Thursday, April 14, 2016
Was Tennessee Williams breaking rules, or breaking apart when he wrote this 1969 play? A bit of both, probably, and the two main characters of the rarely performed In the Bar of a Tokyo Hote…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:19AM[SHARE]Friday, April 1, 2016
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 09:09AM[SHARE]Thursday, January 21, 2016
I'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 country'…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 10:21AM[SHARE]Friday, January 15, 2016
Every 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 Korea su…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:20PM[SHARE]Thursday, December 10, 2015
Is 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 surely given …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:46AM[SHARE]Friday, December 4, 2015
One 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 preci…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:31AM[SHARE]Saturday, November 21, 2015
In 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 Ral…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:54AM[SHARE]Saturday, September 12, 2015
The 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 abo…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:33AM[SHARE]Friday, August 21, 2015
If 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 Blumenau's…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:21PM[SHARE]Thursday, August 6, 2015
Helen 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 by …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 12:01PM[SHARE]Saturday, July 11, 2015
There'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's a br…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:14AM[SHARE]Saturday, March 28, 2015
The 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, the …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:07AM[SHARE]Thursday, March 19, 2015
Jacobean 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 last aut…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 11:14AM[SHARE]Tuesday, January 13, 2015
It'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 is far r…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:42AM[SHARE]Thursday, December 4, 2014
The single spacious room that is the central location of Tena Å tiviÄić's 3 Winters has seen plenty of ghosts. It's part of an old Zagreb mansion, and through the course of the…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 10:25AM[SHARE]Friday, October 10, 2014
"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 work …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:01AM[SHARE]Tuesday, December 17, 2013
There'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 well in Luc…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:25AM[SHARE]Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Southwark 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: it's a…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 11:35AM[SHARE]Wednesday, October 2, 2013
Aleksandr 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 03:27AM[SHARE]Friday, September 6, 2013
It'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 straight…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PM[SHARE]Friday, June 7, 2013
The 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 04:59AM[SHARE]Thursday, April 18, 2013
The 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 day…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:29PM[SHARE]Sunday, December 16, 2012
There'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 sweetnesse…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PM[SHARE]Tuesday, May 22, 2012
In 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 regio…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 11:29AM[SHARE]Saturday, May 19, 2012
You 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[SHARE] 
