Journalism is often used to create compelling true-life plays. This drama, written by award-winning actor Nichola McAuliffe, has both a journalistic writing style and a journalist — actual…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 10:52AMIs it nostalgic to constantly revisit the history of the royal family? In this new play by Nicholas Wright, which opened last night, we travel back in time to 1980 when the aged Wallis Simps…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 10:36AMSpooky coincidences make good drama. Mike Bartlett’s epic follow-up to his highly successful 2010 play, Earthquakes in London, begins with a mind-bogglingly weird situation: every morning …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:46AMAt the newly renamed Harold Pinter Theatre (formerly the Comedy), the inaugural show is a special tribute to the Nobel-Prize-winning playwright, who died in 2008. The subject matter of Ariel…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:45AM“Why does anyone ever have kids?” By the time that a character in April De Angelis’s new comedy utters this exasperated exclamation, there are many in the audience — whether parents …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 10:34AMJohn Osborne was the great founding father of contemporary new writing for the theatre. In 1956, his Look Back in Anger changed British drama for ever, and his subsequent work explored the s…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 10:28AMIt’s a strange fact that very few plays look at the subject of contemporary British royalty. The past yes, but today very seldom. A notable exception is 1990s playwright Sarah Kane’s vis…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:47PMA new play by Mike Leigh is always an event. So there was a palpable excitement in the air at the Cottesloe Theatre (the smallest and most intimate of the three National Theatre auditoria) w…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:26AMArthur Miller is one of those geniuses whose plays are metaphor-rich even when their storytelling is slow. First staged in 1994, Broken Glass is surely his best late-period drama, and this r…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:02PMWelcome back Stephen Poliakoff. With his first new play for 12 years, the master penman has set aside his television excursions into history and memory — most recently Glorious 39 for the …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:34AMYou could call it the BBC Four effect. It’s fact-based fictions set in the past, more often than not about the absurdities of sexual mores or other changing customs. In the latest theatric…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:01PMCan an ordinary wooden chair be an instrument of torture? Of course, every brute investigation makes use of such furniture, whether as a place to tie the victim down, or as a weapon to attac…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:01PM
