Thursday, September 17, 2015
Last February, director Sally Cookson shrunk Charlotte Brontë’s 400-page novel Jane Eyre down to a four-and-a-half-hour play spread across two nights at the Bristol Old Vic. Now, as this …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:09PMWednesday, August 26, 2015
The political wheel has turned full-circle. When Our Country’s Good was premiered in 1988, it was a barely-veiled protest against Thatcher’s slash-and-burn approach to the arts in genera…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:25PMThursday, July 2, 2015
If Simon McBurney’s Measure for Measure for the National Theatre and Declan Donnellan’s recent Cheek By Jowl production mined deep for darkness, Dominic Dromgoole’s for the Globe is co…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:00PMTuesday, June 30, 2015
Geoffrey Rush has done it, Gyles Brandreth has done it, Stephen Fry came close to doing it, and now David Suchet is giving it a go – donning drag and a perpetually disgusted expression to …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:51PMTuesday, May 26, 2015
Between Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and Everyman It was beginning to look like we were never going to get a proper, uncomplicated laugh in Rufus Norris’s National Theatre. Thank goodn…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:38PMThursday, April 30, 2015
There’s a certainty, a reassurance that comes with attending a Globe show. You know that however bad things get, however bloodied the stage at final curtain, however bruised the relationsh…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:30PMWednesday, February 25, 2015
How do you take your rom-coms? Full-fat Hollywood schmaltz, Shakespearean, or lean and elegant – a Stoppard perhaps, or Noël Coward? If your answer did not include “With lashings of soc…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:08PMFriday, February 20, 2015
Farinelli and The King is pretty much a perfect piece of theatre. More importantly, though, it’s perfectly timed. In a month when English National Opera’s troubles have made the front pa…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:09PMFriday, December 19, 2014
When the Orange Tree Theatre lost all its Arts Council Funding earlier this year it was hard to get too outraged. An institution that has made a niche in giving the good folk of Richmond exa…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:04PMFriday, December 12, 2014
British theatre company 1927 celebrate their 10th birthday next year. Over this nearly-decade they have produced just three shows (plus a reimagining of The Magic Flute for Berlin’s Komisc…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:07PMFriday, November 7, 2014
Is the Rose Playhouse London theatre’s best-kept secret? Or simply its worst-publicised? Either way, this gem of a space, tucked away behind the Globe in Bankside, needs and deserves a gre…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:05PMTuesday, October 28, 2014
So TFL have banned the Globe’s posters for ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore for being too racy. What a gift. They couldn’t have given the production a better advertising boost if they’d cov…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:05PMThursday, October 9, 2014
It’s hard to believe that almost two years have passed since Phyllida Lloyd’s Julius Caesar at the Donmar Warehouse. Harriet Walter’s stricken face as the play ended is still burningly…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:05PMWednesday, July 23, 2014
“Comedy, and a bit with a dog”. That’s what audiences really want according to the hapless would-be-impresario Mr Henslowe, and that’s certainly what they get in Lee Hall’s new sta…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:05PMThursday, July 3, 2014
The posters all over the Underground scream Richard Armitage. As far as they are concerned The Crucible is the finest one-man-show since Clarence Darrow. But what we get in performance is so…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:40PMSunday, June 22, 2014
“If we go to the theatre, it’s because we want to be surprised, even amazed.” Peter Brook’s programme note for The Valley of Astonishment stresses emotion and sensation above all thi…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:08PMThursday, May 1, 2014
Lucy Bailey’s Titus Andronicus doesn’t pull any punches (or stabbings, smotherings and throat-slittings, for that matter). Bursting into a Globe smoky with incense with shouts and drums,…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:11PMThursday, April 17, 2014
Plotted on the Nunn Curve of Fatal Attraction to Flare Path, Sir Trevor’s latest West End outing – Noël Coward’s post-war comedy Relative Values – lands solidly in the upper-middle …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMSunday, March 23, 2014
I hadn’t heard the term “cultural cringe” until I went to live in Australia. Holiday encounters had been so full of sunshine, art, water and music that it hadn’t occurred to me to do…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:02AMWednesday, January 15, 2014
A candlelit theatre is one thing. A theatre when those candles are so close you could lean in and blow them out, where a good line sets them flickering in gusts of audience laughter is quite…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:04PMTuesday, December 24, 2013
The Anatomy of Melancholy (or to give it it’s full title - The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Ma…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:08PMSaturday, December 21, 2013
Unlikely subjects can make for great musicals. (Assassins, anyone?) Just as great subjects can make for terrible ones (the Broadway Breakfast at Tiffany’s comes to mind). Sadly Andrew Lloy…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:48AMFriday, October 25, 2013
Adapt a Jane Austen novel for the stage and you have a generous handful of characters and a selection of drawing rooms in which to put them. Adapt a George Eliot novel and you’re faced wit…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:08PMThursday, September 19, 2013
“What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?” Surely never before has Benedick’s opening quip cut so close to the literal, nor drawn such a laugh from its audience. With a combined…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:04PMTuesday, September 17, 2013
It’s a nothing of a line – “Hail mortal” – spoken by nobody important, but in Michael Grandage’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream it becomes the basis for an entire concept. A trivial…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:04PMMonday, August 5, 2013
Over in Southwark you can currently find Rodgers and Hammerstein exploring the seamier side of life among the prostitutes and drop-outs of Pipe Dream, but in the woody amphitheatre of the Re…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:08PMThursday, May 30, 2013
Midsummer’s Eve may still be a month away and the evenings more bracing than balmy, but despite a serious chill still in the air the Globe Theatre yesterday proved yet again that it exists…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:38PMA thunder sheet booms, a didgeridoo hums distantly, a model ship rears and pitches its way forward through the waves of groundlings and suddenly we find ourselves washed up on the shores of …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:09PMSaturday, April 20, 2013
Although overwhelmingly remembered now as a novelist, Somerset Maugham was best known during his lifetime as a playwright. “England’s Dramatist”, as the newspapers christened him, prod…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:11PMTuesday, February 26, 2013
His recent film adaptation of Anna Karenina framed the action of Tolstoy’s novel in a theatre, so it seems only natural that director Joe Wright should follow it up with a return to the st…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:09PMMonday, February 25, 2013
“I have nothing to say, and I am saying it. And that is poetry.” Originally delivered by John Cage at an artists’ club in New York in 1949, the composer’s Lecture On Nothing went on …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:09PM 
