The disconnect between rhetoric and genuine meaning feels very contemporary Kathryn Hunter's performance as Lear forges its heat from contradictions. She is as frail as she is strong, as det…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:24AM[SHARE]Gecko boldly sculpts surreal alternative realities to our predicted worlds You never forget your first Gecko production. I experienced mine almost 20 years ago at the Battersea Arts Centre, …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:24AM[SHARE]A ten-foot golden phallus is launched from the musicians' gallery Boris Johnson was of course not the first British leader to engineer a split with Europe for personal gain. This strikes you…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 12:18PM[SHARE]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 changes…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 11:06PM[SHARE]Naomi 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 hi…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:24AM[SHARE]This 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 laughter …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:48AM[SHARE]You 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 da…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:24AM[SHARE]★★★ 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…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:24AM[SHARE]Mike 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: The Arts Desk at 05:24AM[SHARE]The 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 underpinned…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:48AM[SHARE]Director 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: The Arts Desk at 07:54AM[SHARE]The 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 Germ…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:12AM[SHARE]Scattergun 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 was t…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:42AM[SHARE]A 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 st…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:48AM[SHARE]The 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 whirli…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:54AM[SHARE]Despite 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 wit…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:18AM[SHARE]His 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 philoso…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:33AM[SHARE]Musical 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: The Arts Desk at 09:36AM[SHARE]This 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: The Arts Desk at 05:48AM[SHARE]How 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: The Arts Desk at 07:42AM[SHARE]Any 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 Emperor Augus…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:03AM[SHARE]An 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…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:54AM[SHARE]Playwright 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: The Arts Desk at 08:24AM[SHARE]Edward 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 m…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 12:36PM[SHARE]Too 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: The Arts Desk at 09:36AM[SHARE]Raine 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 comp…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:36AM[SHARE]Uncomfortable 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 res…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:36PM[SHARE]A 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 N…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:54AM[SHARE]A 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: The Arts Desk at 04:03AM[SHARE]Co-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 by…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:03AM[SHARE]Celie 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 m…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:33AM[SHARE]
