Friday, February 26, 2016
Theatregoers suffering from First World War fatigue may want to pass on Jonathan Lynn’s merely competent historical drama about two mythic figures: Charles de Gaulle and Philippe Pétain. …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:34PMTuesday, February 16, 2016
War bad, theatre good. That’s about the level of insight available from this amiable show, transferring after a successful run in Bath. It’s one of the weaker entries in the ever-popular…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:15PMThere will be blood. And expletives. And puppet sex that makes Avenue Q look positively monastic. But perhaps most shocking of all is that beneath the eye-wateringly explicit surface of Robe…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:28AMFriday, February 12, 2016
Jack is an alcoholic. Stephanie is a whore. Joseph is stupid. Stevie is a broody neurotic. These identifiers are proudly proclaimed in the first minute of Matthew Perry’s debut play, but i…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:44AMFriday, February 5, 2016
The death of a child is an unnatural loss. There’s no reassurance that the departed lived a full life, rather the jagged edge of one cut short. In the case of Becca and Howie, it’s also …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:36AMTuesday, February 2, 2016
Lolita Chakrabarti’s impassioned debut has only gained topicality since its 2012 Tricycle incarnation. Trevor Nunn’s all-white Wars of the Roses and #OscarsSoWhite, among others, have fa…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:17PMTuesday, January 26, 2016
Anne longs for 23-year-old son Nicholas to return home. One night, he appears. Or does he? Welcome back to the queasily elliptical world of Florian Zeller, where certainty fractures as famil…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:37PMMonday, December 7, 2015
Just what constitutes reasonable behaviour in an enlightened society? Not long ago, the death penalty fell under that umbrella in Britain, and state-sanctioned killing as punishment for the …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:27PMFriday, December 4, 2015
Events have overtaken this Macbeth, dramatically heightening its queasy topicality. Not just brutal beheadings and torture, but the cost and collateral damage of conflict without end, and th…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:01AMTuesday, November 24, 2015
Hollywood took 365 speaking parts, 50,000 extras and 78 horses to tell this epic tale in 1959; here at the Tricycle, it’s a cast of four and some enterprising puppet work. Playwright Patri…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:12PMWelcome to the hellmouth. In Jamie Lloyd’s startling 50th anniversary revival, the seething, primal hinterland of Pinter’s domestic conflict is made flesh: the metal cage surrounding an …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:19AMThursday, November 12, 2015
Teenagers lie – that’s nothing new. But are the activities they’re concealing from anxious parents in this oversharing digital age more extreme, more likely to define their lives and t…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:24PMMonday, November 9, 2015
What exactly is the level of Kenneth Branagh’s self-awareness? He’s certainly conscious of inviting comparison with Olivier once again by presenting a year-long season of plays at the re…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:18AMThursday, November 5, 2015
This new family musical, based on the popular 2003 Will Ferrell film, has rightly been censured for its extortionate seating prices, hosting the West End’s most expensive top-end tickets a…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:33PMMonday, November 2, 2015
It trashed Olivia Newton-John’s film career, halted the movie-musical revival, and was so critically reviled it led to the creation of the Razzies. How, then, could the stage version of hu…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:30PMFriday, October 30, 2015
After 12 seemingly idyllic years, Tom and Beth’s marriage is over. That’s a concern for Gabe and Karen, partly because they care for their friends, and there’s the ugly business of cho…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:28PMTuesday, October 27, 2015
If the thought of three hours of DH Lawrence fills you with dread, fear not. Ben Powers’ three-for-the-price-of-one melding of Lawrence’s trio of mining plays is a spellbindingly intimat…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:04PMSaturday, October 17, 2015
This year’s Olivier Awards saw the Young Vic trounce its South Bank neighbours, with Ivo van Hove’s revolutionary A View from the Bridge leading 11 nominations and four wins; the product…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:58AMThursday, October 15, 2015
Molière’s 1664 comedy Tartuffe transplanted to present-day Atlanta, Georgia: it sounds like an inspired idea. The hypocritical religious devotee becomes a charlatan preacher fleecing his …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:14PMTuesday, October 13, 2015
Rents are going up, local businesses priced out, and the rich folk and hipsters are invading. That’s in Washington Heights, New York’s largely Dominican-American quarter, but it could as…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:37PMMonday, October 12, 2015
There’s nothing like a death to bring a family together. In Simon’s case, that death is his own – impending execution by firing squad in an unnamed Asian country, unless he can win a r…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:19PMThursday, October 1, 2015
Stop press: our rampant celebrity culture might not be wholly positive! If you’ve already been apprised of that fact some time in the past century, go ahead and skip actor Daniel Dingsdale…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:04PMTuesday, September 29, 2015
Theatre is in the very bones of this bold adaptation, with the Lyric gifted a cameo role: past productions are fleetingly pastiched in a flashback to the era of the venue’s foundation…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:39AMThursday, September 24, 2015
“Comedy, love and a bit with a dog,” counselled Henslowe in Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love, and his populist advice is taken to heart in this broad, bawdy, big-hearted farce untroubled…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:55PMWednesday, September 23, 2015
Following a dangerously selective reading of a religious text, 15-year-old Benjamin has adopted a fundamentalist doctrine that espouses misogynist, homophobic and puritanical views and, at i…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:39AMSunday, September 20, 2015
The “femmepersonators” of Harvey Fierstein’s 1962-set drama would be flabbergasted by today’s level of trans visibility, from Grayson Perry and Caitlyn Jenner to Transparent and Eddi…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:07AMMonday, September 14, 2015
Metta Theatre’s didactic short plays evening takes a rigorously Poppins approach: a spoonful of drama to help the medicine go down. The sobering facts – “We need to produce more f…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:03AMThursday, September 10, 2015
Can we – should we – control the future? That’s the dilemma faced by anxious parents attempting to steer their offspring through a labyrinthine school system, educational think-tanks, …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:22PMMonday, September 7, 2015
Can you peg a whole play on a decent twist? When We Were Women’s narrative tease pays off interestingly, but takes a hell of a long time getting there. It leaves little space to explore th…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:55PMFriday, September 4, 2015
“My brother died.” That’s the reality New York-based banker Willem struggles to inhabit when he returns to his estranged family in Amsterdam. There is no sense in Pauli’s loss – a …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:36PMThursday, August 27, 2015
Well, here’s an oddity. You Won’t Succeed... is too fragmented for musical theatre, too bombastic for cabaret, and about as profound as a first-draft Wikipedia page. Channelling the self…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:52PM 
