3,544 stories from The Arts Desk
Shirley Ballas and Scarlett Moffatt are good fun
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Assembly Hall Theatre, Tunbridge Wells ★★★★
Camp Siegfried, Cabaret, and Lisa Dwan as Beckett's Winnie among the year's best theatre in London.
Agent supreme Peggy Ramsay returns to the stage in accomplished Alan Plater revival
Was Peggy Ramsay a "woman out of time"? The legendary London literary agent, who nurtured the talents of …
A triumphant musical about teenage angst
When Berliners sat down to watch Franz Wedekind's debut play Fruhlings Erwachen " Spring Awakening " in 1906, they had little inkling of the kind of…
★★★★ THE TIGER LILLIES' CHRISTMAS CAROL: A VICTORIAN GUTTER, SOUTHBANK CENTRE Melancholy musical retelling laced with wit and political venom Â
The Tiger…
Has director Patrick Marber boobed this time?
In his 1973 play Habeas Corpus, now revived at the Menier Chocolate Factory under the direction of Patrick Marber, Alan Bennett had his way with…
Clive Rowe dons the frocks, while Rob Rinder and Anton Du Beke slap their thighs
Jack and the Beanstalk, Hackney Empire ★★★
A vivid and witty recreation of politics in the late Sixties
No playwright has a scalpel as sharp as James Graham's when it comes to dissecting politics; he has a brilliance and edge that st…
Jessie Buckley and Eddie Redmayne constantly surprise in multilayered production
Turning a theatre into the Kit Kat Club, Berlin, early 1930s, is nothing new: the Edinburgh University Theatr…
Revival of American writer Alice Childress's 1955 anti-racist play shines bright
The National Theatre has a good record in staging classic American drama by black playwrights. James Baldwin…
Gentle spoofing turns to something much more earthy and traditional
This is a story of an innocent who finds herself unexpectedly in a strange, unknown world. The same could be true for tho…
The stage magic is both ingenious and beguiling
It's been seventeen years since Nicholas Hytner first directed Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials at the National Theatre, ambitiously whirli…
Blanche McIntyre regenders the Duke and relishes the London low-life
Measure for Measure may be the quintessential Shakespearean "problem" play, but just what has earned it that epithet rem…
Remembering the brilliant actor knight who revealed himself both on stage and in pioneering performance diaries
The energy of Antony Sher, who has died at the age of 72, was prodigious. He n…
Despite its deceptive lightness, at heart this is a dark terrifying story
When the Canadian Yann Patel went to India as a young adult backpacker he fell in love " not with one person but wit…
The master of musicals remembered, and revered
★★★ THE GOOD LIFE Nostalgic comedy with a surprising resonance 45 years onÂ
Tom, Barbara, Jerry and Margo are back in the '70s, but with a message for today
"Off-grid…
★★★ A Christmas Carol - Immersive Dickens production not quite a Christmas cracker
Stephen Mangan's Scrooge learns his lesson in imbalanced Dickens adaptation
Four year…
His earthy informality instantly anchors the philosophy
Words flow like water in TS Eliot's Four Quartets, shimmering with allusion, swirling and eddying with the ideas and fractured philoso…
A noisy, busy comedy that loses its anchor somewhere in the chaos
"Am I myself?" At the tangled centre of Shakespeare's comedy of two pairs of identical twins, servant Dromio asks the quest…
Moira Buffini's state-of-the-nation, climate-change play runs into the doldrums
After all the tides of monologue plays have ebbed, British new writing is now paddling in the pools of state-o…
Roy Williams and Clint Dyer bring their monologue sequence to a triumphant conclusion
One of the absolute highpoints of new writing in the past couple of years has been the Death of England …
Musical adaptation of Louisa May Alcott classic is enjoyable but undemanding
Louisa May Alcott did not think she could write a successful book for girls. After her publisher suggested this …
Zadie Smith's updated Chaucerian tale has a spring in its step and a twinkle in its eye
Zadie Smith might not be the only writer who can rhyme "tandem" with "galdem", but she's the only one…
Al Smith's new play was jinxed before it started " and it never really recovers
Why are we indifferent to anti-Semitism? In the past few weeks the Royal Court, a proud citadel of wokeness, h…
