22 stories by "Dzifa Benson"
It's an immediate testament to the enduring appeal of Breakin' Convention, Sadler's Wells annual festival of hip hop theatre, now in its 16th year, to see the queues of people snaking round …
In her comprehensive and insightful book Contemporary Women Stage Directors, Paulette Marty attempts to answer a pivotal question 'How does gender influence the work of women directors'
At the beginning of the performance of Mitten wir im Leben sindBach6Cellosuiten, choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker she's also one of the five dancers comes right to the front of the s…
Receiving its world premiere at Sadler's Wells, The Thread is acclaimed British choreographer and Sadler's Wells Associate Artist Russell Maliphant's new work. Staged in collaboration with V…
Presented by National Dance Company Wales NDCWales, Awakening is a tour that marks the company's entry into a fresh phase of its development under the leadership of new artistic director, Fe…
It's the 21st century, so we should live in a world where an all-women-of-colour major production of a Shakespeare play like Richard II isn't so remarkable.
In this year, the 10th anniversary of Thriller Live at the Lyric Theatre and about a decade since Michael Jackson's passing, the show has played to over two million people, is the 15th-longe…
You wait so long for a Macbeth then like the buses, four major productions come along at once. The Barbican is staging the Royal Shakespeare Company's offering while the roundly panned Natio…
The British Library isn't the most obvious place to stage a dance installation but in the case of choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh's Contagion, which has toured to other non-theatre spaces ar…
New English Ballet Theatre, founded by artistic director Karen Pilkington-Miksa, has been on a mission to nurture and showcase young dancers and emerging choreographers since it launched sev…
If you go to see Alan Fieldan with JAMS' which presumably stands for the names of the four actors, Jemima, Alan, Malachy and Sophie, Marathon at the Barbican, you'd do you well to remember a…
It's been a long minute - over two decades, in fact - since acclaimed director Peter Brook, who is now 93 years old and has been called our greatest living theatre director, helmed a play at…
The boundary razing two-hander created and performed by Jennifer Kidwell and Scott R Sheppard Underground Railroad Game doesn't give too much of its own game away in the pre-show literature.…
It isn't often that the trifecta of the writing, directing and acting of a play harmonise perfectly into a deeply satisfying whole, but when that happens - as it does in Milly Thomas's award…
The will-they-won't-they trope of the BeatriceBenedick relationship in Much Ado About Nothing is so familiar to audiences that, even though it's staged repeatedly the last time this reviewer…
As the lights fade up on stage in the Royal Festival Hall, nine figures lying supine and inert are revealed, along with a rack of clothes, rocks, silver pails of what appear to be soil and, …
The Dorfmann Theatre within the National Theatre complex is proving to be an even more versatile space than promised when it reopened after refurbishment in 2014.
Thirty years after composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and director Jonathan Moore's trailblazing opera Greek premiered at the ENO, it's apparent from this new production, part of Arcola Theatre's…
In the programme notes for her darkly disturbing new play Spiral, Abigail Hood quotes a plea she discovered at the bottom of a free London newspaper Dear Steven, we love you, we miss you. We…
What's the earliest memory you have of your fatherThis is the question, among many, that sets off a process of enquiry into the state of the nation's masculinity and its concerns through the…
The couple at the heart of the award winning writer Tim Cook's new play - Adam Lee Knight and Eve Jeannie Dickinson - inevitably calls to mind its biblical counterpart. They are a young, nai…
The programme notes that accompany celebrated choreographer Hofesh Shechter's latest production, Show, are just as sparse as the title is nondescript. The most that can gleaned about what th…
