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: theartsdesk.com at 12:24PMAn 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, an…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 08:37AMThe 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 01:54AMRemembering 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: theartsdesk.com at 09:42AMThe 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: theartsdesk.com at 06:36AMThree 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: theartsdesk.com at 04:18AMA 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: theartsdesk.com at 10:24AMFrom 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: theartsdesk.com at 06:24PMRemembering 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: theartsdesk.com at 06:54AMThe 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: theartsdesk.com at 07:12AMRecalling 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 …
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 01:18PMThe 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 hi…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 05:06AMThe 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 …
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 08:18PMThe 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: theartsdesk.com at 11:24AMA 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: theartsdesk.com at 04:48AMThe 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. Gro…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 05:18AMTHEARTSDESK 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: theartsdesk.com at 04:00AMIs 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 worl…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:04AM"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 05:25AMJoe 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 09:10PMIn 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 …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:04PMOf 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 04:33AMPatrick 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 …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:43AMIt’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 c…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:40AMBrian 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 12:45PMJason 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 04:18AMFrank 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 04:07AMIs 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 04:38AMGruff 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 04:24AMThe director tells Jasper Rees why she's turned her hit 2002 film into a West End musical
SOURCE: The Telegraph at 02:00AMIf 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