Tuesday, October 18, 2016
You begin to run out of superlatives when it comes to Thom Southerland and Danielle Tarento’s touch with small scale musicals. Having seen three of their previous ones at Southwark Playhou…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:51AMTold partly in text but also sung through accompanied by marimbas, drums and any other vocal sound required made by the 25 piece ensemble, A Man of Good Hope is a model of economy yet full b…
SOURCE: mytheatremates.com at 11:16AMSaturday, February 21, 2015
Her music roots stretch back a long way, not just through a female line that touches hands with Billie Holliday and before her, Bessie Smith Continue reading...
SOURCE: The Guardian at 12:30AMFriday, June 14, 2013
Oh, how the mighty are fallen. Margaret Alexander (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is a storefront pastor in Harlem who leads her flock with absolutist conviction. No drinking, no smoking - the way …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:45AMSunday, June 9, 2013
What kind of legacy will the Blair years lave on ordinary people? Some predictable answers but also some unexpected, haunting personal accounts emerge in a drama inspired by the spectacularl…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMSunday, May 12, 2013
What must it be like to lose a child to random violence? The great Irish dramatist Frank McGuinness, who has tackled mythic violence on a number of occasions in previous work, has now delive…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PMWednesday, April 10, 2013
"And, to deal plainly, I fear I am not in my perfect mind." So speaks King Lear towards the end of his monumental journey of self-knowledge that has taken the mad monarch from the highest to…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:35AMThursday, February 28, 2013
"Half-caste" and "mixed race" are terms that excite strong emotions. Are you black, are you white? Where do you belong? To whom do you owe your loyalties when the chips are down?read more
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:10AMSaturday, February 2, 2013
The walls of the staircase to the Finborough Theatre off the Earls Court Road are lined with framed awards. Downstairs for the umpteenth time, the café/restaurant has gone bust. But no othe…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:23AMSunday, January 27, 2013
It’s like waiting for a number 19 bus. You hang around for half an hour then two come along at once. So it is just now with plays either written by women or featuring women’s lives. Whil…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:05PMThursday, December 20, 2012
If you have any young siblings, friends or relatives in need of burning off a little energy, send them directly to BAC. With their open-hearted style of rough, circusy-type theatre, Kneehigh…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:03PMSaturday, November 24, 2012
Given the present Middle East uproar, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that contemporary versions of The 1001 Arabian Nights are sprouting everywhere. With their variety of stor…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMSunday, October 14, 2012
Banking and the financial world may have gone into free-fall, but there are still killings to be made. Particularly personal ones. Nicholas Pierpan’s You Can Still Make a Killing is a fain…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMTuesday, August 21, 2012
“Our Country’s Good, a play that proclaimed the power and enduring worth of theatre and that celebrated its centrality to our lives, was of importance in the third term of a government w…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:10PMWednesday, August 15, 2012
It’s brave to take Shakespeare into the West End in midsummer – and in this of all summers. Greg Doran’s all-black, African Caesar certainly doesn’t lack for impact, colour, zest, ur…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMWednesday, July 11, 2012
At the end of The Riots, the Tricycle Theatre’s verbatim response to last year’s upheavals edited by Gillian Slovo and Cressida Brown, a local Muslim whose home was burnt down in Tottenh…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:48AMSunday, February 19, 2012
Four people walked out of Filter’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream last night. The rest stayed to cheer an hour and 20 minutes of fast and furious filleted Shakespeare from a company which has…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:10PMThursday, January 26, 2012
The Old Vic Tunnels would seem to be the perfect place to set three of Eugene O’Neill’s three earliest plays about the sea, drenched as they are in the stench of life in the heavy engine…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:48AMSunday, January 22, 2012
Nick Payne has already made quite a mark. In 2009 he won the George Devine award for Most Promising Playwright with the intriguingly entitled If There Is I Haven’t Found it Yet at the Bush…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:20PMThursday, November 24, 2011
W. C. Fields once famously cautioned against working with children or animals. He might very well have gone crazy had he been involved with the RSC’s hit musical production, Matilda, which…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:22PMFriday, November 18, 2011
This needs confessing. Neil LaBute and I have an uneasy relationship. David Mamet - in Oleanna or Boston Marriage mode – also gets under my skin. It’s close-run thing: misogyny exposed, …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 12:04AMSunday, October 16, 2011
Sometimes theatre people do mad things. Like stay up all night and the following day to “celebrate” the King James Bible and a theatre’s house-move to a new premises. Its 400th year ha…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:03PMSunday, September 18, 2011
It all started back on Thursday, 6 April, 1972. In the dining room of the less than salubrious Bush Hotel on the corner of Shepherds Bush Green, in a room that had once been Lionel Blair’s…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:35AMMonday, June 27, 2011
One of Britain's most distinguished actors known for her roles on stage, screen and TVMargaret Tyzack, who has died aged 79, was one of Britain's greatest and most popular actors, working on…
SOURCE: The Guardian at 02:18PM 
