Thursday, March 21, 2013
It’s one of the most anticipated theatrical openings of the year, with tickets allegedly changing hands for astronomical sums and some pundits already rushing to issue dire warnings of the…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:56PMThursday, February 28, 2013
It begins with a tall, thin man walking out of light and into darkness. There is much that remains murky in Barry McGovern’s adaptation of this novel by Samuel Beckett, written between 194…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:45PMMonday, December 10, 2012
It’s brash, jolly, stuffed with wildly politically incorrect language, double entendres and spoof-laden song and dance.read more
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:53PMTuesday, November 27, 2012
Cole Porter’s musical spin on Shakespeare demands the fluidity, fizz and acidity of champagne. In Trevor Nunn’s revival, which transfers to London after a successful run in Chichester, i…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:24PMFriday, November 2, 2012
The Russians are coming next week, when the Moscow company Vakhtangov bring their production of Anton Chekhov’s tragedy of dissipated lives and squandered love to the West End.read more
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:48PMTuesday, October 2, 2012
It’s not often that the works of 17th-century French classicist playwright Jean Racine make an appearance in the West End, and you can’t fault the ambition of the Donmar’s artistic dir…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:21PMTuesday, September 11, 2012
He arrives in a blaze of light and trumpets, but Jonathan Pryce’s King Lear seems as much charming, lovable father as imposing monarch as he sets about carving up his kingdom. What follows…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:25PMThursday, June 7, 2012
If you weren’t sick when you arrived at Les Cerisiers, the hospital in this satiric early Sixties drama by Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt, you probably would be by the time the ins…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:52PMThursday, February 9, 2012
One look at Tom Scutt’s meticulous design for Jeremy Herrin’s production of this savage Alan Ayckbourn comedy, and you know you’re in the 1970s. Wood veneer and faux leather lend a shi…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:30PMWednesday, January 18, 2012
An interfering producer, an accountant who keeps trying to cut corners and costs, even a casting couch – making movies was never easy, according to this amiable new play by Nicholas Wright…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:19PMTuesday, November 29, 2011
Sex, spending, violence and debt: life in the city is lived raw, in this caustic interpretation of Shakespeare’s comedy by Dominic Cooke. The setting is grimy, graffiti-daubed; shiny apart…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:02PMWednesday, November 9, 2011
First come the strip-lit corridors, the stained breezeblocks, the locked doors; later there are restraints, drugs, needles. The time is out of joint, and we are all imprisoned in a nightmare…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:58PMTuesday, November 1, 2011
“Smackhead, groin doctor and smut-scribe”: that’s one way in which writer Mikhail Bulgakov is described in John Hodge’s debut stage drama.read more
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 11:31PMSaturday, October 15, 2011
“Go home. This is not your business. This is not your war.” So a Congolese warlord tells Sadhbh, an Irish human-rights defender, in Stella Feehily’s new drama for Out of Joint. Has the…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 01:37PMTuesday, September 20, 2011
“A simple story of everyday life in a big city, a story of love and passion and greed and death.” That was how Kurt Weill described Elmer Rice’s 1929 play, Street Scene, set on the fro…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:20PMThursday, September 8, 2011
It may not serve up all that much to get your teeth into, but Bijan Sheibani’s production of this 1959 play by Arnold Wesker looks fantastic on the plate. Giles Cadle’s saucepan-shaped s…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 12:03AMThursday, September 1, 2011
A monolithic slab, like a giant incarnation of a Biblical tablet of stone, dominates Mark Thompson’s set for Jamie Lloyd's production of the third play by Alexi Kaye Campbell. Nothing…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:33PM 
