Stunning detail from Lev Dodin's company in desperate tragedy and human comedyTowards the end of the Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg's Life and Fate, a long scene in director Lev Do…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:18AM[SHARE]Roger Allam and Nancy Carroll serve David Hare's iron fist in velvet glove to perfection"What could be more serious than married life?" asked Richard Strauss, whose operas became a surp…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:51AM[SHARE]★★★ FANNY AND ALEXANDER, OLD VIC Agile but shallow Bergman adaptationThree strong performances weakened by miscasting elsewhere and restless soundtrackCould an epic cinemat…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:05AM[SHARE]Nobody said that a 70-minute audience with the undead was going to be easy. You can read Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing in your own time, pausing for thought, leaving off, coming back. W…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:14AM[SHARE]What's in a name? Imogen has a softer music to it than Cymbeline, the only one of Shakespeare's plays in which the title character is marginal - even if Hal and Falstaff just outshine Henry …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:57AM[SHARE]She gave us the most moving of King Lears years before the news broke that Glenda Jackson would be playing the role. Only Mark Rylance has recently matched the malicious wit of her Globe Ric…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:36AM[SHARE]Southwark's golden triangle " the Menier, the Playhouse and the Union " has given us so many "lost" musicals which only a decade or so ago would have been lucky to get in-concert airings.rea…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:15AM[SHARE]Britten fathomed Phaedra's passion for her stepson in a shattering quarter of an hour's dramatic cantata. Euripides' Hippolytus takes about 90 minutes in the playing. Director Kryz…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:46AM[SHARE]You rarely see a full production of Shakespeare's dream play so magical it brings tears to the eyes. But then you don't often get 42 players and 14 voices joining the cast to sing and play e…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:34AM[SHARE]Banished from the Barbican are the hollow kings of the mediocre RSC Henrys IV and V. In their place comes a whole new procession of living, breathing monarchs in a vision that's light years …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:09AM[SHARE]Could the fascination of Glenn Close's Norma Desmond transcend the frequent bathos of Lloyd Webber? Would they have sorted out the miking which wrecked last year's first choice of semi-ENO m…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:30PM[SHARE]Demons, trolls and dead souls have a habit of latching on to Ibsen's bourgeois Norwegians. Surely the best way for actors to handle them is to keep it natural, make them part of the furnitur…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:02AM[SHARE]The last time I saw Janet McTeer, she was doing her best with the slightly underwritten role of sister to Glenn Close's lethal Patty Hewes in Damages, the ultimate TV series about the discre…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:55AM[SHARE]Greek family smashups at the Almeida now yield to northern agony sagas, less bloody but potentially just as harrowing. In Little Eyolf the 66-year-old Ibsen dissected a failed marriage as ru…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:15AM[SHARE]Never use one word when you can get away with two: that seems to have been the maxim of Eugene O'Neill even in one of his shorter plays. After all, when is an ape not hairy, and why does sto…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:19AM[SHARE]With her strong, often fierce features and her convincing simulations of rage, Kate Fleetwood might have been born to play Medea. Unfortunately this isn't Euripides' Medea but Rachel Cusk's …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:22AM[SHARE]No doubt this sophisticated bagatelle worked like a charm in the intimate space and woody resonance of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The Duke of York's Theatre is one of the West End's smalle…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:31AM[SHARE]Whose Don Juan " progenitor Tirso de Molina's, Molière's or Pushkin's? None of the above. Unless you have a decent knowledge of Ukrainian culture, you won't have heard of Lesya Ukrainka, bo…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:04AM[SHARE]You don't know Homer's Iliad until you've heard it read aloud, all 24 books " well, very nearly all - and 16 hours of it, as the oral tradition would have kept it alive at least until the At…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:25PM[SHARE]This is the real Greek, bloody-fantastical thing. After the fascinating but flawed attempt to bring Aeschylus's Oresteia into the 21st century, the Almeida has turned to a more tradition-con…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:27AM[SHARE]Stop miking Bryn Terfel. Stop over-miking musicals; the show voices in a hybrid cast don't need much. Too much ruined English National Opera's recent Sweeney Todd, and in this Proms adaptati…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:49AM[SHARE]Kafka and Jones, the names above this little shop of horrors, would be a marriage made in off-kilter theatreland if the Czech genius had written any plays. He didn't, so Nick Gill has made a…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:57AM[SHARE]There are two fundamental ways to fillet the untranslatable poetry and ritual of Aeschylus, most remote of the three ancient Greek tragedians, for a contemporary audience. One is to find a p…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:38AM[SHARE]Judge Judy meets The Only Way is Essex: this endlessly resourceful production of Gilbert and Sullivan's first (mini) masterpiece Trial by Jury is one that cries out to appear on the telly. W…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:30AM[SHARE]When does a Gilbert and Sullivan chorus make you laugh, cry and cheer as much as any of the famous set pieces? In this case when Major-General Stanley's daughters "climbing over rocky mounta…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:00AM[SHARE]Russia isn't the only country where violations of personal freedoms and censorship seem to be mounting by the day, but it's surely the most confused: ask any of the persecutors what they hop…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:56AM[SHARE]Vaudeville is alive and well in the Lilliputian gilded cave which might have been made for it (not that Victorian Savoyards could have had any inkling). If you find yourself, like last night…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:49PM[SHARE]A journey into dreams through songs from Dowland to The Kinks; a Swiss director who, Covent Garden's Director of Opera Kasper Holten assures us, is "one of the most important European theatr…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PM[SHARE]Still they keep coming, 35 years on from the London premiere: Sweeneys above pubs, in pie shops, concert halls and theatres of all sizes, on the big screen, Sweeneys with symphony orchestras…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:06PM[SHARE]All Savoyards, whether conservative or liberal towards productions, have been grievously practised upon. They told us to expect the first professional London grappling with Gilbert and Sulli…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:53AM[SHARE]How can a feisty village dame duetting "lackaday"s with the mounted head of a long-lost, nay, long-dead love be so deuced affecting? Ascribe it partly to the carefully-applied sentiment of G…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:31AM[SHARE]
