Wednesday, November 9, 2022
Saying goodbye to the actor famous for saying hello
Leslie Phillips would have known for half a century that at his death, which was announced yesterday, the obituaries would lead with one t…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 12:24PM[SHARE]Friday, September 23, 2022
An interview with the novelist the morning after she won the Man Booker Prize for the first time
Hilary Mantel, who has died at the age of 70, was a maker of literary history. Wolf Hall, …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:37AM[SHARE]Tuesday, March 8, 2022
The theatre troupe created art in secret under the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko but went into exile after their latest encounter with the Belarusian KGB. They talk to Jasper Rees abo…
SOURCE: The Independent at 01:54AM[SHARE]Sunday, December 5, 2021
Remembering the brilliant actor knight who revealed himself both on stage and in pioneering performance diaries
The energy of Antony Sher, who has died at the age of 72, was prodigious. He n…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:42AM[SHARE]Tuesday, November 16, 2021
The school friend who commissioned, directed and acted in Pinter's first play
Henry Woolf's place in the theatre history is small but significant, a bit like Woolf was himself. Until his dea…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:36AM[SHARE]Saturday, April 17, 2021
Three encounters with the great actor who has died at the age of 52
Each generation is given one actress who can do everything and is loved by all. There was Judi Dench, and then there was I…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:18AM[SHARE]Wednesday, September 9, 2020
A memorial interview with the playwright and scriptwriter who enjoyed a remarkable Indian summer
Ronald Harwood, who has died at the age of 85, was best known for his play about tending to t…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 10:24AM[SHARE]Saturday, June 20, 2020
From King Lear to Bilbo Baggins - remembering the great film actor who vanquished stage fright
Ian Holm was once in his local cinema on High Street Kensington, enquiring at the ticket office…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:24PM[SHARE]Thursday, May 28, 2020
Remembering the AIDS activist who wrote The Normal Heart and the screenplay for Women in Love
Larry Kramer, who has died at the age of 84, was the Solzhenitsyn of AIDS who indomitably report…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:54AM[SHARE]Saturday, November 16, 2019
The story of Touching the Void has been told and retold. Its author explores its appeal
In Peru in 1985, Joe Simpson - then 25 - and his 21-year-old climbing partner Simon Yates were descend…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:12AM[SHARE]Saturday, June 15, 2019
Recalling a two-day audience at the home of the great maestro, who has died aged 96
"I am amazed to be still alive. Two hours of medieval torment." Franco Zeffirelli - who has died at the ag…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 01:18PM[SHARE]Wednesday, November 7, 2018
The RSC's stage version reaches the West End, while Terry Gilliam's film is stuck in a legal vortexIt's a story of a mad old man who imagines himself to be a knight errant. On his …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:06AM[SHARE]Tuesday, September 11, 2018
The vampish comic actress has died at 90 not long after receiving an MBEFenella Fielding - "one of the finest female impersonators in the business," joked Eric Morecambe " has died at the ag…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:18PM[SHARE]Monday, August 27, 2018
The great technician of stage comedy, who has died at 91, recalls writing the likes of Sweet Charity and The Odd Couple Asked to nominate the most important playwright in America since the w…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 11:24AM[SHARE]Wednesday, July 25, 2018
A celebration of the Northern Irish stage craftsman whose play Aristocrats is revived at the Donmar Warehouse Brian Friel, who died in 2015 at the age of 86, was a shy man who shunned interv…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:48AM[SHARE]Monday, May 21, 2018
The director staging Brian Friel's Translations at the National talks about Ireland, England and the changing face of theatreIan Rickson's route into theatre was not conventional. Growi…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:18AM[SHARE]Monday, February 26, 2018
THEARTSDESK IN MINSK Feasting with the remarkable Belarus Free TheatreThe renowned underground theatre company confronts the past and present at home and abroadBudzma! (Cheers!) At a long, f…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:00AM[SHARE]Sunday, October 2, 2016
Is Katori Hall (b. 1981) the embodiment of Martin Luther King's dream? She was born in Memphis, the city where King died. The Mountaintop, her play about his last night alive, had its world …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:04AM[SHARE]Saturday, September 17, 2016
"I've always thought there's nothing worse than coming to the end of your life and realising that you haven't participated in it, and so I write about people who've done that to a certain ex…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:25AM[SHARE]Monday, May 9, 2016
Joe Penhall first thwacked his way to the attention of British theatregoers more than 20 years ago with a series of plays about schizos and psychos and wackos. An iconoclastic laureate of li…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:10PM[SHARE]Friday, May 6, 2016
In his last minutes as the artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe, Dominic Dromgoole took to the stage to reflect on his years at the helm. Behind him was the cast of Hamlet, home after tw…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:04PM[SHARE]Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Of all the dramas with the name Arnold Wesker attached to them, the most absorbing ran as long as The Mousetrap, but offstage rather than on. It was in the style of a remorselessly black far…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:33AM[SHARE]Monday, November 16, 2015
Patrick Barlow's last play was parked in the West End for nine years. The 39 Steps finally closed this autumn, but not before travelling all over the world, most prestigiously to Broadway bu…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:43AM[SHARE]Monday, October 26, 2015
It's not easy to see the pattern in Roger Michell's career. More than most British directors, he has zigzagged between the stage and the screen. He was the one who first rehearsed such conte…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:40AM[SHARE]Friday, October 2, 2015
Brian Friel, who has died at the age of 86, was a shy man who shunned interviews, keeping his powder dry for the work and shrouding his personal life in mystique. Not that he never opened hi…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 12:45PM[SHARE]Monday, August 24, 2015
Jason Hughes belongs to an influential generation of actors who emerged from South Wales in the 1990s. A promising rugby player as a teenager, his head was turned by theatre. Ruth Jones and …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:18AM[SHARE]Wednesday, July 8, 2015
Frank Sinatra is back in London in the centenary of his birth. His disembodied voice is returning in a show called Sinatra: The Man & His Music. At the London Palladium, where he made hi…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:07AM[SHARE]Monday, July 6, 2015
Is there more than one Michael Longhurst? As sometimes happens in theatre, a rising young director seems to be everywhere at once. His calling card is the modestly universal Constellations. …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:38AM[SHARE]Thursday, June 25, 2015
Gruff Rhys has called it as the Great Welsh Media Gang-Bang. This year everyone who is anyone (who can get funding) has hopped on a plane for Argentina to follow in the footsteps of the 150 …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:24AM[SHARE]Monday, June 22, 2015
The director tells Jasper Rees why she's turned her hit 2002 film into a West End musical
SOURCE: The Telegraph at 02:00AM[SHARE]Saturday, June 13, 2015
If the honours system is used to award individuals, its other job is to provide an aspirational marker for the country as a whole. This, it tells us twice a year, is who we want to be: inclu…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:12AM[SHARE] 
