Monday, 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 07:09PMMonday, February 11, 2013
You don’t so much watch a Robert Lepage show as surrender to it, and his latest project sees Canada’s most innovative theatre-maker in full assault. It’s hard to think of another direc…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:05PMFriday, February 8, 2013
There’s nothing novel about novel-adaptations on stage. We’ve seen every classic from Pride and Prejudice to Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The Woman in White (and The Woman in Black) get …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:06PMWednesday, December 19, 2012
“How I do love a steely sting in my fairytale ending” croons Meow Meow, eyes glinting even more brilliantly than her eyeshadow. When she says “sting” a whole army of scorpions couldn…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:06PMSunday, December 16, 2012
“You don’t put yourself into what you write, you find yourself there.” It’s a maxim that has guided a writing career that, insect-like, has made itself at home among the lived detrit…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:14PMTuesday, December 4, 2012
There’s no ignoring gender in Julius Caesar. Whether it’s Portia’s “I grant I am a woman” speech, an enfeebled Caesar likened to a “sick girl”, or Cassius raging against oppres…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:06PMSunday, November 18, 2012
Something new is happening in the West End. Just up the road from Thriller and down a bit from Les Misérables a billboard the colour of weak tea (positively consumptive compared to the full…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:10PMSaturday, November 17, 2012
1866 was a crucial watershed in Henrik Ibsen’s writing career. As a man he may have come of age some 20 years earlier, but it was only at almost 40 that his writing attained brooding, bear…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:46PMTuesday, September 18, 2012
As long as Simon Callow is around, London’s theatre scene will never be short of one-man shows, nor of Shakespeare. A new pretender to the Shakespearian throne, a rival for the hollow crow…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:28PMWednesday, September 12, 2012
Hedda Gabler – the doomy tragedy, the one with the pistol, the “female Hamlet”. We all know the score when it comes to Ibsen. All, that is, except apparently for Sheridan Smith, who re…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:25PMThursday, August 2, 2012
When Complicite conceived their beautiful A Disappearing Number they gave maths energy, drama, and above all watchability, but they never quite brought the heart. In Simon Stephens’s new a…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:12PMWednesday, July 25, 2012
“Would you enforce me to a world of cares?”, croons Rylance’s Richard III, lingering tremulously over his question, the picture of world-sick piety and reluctance. As the groundl…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:06PMTuesday, July 24, 2012
“Of all the anti-social vested interests the worst is the vested interest in ill-health.” The Preface on Doctors that precedes George Bernard Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma finds the wr…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:07PMSunday, July 15, 2012
Before Ibsen was, well, Ibsen, he had a successful career as a failed playwright. Producing works on a spectrum between unremarkable and outright bad, he muddled his way through to his late …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMTuesday, July 10, 2012
The front door of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House may first have slammed shut in 1879, but it’s a sound whose echoes and re-echoes continue to resonate. The crash of feminist selfhood, bursting…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:00AMMonday, June 11, 2012
The RSC’s Twelfth Night dumps its audience unceremoniously onto the shores of Ilyria in the thump and beat of waves. While Viola struggles from the (very deep and very real) water, asking …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:10PMMonday, April 30, 2012
A comedy of alienation, estrangement, and magical metamorphosis – if ever there was a Shakespeare play made for the linguistic transfigurations of the Globe to Globe season it’s A Midsum…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:06PMMonday, April 23, 2012
“It’s easy for me to talk to you; we don’t know each other”. Robert Holman’s Making Noise Quietly is a work that, like its title, lives in the delicate push-pull of contradiction: …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:58PMSunday, April 1, 2012
A play of boundaries, limitations, barriers, one that gazes outwards while never crossing the threshold, Uncle Vanya is often betrayed by the physical space of major stagings. In a new produ…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:07PMTuesday, March 6, 2012
Since their launch just two years ago, National Theatre Wales has staged plays on a firing range, in a miner’s institute, and – most memorably – claimed the whole town of Port Talbot a…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:11PMSunday, February 26, 2012
“Winsome” isn’t a word you hear very often these days. The taint of coy, simpering campery already hung about it in the 1920s when Noel Coward gave it a starring role in the after-dinn…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:10PMTuesday, February 21, 2012
Another week, another tragedy, and another wedding dance routine set to a thumping soundtrack. But while The Changeling buckled under the pressure Joe Hill-Gibbins applied at the Young Vic a…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:49PMMonday, February 20, 2012
Half-term may be nearly over for many, but there is no shortage of children’s theatre on offer in London at the moment. Long-running family favourites including Shrek the Musical and The L…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:10PMTuesday, February 14, 2012
Drum rolls, fiddles and flutes were all in action last night at the Donmar Warehouse to herald the beginning of an era. After ten successful years under the direction of Michael Grandage, it…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:12PMThursday, February 2, 2012
The murder drama is a staple of television schedules. And for every Miss Marple or Rosemary and Thyme there are many more trickling from the Lynda La Plante vein, whose currency of gore, hor…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:35PMMonday, January 23, 2012
Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III has enjoyed something of a royal progress around England over the past year. Touring in Christopher Luscombe’s slick production for the Peter Hal…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:44PMMonday, January 9, 2012
Of all the 20th century’s literary dystopias George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has proved most tenacious, epitomised by its sinister promise: “Big Brother is watching you”. But wh…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:27PMSunday, December 11, 2011
That a tale confronting society’s most pernicious evils, giving poverty a human face and desperation a voice, should become a cornerstone of the British festive experience is perhaps unexp…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:43PMTuesday, December 6, 2011
A recent newspaper article championed the topicality of Richard II, laboriously rewriting it from camp conservatism to a politically current meditation on the “sad stories” we still tell…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:14PMMonday, November 21, 2011
There comes a point in a writer’s life when he – it’s usually a he – stops writing about life and starts writing about writing. With Ibsen this stage arrived in the self-reflexive ra…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:57PMMonday, November 14, 2011
Many dramatists have taken their turn putting faces to Thoreau’s lives of “quiet desperation”. But the challenge in what Thoreau goes on to conclude – that it is therefore a mark of …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM 
