Wednesday, January 14, 2015
When a play is preceded by a long list of content warnings, it’s hard not to let your judgement be coloured in advance. Sexual violence, strong language, strobe lighting, smoke effects, au…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:08AMWednesday, November 5, 2014
A significant milestone was passed this week - Tuesday, 4 November, was Equal Pay Day. From that day until the end of the year, the average woman in this country effectively works for free c…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:01PMThursday, October 2, 2014
As a political act, the first performance of Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel in 1916 is exceptionally important. It was staged in Washington DC by the drama committee of the …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:35PMSaturday, September 27, 2014
As we arrive at the last few months of 2014, the temptation to say “Enough! No more!” to representations of the First World War creeps up. The centenary of 1914 has been so comprehensive…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:16AMSaturday, August 30, 2014
Richard Bean has had a busy year, and it isn’t over yet. Great Britain, his bawdy play about press ethics and police corruption, is transferring to the West End after hitting the spot at t…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:22AMMonday, August 11, 2014
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” declares Lord Darlington in Act II of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan. He’s the classic Wildean cad - unpri…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:19AMSaturday, July 12, 2014
When the lights go up on Jack Shepherd’s In Lambeth, you could be forgiven for assuming you were looking at a biblical scene. A man and a woman sit naked in the branches of a tree, a table…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:11AMThursday, June 26, 2014
For a play that involves a lot of movement, it is the freeze-frame stillnesses in Athol Fugard’s Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act that linger before the eyes once it is …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:15AMThursday, June 12, 2014
In creating Mr Burns, Anne Washburn was trying to answer a question overlooked by most purveyors of dystopian fictions: what would happen to pop culture after an apocalypse? The physical and…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:40PMSaturday, May 31, 2014
Is there such a thing as a human right to forgiveness? Nicholas Wright's riveting play about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in post-apartheid South Africa circles around this …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:47AMSaturday, May 24, 2014
In French, when you want to end a digression and get a conversation back on point, you say "revenons à nos moutons". It's a commonly used idiom, meaning literally "let's get back to our she…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:18AMMonday, April 21, 2014
Usually, to describe a play as "of its time" is a criticism. It is suggestive of drama that hasn't aged well, that doesn't work quite as well for today's audience as it did for the original …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:49AMSaturday, March 29, 2014
Thérèse Raquin is not a happy sort of production. This musical adaptation of Émile Zola's 1867 novel transports you to the dank darkness of the Passage du Pont Neuf in 19th century Paris,…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:12AMMonday, March 17, 2014
It's unusual for a play to be political without being preachy, or dull, or both. As obsessed as we are with class distinctions, we aren't as good as we should be at pulling them apart. Invin…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:09PMSaturday, March 15, 2014
The Husbands is set in a feminist utopia – or so it appears at first glance. Shaktipur, the place the characters call home, is a rural matriarchal community in which women are leaders…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:20AMTuesday, February 11, 2014
Would you be able to tell if the world had ended? For Beth and Franklin, the wannabe intellectuals at the heart of Stephen Sewell's play, it proves quite difficult to ascertain whether life …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:49PMSaturday, January 25, 2014
Barely a month of 2014 has passed, and yet already the opportunities to remember the First World War seem to be presenting themselves at every turn. In this trio of short plays, we get a mor…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:11AMTuesday, January 14, 2014
In many ways, the darkness is the most memorable aspect of this production. It's so deep and all-encompassing that your eyes start to play tricks on you, seeing spots of light and shadow whe…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:53AMTuesday, January 7, 2014
There is no point during Bloodshot where you can be entirely sure just what you are watching. At times it seems like a straightforward one-man show, with sole cast member Simon Slater chargi…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:12PMTuesday, December 10, 2013
"My mum was given this new wonder-drug for morning sickness when she was pregnant with me," explains Mat Fraser at the start of Beauty and the Beast. "It was called Thalidomide. That's why I…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:55AMTuesday, November 12, 2013
In several of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories, reference is made to something called "a knockabout cross-talk act". It's a two-handed sketch, usually performed at a village hall …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:09PMFriday, November 8, 2013
A single movement is all it takes. A wounded man is held at gunpoint, and instead of cringing away from the inevitable bullet, he lifts his head and looks his would-be executioner in eye. Th…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:40PMWednesday, October 30, 2013
The best moment in this production of Pinter's The Dumb Waiter is when one of the protagonists snatches up a piece of paper and bellows "Scampi!" at his bewildered partner in crime. The l…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:18PMFriday, October 11, 2013
It's often a sign of a good drama when, as it concludes, you find it hard to tell which character you dislike most. And so it is with Adult Supervision - all the way through, first-time play…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:13AMSaturday, September 28, 2013
The opening of Charles Dickens's novel A Tale of Two Cities is among the most famous ever written: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:31AMFriday, August 30, 2013
Could you choose between love and knowledge? Between a life of acceptance and affection, and one of self-improvement and learning? These are the questions that Jessica Swale's new play Blue …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:28AMSunday, July 21, 2013
Cush Jumbo could very easily have put on a hit show about Josephine Baker. There would have been a chorus line of flappers, replete with spangles and feathers. She would have belted out some…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:11AM 
