a sombre note. On stage there is laughter …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:48AM[SHARE]Monday, April 25, 2022
You go into a dimension where you operate through instinct as much as intellect
Punchdrunk's latest epic undertaking may be inspired by the legend of Troy, but this is nothing less than a da…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:24AM[SHARE]Monday, April 18, 2022
★★★ THE 47TH, OLD VIC Mike Bartlett's ambitious Trump satire doesn't quite hit its target
As a playwright, how do you handle an arse-fixated arch-disrupter?
Megalomania is…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:24AM[SHARE]Mike Bartlett's raucous chronicle of London in the age of Boris Johnson
If Nero fiddled while Rome burned, then Boris Johnson has played the whole sodding orchestra. Between the parties, the…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:24AM[SHARE]Thursday, April 14, 2022
The soundtrack features musicians ranging from Robyn and Dua Lipa to Cardi B
Jane Austen's waspish vision revealed the vanities, delusions and cynical financial calculations that underpinned…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:48AM[SHARE]Monday, March 7, 2022
Director Rufus Norris uses the Olivier's revolving stage like a virtuoso
With its violent storms, bombed out cities and stories of families ripped apart by war, Small Island feels very much …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:54AM[SHARE]Monday, February 28, 2022
The author Thomas Melle had his animatronic double created for this intelligent show
It's the vulnerability of the robot that strikes you in this subtle, intelligent production from the Germ…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:12AM[SHARE]Tuesday, February 8, 2022
Scattergun subversion is undermined by psychological miscalculations
Hamlet isn't often played for laughs. When David Tennant took the comedic approach in the RSC's 2008 production, it was t…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:42AM[SHARE]Monday, December 13, 2021
A vivid and witty recreation of politics in the late Sixties
No playwright has a scalpel as sharp as James Graham's when it comes to dissecting politics; he has a brilliance and edge that st…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:48AM[SHARE]Thursday, December 9, 2021
The stage magic is both ingenious and beguiling
It's been seventeen years since Nicholas Hytner first directed Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials at the National Theatre, ambitiously whirli…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:54AM[SHARE]Friday, December 3, 2021
Despite its deceptive lightness, at heart this is a dark terrifying story
When the Canadian Yann Patel went to India as a young adult backpacker he fell in love " not with one person but wit…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:18AM[SHARE]Friday, November 26, 2021
His earthy informality instantly anchors the philosophy
Words flow like water in TS Eliot's Four Quartets, shimmering with allusion, swirling and eddying with the ideas and fractured philoso…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:33AM[SHARE]Monday, November 22, 2021
Musical adaptation of Louisa May Alcott classic is enjoyable but undemanding
Louisa May Alcott did not think she could write a successful book for girls. After her publisher suggested this …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:36AM[SHARE]Friday, October 22, 2021
This shark-tooth-sharp comedy provides a behind-the-scenes glance at "Jaws"
Jaws was the Moby Dick of late 20th century capitalism, a fantasy about fear and the unknown for a society that ha…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:48AM[SHARE]Loading more stories…
