Wednesday, December 10, 2014
With a bloodthirsty, corpse-devouring plant called Audrey at the centre of events, we can only be in the Little Shop of Horrors. It’s a far cry from Jack and the Beanstalk, but the Royal E…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:49AMWednesday, November 5, 2014
No one is more prescriptive than Tennessee Williams when it comes to stage and set directions. As he got older and wiser he made allowances for directors and actors to have their say. “The…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:40AMThursday, September 18, 2014
Instead of that small well-worn stone balcony in that courtyard in Verona, picture an extended well-worn cast-iron balcony in the Victoria Baths in Manchester. The young lovers have ample ro…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:06AMWednesday, May 14, 2014
By picking his way through Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid - written 600 years later - Simon Armitage has it all, including the horse and Helen, each of whom in their way …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:06AMWednesday, April 2, 2014
Swedish director Maria Aberg, making her Royal Exchange debut, sets the play in 1945 post-war Britain and strives to play in the effects of war on the home front, where women are in charge a…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:09AMTuesday, February 25, 2014
“It’s all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind,” advised Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West when writing the spoof biography Orlando as a “love letter�…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMWednesday, February 19, 2014
We are witnessing the end of an era in the long history of Manchester’s theatreland: the disappearance, after more than 60 years, of the treasured Library Theatre. Coming full circle, it i…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:45AMWednesday, January 29, 2014
There’s no place like home – and home for writer Simon Stephens is Stockport. He doesn’t live there any more, but he was born there in 1971 and still finds the place, particularly its …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:14AMWednesday, November 6, 2013
How many times can a director re-work the same show and still come up with something fresh, gripping and memorable? This is James Brining’s third version of Sondheim’s killer thriller mu…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:41AMWednesday, October 2, 2013
The guilt of knowingly sending our sons to war with defective equipment and fatal results certainly resonates today. Who takes the blame? Do we get ministerial resignations or arms-dealers g…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:28AMTuesday, July 16, 2013
You know it must be the holiday season when comic caper-loving Told by an Idiot run riot in the Royal Exchange. Expect the theatre of the absurd, with glimpses of Keystone Kops and Marx Brot…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:17AMSunday, July 14, 2013
It isn’t so much man versus machine as man versus the man behind the machine. Famously, in 1997 the Russian chess grandmaster and world champion Garry Kasparov faced IBM's supercomputer RS…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:51AMTuesday, May 7, 2013
What price a woman’s liberation? And what price a man’s self-defined honour? By pitching one against the other and against the backdrop of wedlock (the emphasis being on the “lock”),…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:57PMSunday, February 24, 2013
Let’s Kick Racism Out of Football. Show Racism the Red Card. Say No to Racism. Such are today’s campaign messages. And then there’s the headline: “Colour Prejudice Problem” i…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:28AMSunday, February 17, 2013
“Work, more work and six foot of earth in the end. That’s life,” says John Rutherford. That single-minded work ethic is what drives him on and drives his family to despair and desertio…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:28AMWednesday, January 23, 2013
On 1 July 1916, the battalion of Lancashire volunteers recruited from Accrington was all but wiped out in about 20 minutes as they took on the task of attacking the village of Serre on the o…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:15PMMonday, December 3, 2012
Having 30 “rats” running around hardly seems the stuff of festive fare, but since the begetter of the show is Carol Ann Duffy, known in her children’s writing for dark fairy tales, we …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:40PMTuesday, October 30, 2012
Oh, how it’s raining. Streaming down the windows of the dry goods store, Torrance Mercantile, in the Deep South, where Lady Torrance is marooned in a stiflingly small town and a loveless m…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:05PMSaturday, October 6, 2012
Like several of Bill Naughton’s plays, Lighthearted Intercourse started life as a BBC Third Programme drama. When it was broadcast, in 1963, its title was, less provocatively, November Day…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:05PMMonday, September 17, 2012
What’s in a name? Pinchwife, Fidget, Horner, Squeamish, Sparkish… William Wycherley labelled his characters blatantly. No-one is hornier than Horner, the womaniser who puts it about (sor…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:27PMSaturday, July 21, 2012
Within hours of the opera buffs leaving town, having had their fill of Buxton Festivalia, the old spa changes gear for operetta. For three weeks, the town becomes the jolly international cap…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMThursday, June 14, 2012
Visualise a large lost property office, such as that for Transport for London at Baker Street, which inspired this production, its racks stuffed with thousands of items, from false teeth to …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:02PMTuesday, May 22, 2012
It’s ironic that Oscar Wilde should escape to the Lake District in 1891 to write a play satirising London society, his first success in the theatre. He took such a shine to the region’s …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:53AMThursday, May 10, 2012
Street of dreams? The people who lived in the real-life inspiration and location for Coronation Street, Archie Street in Salford, hand-picked by the soap’s begetter Tony Warren, would be f…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:18PMMonday, April 16, 2012
Seeing Miss Julie played in-the-round would, I suspect, have delighted Strindberg. In his preface to the play, he was much exercised about the setting, presuming a proscenium stage: a single…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:13PMThursday, April 5, 2012
The cultural triumvirate of the Hallé Orchestra, the Royal Exchange Theatre and The Lowry have joined forces for this new production of the 1953 hit musical Wonderful Town. Leonard Bernstei…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:20AMWednesday, April 4, 2012
The world premiere here of Monkee Business the Musical was planned long before the untimely death in February of Davy Jones, the Manchester-born member of the manufactured band tha…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:10AMTuesday, March 6, 2012
What is it about the Sixties that keeps drawing us back? Surely, it can’t just be that anniversary thing – 50 years on? Perhaps, in these care-worn times, we just like to revisit our don…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:07AMSunday, February 26, 2012
“Am I for t’ see mi own lad bitted an’ bobbed? Theer’s more blort than bustle i’ this world - an’ ‘er’s a clat-fart”. Welcome to the old curiosity shop of English drama, fr…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:10PMSaturday, January 21, 2012
Alfie’s back. The eponymous scallywag of the late Bill Naughton’s picaresque yarn of London’s so-called “swinging 60s” is at it again, canoodling the women and cuckolding their hus…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:53AMTuesday, December 13, 2011
Oh, the joys of eccentricity. Welcome to the Vanderhof family of misfits. The head of the household, Grandpa Martin, refuses to pay any taxes, preferring to keep snakes on a hat-stand. Good …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:32AM 
