Friday, June 14, 2013
What to do with an old warhorse like The School for Scandal, a fantastic play written by Richard Brinsley Sheridan in 1777 full of smart lines and great parts, beloved not just of profession…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:28PMWednesday, June 5, 2013
Githa Sowerby's play, written in 1912 and a huge hit at the Royal Court and then in America, has been described as having qualities of Ibsen or Chekhov, and its themes certainly echo those w…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:14PMThursday, April 25, 2013
Conor McPherson’s 1997 play has become a modern classic, and it's not difficult to see why. It's a glorious evening of storytelling that allows the cast to display their wares, as the conv…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:07PMFriday, February 22, 2013
The last time James McAvoy played the Scottish king, it was in a scintillating reworking of the play written in the modern idiom by Peter Moffat, for the BBC's ShakespeaRe-Told season in 200…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:10PMWednesday, February 13, 2013
Noël Coward's 1924 play must have been thought very daring at the time, dealing as it does with a young man's cocaine addiction - no wonder it has been called the jazz age's Shopping and Fu…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:02PMTuesday, January 29, 2013
A wise man once said of Simon Gray's plays - and he wrote a lot of them - that they often have a lot of talk and very little action. And so it is with his 1961 tragi-comedy, set in the …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:07PMWednesday, January 9, 2013
A new Friday-night cabaret club opens tomorrow at the fabled Café de Paris in London's Leicester Square. The Grade II-listed venue's subterranean ballroom, where Marlene Dietrich, Frank Sin…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PMTuesday, November 20, 2012
You don't see much of Arthur Wing Pinero's considerable output these days. Although he was largely contemporaneous with Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Gilbert and Sullivan, whose works…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:24PMWednesday, September 19, 2012
The St. James Theatre has risen, phoenix-like, almost literally from the ashes of the Westminster Theatre, which was first a chapel, then a cinema and latterly a drama theatre that played ho…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:04PMThursday, September 13, 2012
David Hare's 1998 play wasn't terribly well received when it was first produced by the Almeida; several critics regarded it as a thin work, weakly directed by Richard Eyre, and opined that L…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 10:35PMMonday, August 20, 2012
I, Tommy Gilded Balloon **** Everybody will be familiar with Tommy Sheridan's story, and not necessarily because they closely follow Scottish politics at their most internecine. Rather …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:50PMSunday, August 19, 2012
Jigsy, Assembly Rooms **** Les Dennis may have started his career as a comic, and then as a presenter of cheesy, family-friendly television game shows, but of late he has been plying hi…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:19AMThursday, August 16, 2012
Mies Julie, Assembly Hall **** Miss Julie is pretty full-on at the best of times but in Yael Farber’s striking new version, Strindberg’s themes of class and gender are given a shock…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:09AMTuesday, April 24, 2012
What a joy this once-in-a-generation season is. From Moscow comes this free-wheeling production of Shakespeare's great morality play, and one that also makes remarkably free with the text to…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:06PMWednesday, March 28, 2012
This is the Jacobean tragedy that probably gave Quentin Tarantino his best ideas - by the end of night the body count is almost in double figures through stabbings and strangulations. But ev…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:17PMTuesday, January 31, 2012
With its mistaken identities, a meddling mother, a chest of precious jewels, gulling of fops and two pairs of thwarted lovers, it's easy to see Shakespearean overtones in Oliver Goldsmith's …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:03PMWednesday, December 14, 2011
Conor McPherson's 2000 play is one of the Irish writer's most memorable works, and this revival comes soon after his less acclaimed latest play, The Veil, over which we shall draw, er, a dis…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:21PMTuesday, December 13, 2011
The play-within-a-play device has honourable antecedents - playwrights from Thomas Kyd and Anton Chekhov, through to Bertolt Brecht and Tennessee Williams, have flirted with it, while Shakes…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:08PMWednesday, November 16, 2011
“The whole world's in a terrible state of chassis,” says Captain Jack Boyle more than once during Sean O'Casey's great play, set in 1922 and the second of his Dublin trilogy, bookended b…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:27PMFriday, November 11, 2011
If you didn't know Frederico García Lorca's Yerma before this show, you probably wouldn't be any better informed after watching Natalie Abrahami's engaging but flawed production.read more
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:35PMWednesday, October 19, 2011
Sharon Gless is best known for her role as Detective Christine Cagney in Cagney & Lacey, and then to another generation in the American version of Queer as Folk and currently in the dram…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 10:08AMWednesday, October 5, 2011
Conor McPherson has set his latest play at an interesting point in Irish – and European – history. It is 1822, post-Napoleonic wars, and Ireland is in an economic mess, with impoverished…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:34AMThursday, September 29, 2011
Saul Rubinek is an established actor in American television programmes such as LA Law and Frasier, where he played Daphne's fiancé Donny. Now the Canadian has turned his hand to playwriting…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMTuesday, September 27, 2011
It's difficult for modern theatregoers – in or beyond Ireland – to understand the extraordinary furore The Playboy of the Western World caused when it was first performed in 1907 at the …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:19PMSunday, September 4, 2011
When The Lion King first opened in London in October 1999, there were cries from some quarters that it was merely following in a long line of stage shows that had been lifted lazily from fil…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:15PM 
