Wednesday, December 17, 2014
For a Christmas-weary Brit who's already had it up to here with commercial bonhomie and festive schmaltz, there were going to be barriers to overcome. Here is an avowedly sweet American play…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 11:18AMTuesday, December 16, 2014
Trafalgar Studios 2, London: Dickens himself particularly enjoyed reading the section of Oliver Twist which deals with the murder of Nancy in histrionic public performances. This is a practi…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 07:05AMTrafalgar Studios 2, London : Christmas time and we expect Scrooge and redemptive jollity, but Miss Havisham's Expectations is the first half of Dickens with a Difference, an altogether…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:57AMTuesday, November 4, 2014
The Colepit, Victoria and Albert Museum, London: The attractive Colepit, its walls covered in blue, red and grey ceramic tiles, accommodates about 35 people in a single row on either side of…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:35AMThursday, October 30, 2014
Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon: The fourth and last offering in the Royal Shakespeare Company's Roaring Girls season of early modern plays with strong female roles is a work not seen…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:28AMMonday, October 20, 2014
Tricycle Theatre, London: There are echoes of Lorca's House of Bernarda Alba in this appealing comedy set in New Orleans in 1836. The master of the house has recently died and his imper…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:07AMSunday, September 28, 2014
Sixteen-year-old Bernadette is determined to write short stories. She's a promising writer, describing her own feelings, the strangers and friends who cross her path in telling detail. Occas…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 12:30PMTuesday, September 16, 2014
In his masterly essay in the programme for Enda Walsh's latest play, Colm Tóibín warns against attempting to pin his work to a particular philosophical position, simply to read into it a m…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:51AMSunday, September 7, 2014
There are 15 characters in Robert McLellan's quirky 1948 comedy, but the star is the language most of them speak. To mark the referendum later this month, the Finborough is mounting a season…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:29AMTuesday, July 29, 2014
Young Vic Theatre, London: There is a thrilling restlessness to Benedict Andrews' production of this American classic. Tennessee Williams describes a particular place in a real street i…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:28AMMonday, July 21, 2014
We know how the story ends, but then so did Euripides' first audience in Athens in 431 BC. Medea was already a familiar character of myth, a sorceress whose ungovernable passion for Jason le…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:44AMSunday, July 6, 2014
When Daytona was premiered at the Park Theatre last year some of the critics went into contortions to avoid giving away the two "reveals" in Oliver Cotton's plot. The challenge remains, but …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:57AMFriday, July 4, 2014
Old Vic Theatre: Arthur Miller's 1950s forensic, passionate examination of personal and public morality still resonates. After All My Sons in Regent's Park and Ivo van Hove's …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:59AMTuesday, June 24, 2014
Gate Theatre, London: According to Homer's Iliad, Idomeneus, King of Crete, was a general in the Greek army which sacked Troy. What happened to him afterwards varies according to differ…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 07:05AMTuesday, June 17, 2014
Director Nadia Fall has taken that patriarchal purveyor of footwear Henry Horatio Hobson and his family out of their natural habitat - a traditional proscenium arch theatre - and into a diff…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 11:46AMFriday, May 23, 2014
"Johnny get your gun" was a popular American recruiting call in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries and, according to the Irish-American song "When Johnny comes marching home, …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 12:33PMThursday, May 8, 2014
Yellow Face comes into the Shed a year after it was greeted enthusiastically when it was first seen in London at the newly-opened Park Theatre. Its category was generally agreed to be "mocku…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:46AMWednesday, May 7, 2014
Swan Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon: Arden of Faversham is described both as an early domestic tragedy and a black comedy. Polly Findlay, making her RSC directorial debut, has plunged enthusia…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:58AMWednesday, April 2, 2014
There is something forensic about Marius von Mayenburg's examination of human nature in this 2004 play, written when he was in his early 30s and the Iraq war still on the television news. El…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 11:04AMWednesday, March 12, 2014
The Cockpit, London: David Ryall is in his 80th year and, having recently undergone chemotherapy, is suffering memory lapses - the role is a mountainous challenge for any actor; to attempt i…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 08:46AMMonday, March 10, 2014
The full title of Jackie Sibblies Drury's play, first produced in Chicago in 2012, is deliberately gauche and in need of editing. No review is complete without it, however, so here it …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 12:30PMWednesday, March 5, 2014
New Wimbledon Theatre, London: This is the sixth tour of Hot Flush! so there must be an audience for it. Much as many in the audience laughed uproariously, much of the humour in the piece is…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:19AMWednesday, February 19, 2014
Lyttelton Theatre, National, London: A Taste of Honey has taken second place in theatre history to another story, that of its writing. In 1958 Shelagh Delaney, an inexperienced 19-year-old f…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:35AMSunday, February 2, 2014
In 2011 Tim Pigott-Smith gave us an impressive, humane King Lear at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Here he is again, a patriarch learning how "sharper than a serpent's tooth" it is to have th…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 11:24AMThursday, January 9, 2014
Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon: Hilary Mantel describes the second book in her trilogy about the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell as "shorter, more concentrated, fiercer". Anoth…
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:29AMSwan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon: Hilary Mantel says her Man Booker-winning novel is "a gigantic play". True, the book is written in dramatic episodes, often in dialogue, but the …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 05:29AMThursday, December 19, 2013
Rhys Ifans enters as a rough sleeper who has wandered in off the street, his sleeping bag over his shoulders, beany hat pulled low over unwashed hair, muttering to himself. For a moment he's…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:37PMThursday, November 28, 2013
Tricycle Theatre, London: Mary J O'Malley's comedy about 1950s convent schoolgirls has come home. An award-winner at the Royal Court in 1977 and then running in the West End for a …
SOURCE: The Stage Registration at 06:29AMSunday, November 24, 2013
Award-winning Toronto-born playwright Claudia Dey is also an advice columnist and here she presents us with three wildly off-the-wall case studies. The twin Ducharme sisters, who share an is…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:55AMWednesday, November 13, 2013
Take a Victorian library and a play which had its premiere 100 years ago and - surprisingly - you have a new arts centre featuring a challenging, dystopian drama. Omnibus in Clapham has exch…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PMThis near-legendary short play, devised by Athol Fugard with the actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona (who gave their names to its characters), was first shown - daringly - in Cape Town in 1…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:00AM 
