Tuesday, November 8, 2016
Gender-blind casting has arrived and we'd better get used to it. Correction it seems we are getting used to it, viz the imminent revival of the Donmar's all-female Shakespeare trilogy. So th…
SOURCE: BroadwayWorld at 10:55AMFriday, November 4, 2016
FOOL FOR LOVE, FOUND111 Sam Shepard's incest play makes a fine swansong for a pop-up venueSam Shepard's incest play makes a fine swansong for a pop-up venueWho is the fool in Sam Shepar…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:36AMThursday, October 27, 2016
If Kenneth MacMillan had left well alone, the taut little chamber piece he made in 1967 - stark, inventive and affecting - would be hailed a modernist masterpiece by now. Instead, swayed by …
SOURCE: BroadwayWorld at 10:48AMTuesday, October 11, 2016
The perception of Steven many-hats Berkoff as “one of the major minor contemporary dramatists in Britain” makes sense when you see this. Here are two chamber pieces, both two-handers, wr…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:20PMFriday, September 23, 2016
Very occasionally the playing of a play leaves a deeper impression than does the play itself. This is the case with Good Canary, a lippy, sweary tragicomedy by Zach Helm about secrets and ad…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:13AMTuesday, July 12, 2016
There are obvious reasons why films about the theatre outnumber plays about the movie industry, but here’s a play that bucks that trend. Anthony Neilson’s latest drama is located on a fi…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:49PMTuesday, June 21, 2016
In the town of Nizhni Novgorod where Maxim Gorky was born, it was said that “the houses are made of stone, the people of iron”. Vassa Zheleznova, the titular matriarch of this rarely per…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:20PMTuesday, June 14, 2016
On the face of it, there is nothing in this tightly focussed little piece that says anything new about the Holocaust. The plight of a poor Jewish boy unfortunate enough to be growing up in 1…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:15PMFriday, May 20, 2016
In the long tradition of fictional characters who embody their monikers, the naming of Nick Bright hardly counts as the most colourful, but it has a sardonic edge when pinned to a young bank…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:37AMSunday, April 17, 2016
The playwright Anders Lustgarten has spent a considerable chunk of his life reading and writing and thinking about China, and clearly wants to set a few points straight. Tired of the persist…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:32AMTuesday, March 15, 2016
As settings for musical comedy go, this one promised some boom for your buck. Las Vegas in the early 1950s was just emerging as a magnet not only for hedonists and gamblers, mobsters and sho…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:02PMThursday, March 3, 2016
It’s often remarked that are no new stories, only old stories retold. The French playwright Jean Anouihl got the idea for his first play from a French newspaper report of 1919, about a you…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:18AMFriday, February 26, 2016
Shakespeare’s plays have proved remarkably resilient to everything that’s been thrown at them down the years, including – in the case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with its flowery bo…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:52PMTuesday, February 23, 2016
Given that Edmond Rostand’s 1897 tragicomic verse play Cyrano de Bergerac gave the word "panache" to the English language, it’s an irony that panache is the quality most woefully lacking…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:50PMWednesday, December 2, 2015
Two plays for the price of one. What’s not to like? Particularly when they resonate so strongly with each other on a hard, uncompromising theme. Broadly, that theme is love and war, sex an…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:31PMMonday, September 28, 2015
Entertaining our troops overseas has already proved a fruitful subject for drama, and not only for its show-within-a-show potential. Peter Nichols’ Privates on Parade – revived in t…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:42AMThursday, July 9, 2015
Musicals are cheesy by nature, aren’t they? If not cheesy, then picturesque. The cast of Les Mis may be grimy and poor, but they’re picture-postcard poor. Even modern musicals play by th…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:20AMFriday, June 5, 2015
“The only way is up” might have been the motto for the Orange Tree over the past year. Last spring, the future couldn’t have looked bleaker for the Richmond producing house when it los…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:16AMTuesday, May 12, 2015
‘I sometimes wish we were more normal’ sighs one of the adult Bliss children in Noel Coward’s country-house comedy. But it’s her family’s self-dramatising abnormality that provides…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:32AMThursday, April 30, 2015
Agitprop is a term that seems to have dropped out of use. It has too many negative connotations; it smacks of political rant. Yet artistic director Neil McPherson, whose small and feisty Fin…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:31AMFriday, April 24, 2015
You’re already in the land of the unpredictable with Pina Bausch. Creating unease was her metier. But when she pulls a gag intended to convince you that something has gone badly wrong on s…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:54AMWednesday, April 15, 2015
You might think you know what you’re in for with a play by Anders Lustgarten, winner of the inaugural Harold Pinter Playwright’s Award and current go-to political activist for the Royal …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMFriday, March 20, 2015
This 1887 domestic drama by August Strindberg is rarely seen in London, and Abbey Wright’s new production of Laurie Slade’s new version might have seized the opportunity to give this gri…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00AMSunday, March 8, 2015
The critic James Christopher describes his first stage play as a black comedy, and the opening few moments set out the noir element efficiently enough, if not with any discernable humour. Ch…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:21AMThursday, February 26, 2015
In the beginning was the Word and, not long after, came a need for ritual purification. “When Adam was banished from Eden, he sat in the river that flowed from the garden. Adam immersed in…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:08AMThursday, February 12, 2015
There is indeed something of Frankenstein’s monster about the handsome young gardener, with his flat-top haircut and gym-bulked torso, who has come to mow James Whale’s lawn. The retired…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:37AMSaturday, July 30, 2011
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Some ballets are dead, but they won't lie down
SOURCE: The Independent at 06:23AM 
