3,478 stories from The Arts Desk
Laura Donnelly once again soars in tailor-made part/s scripted by her partner
Art makes for unexpected bedfellows, and so it proves in Jez Butterworth's moving if meandering The Hills of Ca…
Yaël Farber presents Shakespeare's blistering play with bravura
Less than three years after her magnificent Macbeth, Yaël Farber returns to the Almeida with another Shakespeare tragedy…
Tony-winning production lands in the West End with an astounding cast
Doom and gloom, we are told, may have abounded in the classical underworld, but Hadestown suggests otherwise. Returning …
Matt Smith stars in heavy-handed adaptation of Ibsen's 1880s classic, here with onetime Tony nominee Paul Hilton (The Inheritance) in glowering support
Matt Smith gives his all in unyielding adaptation of Ibsen morality play
Real life is a helluva lot scarier right now than you might guess from the performative theatrics on display in the …
John Logan peers behind the scenes of the film world to muse on the icky relationship between life and art
It's awards season in the film world, which means that we're currently swamped by …
Sarah Snook gives a virtuoso performance amid a dazzling display of tech wizardry
Oscar Wilde's 1890 novella The Picture of Dorian Gray has given the world a trope built for flattery, along …
Real-life triangle around the composer's darkest masterpiece yields fitfully strong drama
David Hemmings was, by his own later admission, a knowing and bumptious boy when Britten cast him as…
A pitch-perfect Lindsay Duncan leads a large and splendid cast in Dodie Smith rediscovery
Sisters are doing it for themselves, just as families as a whole are, too, on the London stage thes…
★★★ JUST FOR ONE DAY, THE OLD VIC Nostalgia fest becomes a little uncomfortable when addressing a 21st century audience
Saint Bob, Mrs T and a whole lot of feelgood. Oh,…
End-of-days drama from centimetres-high clay figures, in a powerful collaboration from Scottish and Norwegian companies
In terms of conveying monumental events using small-scale means, Edinb…
A shocking attack kicks off an audacious experience that makes its audience complicit, in Clare Duffy's ambitious but patchy show
There's been an incident in Edinburgh. Right near the Scotti…
Age has not withered one jot the FAs' fury at the absurdities of modern life
You don't expect a couple of septuagenarian contraltos, aided by a spring chicken of a soprano in her fifties, t…
★★★★ OTHELLO, SAM WANAMAKER PLAYHOUSE Ola Ince makes compromises but gains much in return with her terrifyingly relevant production
An Othello for our times, our c…
Lemn Sissay's adaptation of the Franz Kafka classic is just too wordy
Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis" is a novella whose cultural resonance has echoed loudly down the years. As a modernist me…
★★★★ BRONCO BILLY THE MUSICAL, CHARING CROSS THEATRE Accept the show's unambitious intentions and you'll have a wonderful ride
With additional musical numbers, the…
Ingenious twists can't give Sam Holcroft's play a vital sense of danger
Take dollops of Orwell and Kafka, with a sprinkling of Pirandello for a lighter texture, then bake. That could be the …
New play about three sisters is full of energy, but also a bit too populist for me
The National Theatre is meant to represent the whole nation " and not just the metropolitan middle classes.…
Bartlett Sher's intelligent reading is gorgeously staged and winningly performed
The giant crinolines are back, and the winsome little royal children with miniature temples on their heads, a…
★★★★ THE MOST PRECIOUS OF GOODS, MARYLEBONE THEATRE A story of love's triumph in an ocean of hate
An account of one family's near-destruction in the Holocaust give…
Neil Simon's 1968 play allows for fun, yes, but also sadness
Sarah Jessica Parker's screen renown as Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City has made a London event out of the West End revival …
Zoe Cooper's queer reading is a tonic: clever, funny and seriously silly
What Zoe Cooper has concocted in her loving rewiring of Jane Austen's first completed novel looks at first sight like…
London transfer for the Royal Shakespeare Company's riotous comedy Western
At its best theatre is a seducer. It weaves a magic spell that can persuade you, perhaps against your better judge…
Gothic excess mingles with more modern themes in a one-man transformation of Robert Louis Stevenson's novella
Evil walks among us. But it doesn't arrive courtesy of mad scientists, bubbling …
★★★★ KIN, NATIONAL THEATRE The power of physical theatre to tell the story of migration
Unconventional and thrilling, this Gecko Theatre project will live long in …