Under Trump, the world-class centre for performing arts is one of many US cultural institutions changing beyond recognition. Will others buckle? A year ago " just a year ago " the Kennedy Ce…
While the former arts minister's call for tax breaks and a bonfire of red tape will be welcomed, we seem to be going round in circles. And why hasn't the single most calamitous cause of fund…
Culture is not immune from the advances of the hard right " but it isn't too late for resistance Into the pale stone wall of the Kennedy Center, above its elegant terrace on the edge of the …
Since Alina Sarnatska's first play premiered a year ago, she has documented wartime Ukraine with unflinching frankness Eighteen months ago, Alina Sarnatska was serving as a combat medic on U…
'You can always find an intersection to Shakespeare's world in such situations as we have,' says translator, as Shakespeare productions boom across Ukraine The Ukrainian Shakespeare festival…
Jokes about the president's power grab at the Kennedy Center in Washington soon pale. This is a nakedly authoritarian move Donald Trump's announcement that he was installing himself as the c…
So many pre-election promises: but still a cultural malaise spreads from our schools to museums, galleries and theatres If a former director of the National Theatre says that "more harm has …
Love, death, grief, power, revenge: Greek tragedies get to the essence of the human experience. Here, writers and artists select their favourite plays, music and films inspired by the classi…
After the Tory years of underfunding, BBC-baiting and culture wars, nothing less than the soul of the nation is in the surprise new minister's hands Of all those in Keir Starmer's new cabine…
When access to culture is downgraded, the arts are sidelined in schools and civic spaces are neglected, we all lose out Our writers and experts name the pledges Labour must include in its ma…
A dozen playwrights and directors meet in Kyiv and find comedy can be an important part of their creative process In a studio theatre tucked into a courtyard behind Kyiv's main Khreshchatyk …
Kicked out of art school, the former squatter, barista and sex industry worker tells us what his barriers-and-bunting work says about Britain today " and why he's obsessed with 'Bond-in-drag…
Music, theatre and art have been crushed by years of Tory cuts. They need to be nurtured again, with purpose and with pride As the Conservatives clutch at political straws, the Labour party …
In 1926, with the General Strike looming and the right warning of a Bolshevik revolution, the BBC found itself in a dreadful dilemma. Writer Jack Thorne on why he turned this into 'a love le…
For many in Ukraine, this is a war of 'decolonisation' " and that includes Russia's celebrated artistic heritage At the National Opera of Ukraine in Kyiv recently, I watched a performance o…
Charlotte Higgins was thrilled that her history book about Roman Britain was being adapted for the stage " until she realised it was being reimagined " and she and her partner were the roman…
Defending statues, attacking 'wokeness', trying to destroy Channel 4 … the disgraced ex-PM's impact on the arts has been disruptive, cynical and inept " but what comes next could be even w…
There are so many examples of the arts being used to unite and galvanise people. Here it is being deployed as a tool of division For most of my 25 years as a journalist, "the arts" have usua…
As a teenager, the shadow culture secretary was always up for a party. Now she is expected to have a view on everything from the legacy of colonialism to the future of the licence fee. How i…
After almost a decade away, the world-conquering theatre rebels are back with The Burnt City, an epic take on the ultimate war story. We meet them at their cavernous new premises Punchdrunk,…
Pandemics, the climate crisis and the algorithms used by tech giants feel too amorphous to squeeze into the dramatic form "What the American public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending," t…
The actor made a mere six movies in lockdown but it's his own play and his return as Rooster Byron in Jerusalem that is getting him really excited Mark Rylance is dressed for rehearsals in l…
A sign of a functioning society is its artists being free to create work that pushes against prevailing political tides Public funding for the arts in Britain has, since it began in the afte…
By interfering in appointments, the government is trying to shape museums and trusts in its own image When the chair of the National Maritime Museum, Charles Dunstone, wrote to the Departmen…
From a fake forest in central London to Chekhov's Cherry Orchard told from the orchard's point of view, writers, directors and artists are exploring the roots of nature Let me tell you a st…