Wednesday, December 10, 2014
This isn't just a piratical treasure hunt. The NT is also on a rescue mission. The master plan here is, surely, to retrieve Robert Louis Stevenson's vintage adventure story about buccan…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 11:46AMTuesday, March 18, 2014
Maybe, just maybe, Noël Coward is scarier than you think. As a rule of thumb, when ghosts feature in plays, they're meant to be creepy as hell, calling for some horrid crime to be revenged,…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 10:56AMSunday, February 16, 2014
Winston Smith is alone. Isolated in a pool of light, with an anglepoise lamp at his shoulder, he is about to pen the first entry in his private diary. But he is, of course, being watche…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:23PMTuesday, December 10, 2013
This political satire is hardly a case of rapid-response playwriting. Opening in London's West End last night, after a month touring the regions,The Duck House is a farce about a fictional M…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:55PMSunday, December 8, 2013
We first see the bank clerk, who can’t bear his dull life, serving behind the cashier's till, like an automaton. In Melly Still's hugely inventive, visually stunning multimedia produc…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:19PMTuesday, December 3, 2013
It has been a hard slog, but he's emerging victorious in the end. Essentially, Shakespeare's Henry V tracks a military campaign. In Act One, the eponymous king declares war on France. By Act…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:05PMMonday, October 28, 2013
This is a strange one. Precious little happens and, in some ways, little is said in David Storey's muted chamber play from 1970. Two men named Harry and Jack – getting on in years, bu…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:20PMForever breaking into song and dance, musicals are fun, fun, fun. They are primarily what folks go to for uplifting entertainment, are they not? Actually, many of the best aren't anything li…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:57PMWednesday, October 9, 2013
Once upon a time, there were two cultures, and they were at odds. A forested wilderness stretches between the kingdoms of Sealand and Lagobel, as we glean from the childishly-drawn, giant ma…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 12:24PMTuesday, October 8, 2013
The setting is Dublin. We're talking modern-day and down-at-heel in this major new musical which has a deliberately scruffy look – with a launderette glowing in the dark and a concrete, fo…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 11:17AMThursday, September 19, 2013
Having boundaries actually sets us free. So Neil Armstrong's wife argues. She is dogmatically keen to stop her husband rocketing off to the moon in the first scene of The Lightning Child –…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 01:47AMSaturday, September 14, 2013
They’re eating out of the palm of his hand. Or so he thinks. Stephen Bellamy is a spin doctor, only 25 years old but already a hotshot in American electioneering. At the off, in Beau Willi…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:30AMFriday, December 7, 2012
By 1969, the celebrated theatre reviewer Ken Tynan had been recruited from the critics’ ranks to join the National Theatre team, which was resident at London’s Old Vic, so he was working…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:03PMSunday, August 14, 2011
Talk about timely.
As the US and Europe scrabbled on the brink of financial turmoil, an outstanding New York ensemble called the Theatre of the Emerging American Moment took the Edinburgh…
SOURCE: The Independent at 08:45AM 
