Lorraine Hansberry’s career as a playwright proved tragically short. A Raisin in the Sun is by some distance her best-known work, a key piece about the African American post-war experience…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:09AMI’m still pondering the title of Chris Urch’s new play. On the surface it’s clear enough: The Rolling Stone is a weekly newspaper in Uganda that has been notorious for pursuing that co…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 10:21AMEvery incarnation of totalitarianism has its own specific mythology, which exists in different forms as it is believed at home and “translated” abroad (or not, in both cases). North Kore…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:20PMIs Jim Broadbent Britain’s best-loved actor? The slate of screen roles he’s accumulated over the years – this Christmas Carol is his return to theatre after a decade away – has surel…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:46AMOne of the joys about this stage adaptation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days is the contrast between its phlegmatic hero Phileas Fogg, who deals with everything in terms of pre…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:31AMIn the world of rediscoveries, half a century may not be a long time. Slightly more, in fact, with Robert Bolt’s first performed stage play Flowering Cherry, which premiered in 1957 with R…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:54AMThe repercussions of loss ripple inexorably through Simon Stephens’ 2003 play One Minute. Foreshadowing elements developed in his later work, it’s a testing piece that speaks most of all…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:33AMIf you were expecting a fusty, formal adaptation of Anthony Trollope – and one of his least known novels, to boot – Lady Anna: All At Sea will come as a breath of fresh air. Colin Blumen…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:21PMHelen Edmundson’s The Heresy of Love may be set in 17th century Mexico and follow the conflict between strict religion and personal development, but its theme of a woman denied her voice b…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 12:01PMThere’s a clear territorial divide in the small space of the Jermyn Street Theatre at the opening of Ashley G Holloway’s Lesere. At the centre of Ellan Parry’s persuasive design there�…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:14AMThe devil gets the best lines. That may depend, of course, on whether we’re prepared to qualify David Cameron as the devil, but in William Gaminara's rapid-firing farce The Three Lions, th…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:07AMJacobean playwright John Ford is flavour of the season at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. His better-known, and simply better, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, opened the venue’s new programme la…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 11:14AMIt’s true that there is something wildly, garishly, theatrical about Pedro Almodóvar’s films – none more so than this rampant farce – but it’s equally true that their sensibility …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:42AMThe single spacious room that is the central location of Tena Štivičić’s 3 Winters has seen plenty of ghosts. It’s part of an old Zagreb mansion, and through the course of the pl…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 10:25AM“I am spiteful! I am ill! You are not going to like this!” With these words Harry Lloyd opens his one-man show that adapts the Dostoevsky 1864 novella that is often hailed as the first w…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:01AMThere’s cruel comedy and human drama aplenty in Fortune’s Fool, so much so that it’s hard sometimes to know whether we’re watching farce or tragedy. But it’s a mixture that works w…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:25AMSouthwark Playhouse's new production of The Love Girl and the Innocent is London’s first in over 30 years, and there’s a reason Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s play rarely reaches the stage: …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 11:35AMAleksandr Solzhenitsyn was two years out of prison camp when he wrote The Love Girl and the Innocent. The experience of the eight years of hell that followed his sentence in July 1945 for an…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:27AMIt’s hard to imagine much upstaging Martyn Jacques, the indomitable falsetto frontman of the Tiger Lillies, but the gaping mouth of an enormous mythical fish that seems to have swum straig…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMThe last two years have seen the Tiger Lillies hit a prolific peak of activity, to be found as often on the theatrical as the concert stage, drawing on plenty of influences from outside the …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:59AMThe new South Bank Show has glided into its second season with a seemingly effortless profile of multi-hyphenate Tim Minchin. In case we’ve forgotten what exactly we admire him for these d…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:29PMThere’s something off stage, something loud and threatening, pulsating in dark red, at the beginning of Julien Cottereau’s solo mime piece Imagine Toi. This is a show of fears and sweetn…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMIn the Globe to Globe season, the Caucasus is proving as fruitful a ground as any for new views on old texts. Georgia’s Marjanishvili company, under director Levan Tsuladze, proved the reg…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 11:29AMYou might have wondered if, when Armenia was offered King John as part of the Globe to Globe season, they felt they’d drawn the short straw. Not a bit of it.read more
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:38AM
