Inter-generational story from a Northern mining town melds naturalism and tragedy Anne-Marie Duff blazes across the stage like a meteorite in Beth Steel’s excoriating drama about the chang…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 11:06PMNaomi Wallace's writing is brave and uncompromising Jude is the kind of girl that no-one would want to mess with – she can dance like a demon to Eric Clapton, skewer an ego in seconds and …
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 07:24AMThis production carries as much emotional heft as it exudes riotous comedy Lucy Bailey’s joyous, visually ravishing Much Ado About Nothing opens on a sombre note. On stage there is laughte…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 05:48AMYou go into a dimension where you operate through instinct as much as intellect Punchdrunk’s latest epic undertaking may be inspired by the legend of Troy, but this is nothing less than a …
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 07:24AM★★★ THE 47TH, OLD VIC Mike Bartlett's ambitious Trump satire doesn't quite hit its target As a playwright, how do you handle an arse-fixated arch-disrupter? Megalomania is inherently …
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 05:24AMMike Bartlett's raucous chronicle of London in the age of Boris Johnson If Nero fiddled while Rome burned, then Boris Johnson has played the whole sodding orchestra. Between the parties, the…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 05:24AMThe soundtrack features musicians ranging from Robyn and Dua Lipa to Cardi B Jane Austen’s waspish vision revealed the vanities, delusions and cynical financial calculations that underpinn…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 05:48AMDirector Rufus Norris uses the Olivier's revolving stage like a virtuoso With its violent storms, bombed out cities and stories of families ripped apart by war, Small Island feels very much …
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 07:54AMThe author Thomas Melle had his animatronic double created for this intelligent show It’s the vulnerability of the robot that strikes you in this subtle, intelligent production from the Ge…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 06:12AMScattergun subversion is undermined by psychological miscalculations Hamlet isn’t often played for laughs. When David Tennant took the comedic approach in the RSC’s 2008 production, it w…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 04:42AMA vivid and witty recreation of politics in the late Sixties No playwright has a scalpel as sharp as James Graham’s when it comes to dissecting politics; he has a brilliance and edge that …
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 07:48AMThe stage magic is both ingenious and beguiling It’s been seventeen years since Nicholas Hytner first directed Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials at the National Theatre, ambitiously wh…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 07:54AMDespite its deceptive lightness, at heart this is a dark terrifying story When the Canadian Yann Patel went to India as a young adult backpacker he fell in love – not with one person but w…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 05:18AMHis earthy informality instantly anchors the philosophy Words flow like water in TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, shimmering with allusion, swirling and eddying with the ideas and fractured philo…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 05:33AMMusical adaptation of Louisa May Alcott classic is enjoyable but undemanding Louisa May Alcott did not think she could write a successful book for girls. After her publisher suggested this …
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 09:36AMThis shark-tooth-sharp comedy provides a behind-the-scenes glance at "Jaws" Jaws was the Moby Dick of late 20th century capitalism, a fantasy about fear and the unknown for a society that ha…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 05:48AMHow do traumas from former generations affect how we behave in the present? This is simultaneously a love story and an archaeology of hate, a sparky, spiky encounter between two individuals …
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 07:42AMAny figure in Roman mythology today would be at the pointy end of cancel culture Ovid was exiled – or to put it in twenty-first century terms, ‘no-platformed’ – by an indignant Emper…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 08:03AMAn intriguing if flawed evening, boosted by ebullient ensemble work Indecent is a play wrapped inside a news story about stigma. Playwright Paula Vogel was at Cornell University when she s…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 06:54AMPlaywright Josh Azouz's absurdism owes as much to Sacha Baron Cohen as to Beckett An ageing Nazi, stuffed into a slightly too tight white linen suit, sits at the opposite end of the dining …
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 08:24AMEdward Baker-Duly seems to have sprung fully formed from the pages of 'Punch' If you’re looking for a distraction from the apocalyptic headlines that seem to be the norm right now, then it…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 12:36PMToo many of the messages seem reductive and irrelevant "It is dangerous for women to go outside alone," blares the electronic sign above the stage of the new Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare'…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 09:36AMRaine beautifully evokes how music captures the mess of life In John Eliot Gardner’s magnificent wide-ranging biography of Bach, Music In The Castle of Heaven, he tells the story of the co…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 06:36AMUncomfortable truths beneath the poisoned patter This blistering, fearless play about an 18-year-old black entrepreneur on the King’s Road raises a myriad of uncomfortable questions that r…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 07:36PMA production that revels in the joyously absurd while hinting at the play's darker edges A little less than two years after Sean Holmes’s kick-ass Latin American carnival-style A Midsummer…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 06:54AMA vivid and credible production that is also limited by its form To accept or not accept a donation: that’s certainly the burning political question of the moment.
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 04:03AMCo-production with Manchester International Festival, Marshmallow Laser Feast and Philharmonia Orchestra brings Shakespeare's metaphor to life Which of Shakespeare’s plays is most plagued …
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 06:03AMCelie learns how to live from the strong, rebellious women she encounters This production of The Color Purple is an extraordinary testimony to the fact that many of the twentieth century’s…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 07:33AMThe tilt between our actual selves and our idealised selves will never cease to be an existential tension This stunningly delivered online monologue from a bereaved widow to her husband feel…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 07:03AMSkilfully interwoven accounts of a life in which togetherness is forbidden How do you create a secular version of the Nine Lessons and Carols? The original can feel like a formulaic trot thr…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 06:48AMAn ingenious depiction of the artist's gravity-defying love One of Marc Chagall’s last commissions was for a stained-glass window in Chichester Cathedral, which channelled his characterist…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 04:03PM
