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]"The fantastical should come so close to the real that you must almost believe it", declared Dostoyevsky on Pushkin's masterly ghost story The Queen of Spades. Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota and his …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:55AM[SHARE]Ever been stuck in a claustrophobic space with a group of really unpleasant people? Add mayhem, murder and a razor-sharp wit to be found in only a very few of the nastiest individuals, and y…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:39AM[SHARE]All that glisters is not gold in the casino and television game-show world of Rupert Goold's American Shakespeare. Nor are all the accents, though working on them only seems to have made a s…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:52AM[SHARE]Heritage Shakespeare for the home counties and the tourists is just about alive but not very well at the Royal Shakespeare Company. If that sounds condescending, both audiences deserve bette…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:10AM[SHARE]Strange world, isn't it. Yesterday morning, buoyed up by the Royal Opera's impressive Tristan und Isolde, I was listening on CD to Linda Esther Gray, a Wagnerian soprano for the ages, singin…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:10AM[SHARE]Not so much a national hero, more a national disgrace. That seems to be the current consensus as Norway moves forward from canonizing the loose-cannon wanderer of Ibsen's early epic Peer Gyn…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:42AM[SHARE]Earlier this year two giant puppets, plus a bottom (lower case, human) on wheels, dominated Shakespeare's dream play at the Barbican. Replace the bottom with an ever-present little dog and y…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:32AM[SHARE]Ibsen cast a cruel eye on the characters of his most relentlessly symbolic play, wild ducks wounded or domesticated by fate or character. They speak or act unsympathetically, for the most pa…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:14AM[SHARE]Like Ibsen's titanic character in search of a self, the Barbican's theatre programme globetrots to find the richest and rarest. Yet it certainly doesn't reach the conclusion of Peer Gynt tha…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:27AM[SHARE]"It takes a star to parody one," wrote theartsdesk's Edward Seckerson, nailing the essence of this immortal spoof-fest's last incarnation at the Menier Chocolate Factory. Star quality was as…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:48AM[SHARE]"You feel like you're walking into Fame the movie," says one of three third-year drama students towards the beginning of this six part documentary. That's what we might have hoped of what, a…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 01:02AM[SHARE]It should work as pure musical theatre. Yet what precisely is Gershwin's - or rather "The Gershwins'", as this title frames it, though Ira wasn't quite Gilbert or Brecht - Porgy and Bess? An…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:51AM[SHARE]"Some might say we're getting too old for this sort of thing," declares Martin Jarvis's Jack " or should I say "Jack" " going off Wildean piste. Well, we had wondered whether the reunion of …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:13PM[SHARE]You can usually trust the buzz around rehearsals. From Glyndebourne, five weeks into preparation for La traviata, which opens tomorrow, one of the team working on Tom Cairns' new production …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:51AM[SHARE]If you're tempted to see Fiona Shaw's impressive solo performance as Mary the mother of a son she can't bring herself to name " and see it you probably should " then bear two things in mind.…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:57AM[SHARE]London has had its fair share recently of Chekhov productions from Russia, though none anywhere near as quietly truthful as these from Moscow's Mossovet State Academic Theatre. Veteran film …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:57AM[SHARE]We've now learned from the films of Paolo Sorrentino and honorary Roman Ferzan Ozpetek what great and nuanced ensemble acting the Italians can produce. Even so, the towering star of the curr…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:00AM[SHARE]Showboys will be boys " gym-bunny sailors, in this instance " as well as sisters, cousins, aunts, captain's daughters and bumboat women. We know the ropes by now for Sasha Regan's all-male G…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:39AM[SHARE]An insider once told me that you get a grant for including puppets in a production. Which may account for the amount of crap puppetry haphazardly applied in the theatre. That's certainly can…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:53AM[SHARE]For those of us who never saw Samuel Beckett's favoured performer Billie Whitelaw on stage as indomitable, buried-alive Winnie, peculiarly happy days are here again with another once-in-a-ge…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:10PM[SHARE]Read Erich Kästner's 1928 novel about young Emil Tischbein and the Berlin boys he enlists to catch a thief, and you'll come away feeling warm if slightly incredulous at the strong moral com…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:37AM[SHARE]Now here's a funny thing, possums. Back in 1990 when one great Australian Dame, Joan Sutherland, gave her farewell performance, another, a certain housewife superstar from the Melbourne subu…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:50AM[SHARE]It has be partial, because of the iconoclastic French actor-director's 10 opera productions, I've only seen two, on screen only " but a big two at that " and only three of his 11 films. Yet …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:15AM[SHARE]Arturo Ui, king of the Chicago cabbage trade, is Brecht's Richard III. Egad, he even speaks in iambic pentameters, with a fair few nods at Shakespeare, though a certain cowlick and moustache…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:30AM[SHARE]Shallow in its cartoonish whizz through the tergiversations of a troubled reign, hugely energetic in its language and structure, Marlowe's horrible history is never less than compelling and …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:06AM[SHARE]Sicilian location, Irish populace, Balkan Roma music: Richard Eyre's production of a Pirandello bagatelle could easily have turned into the kind of Europudding more common in cinema. That it…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:48AM[SHARE]Rodgers and Steinbeck: sound unlikely? Well, self-proclaimed "family show" man Hammerstein may have baulked at words like 'whorehouse' when he created a play for music out of Steinbeck's Can…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:31AM[SHARE]If there's a more thinly written, loosely structured and hammily acted play than Samuel Adamson's panorama of Purcell's London, then I have yet to endure it. Baffling, because this is the wr…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:04PM[SHARE]No theatre in London, surely, has offered us more miracles of transformed space than the Young Vic. Small it may be, but its productions often feel big in every way, and none more so than Jo…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:03AM[SHARE]There are two dances to unheard music in Howard Brenton's pithy Strindberg reduction. One spells trouble for the interloper between the vampire couple who suck the blood of others to sustain…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:11AM[SHARE]
