3,497 stories from The Arts Desk
HOWARD DAVIES: AN APPRECIATION The peerless directors' director cast a spell over audiences across the repertoireThe peerless directors' director cast a spell over audiences across the …
AMADEUS, NATIONAL THEATRE Revival of Peter Shaffer's most famous play is a musical triumphRevival of Peter Shaffer's most famous play is a musical triumph Populist playwright Peter Shaffer, …
THE INTELLIGENT HOMOSEXUAL'S GUIDE TO CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM WITH A KEY TO THE SCRIPTURES, HAMPSTEAD THEATRE Tony Kushner's revision of a 2010 New York drama contains multitudesTony Kushne…
'I AM DISMAYED BY THE TONE OF THE DEBATE' A member of the Globe's Council sees both sides in the Emma Rice furoreA member of the Globe's Council sees both sides in the Emma Rice furoreT…
THE NEST, YOUNG VIC Moralising made real in Conor McPherson's version of a German hitMoralising made real in Conor McPherson's version of a German hitDo we see enough in the UK of conti…
A flawed musical about conjoined twins is elevated by its central pairComposer Henry Krieger's highly anticipated Dreamgirls arrives later this month, but first up is the UK premiere of his …
FOOL FOR LOVE, FOUND111 Sam Shepard's incest play makes a fine swansong for a pop-up venueSam Shepard's incest play makes a fine swansong for a pop-up venueWho is the fool in Sam Shepar…
Terrific revival of Terry Johnson's modern classicTerry Johnson's Dead Funny debuted at the same theatre in the West End in 1994 (after opening at Hampstead), and its starting point is …
Jason Robert Brown's two-hander song cycle is a knockoutFrom Monteverdi to Schubert to Bernstein and Lloyd Webber the dramatic song cycle has travelled far and wide over the centuries, …
A part we have played is like a person we once met, grew to know, became intimately enmeshed with and finally moved away from. Some of these characters remain friends, others are like ex-lov…
Some have responded to the very notion of a musical about cancer as if the idea itself were breaking some unwritten code of what is permissible to put on stage
We've got a lot to celebrate in 2016: fifty years since the Roundhouse became an arts centre and 10 years of transforming young lives through creativity. In celebration of this momentous yea…
Q: How do you review a show that includes lines that ask "can my mouth swallow my mouth"? A: With difficulty, but I should be okay as long as I resist the temptation of being as surreal as C…
Kemp Powers' play is set in a dingy motel room in Miami on the night of 25 February 1964, after Cassius Clay (as Muhammad Ali then was) had earlier beaten Sonny Liston to gain the world heav…
At first, I was a bit confused by the play's title. After all, David Hare gave his 1998 adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde the moniker of The Blue Room, which coincidentally is the s…
Ambition trumps (if you'll forgive that verb) achievement in Ella Hickson's new play, a long-aborning exercise in time-travel whose audacity of vision can't override one's impression that th…
On 10 October 2016, World Mental Health Day, the team of Belarus Free Theatre came back together to start the final stages of production for Tomorrow I Was Always a Lion, a new theatre show …
The best way to line up the stars is to offer them a chance to act in a play about the theatre. For this, Ronald Harwood's The Dresser has a good track record: its original West End outing s…
The first thing you hear are the marimbas " music that's pounded, punched out of the air by hundreds of fists. Later the instruments give us dances and songs, but this musical violence is ne…
It's not often you need a passport to get into a theatre show. But then the journey required to get to Scottish site-specific experts Grid Iron's Crude does feel like something of a pilgrima…
Playwright Mark Ravenhill's 1996 Royal Court debut was not the decade's most shocking piece of theatre, but its title was, and is, certainly the one that troubles producers and publicists th…
The perception of Steven many-hats Berkoff as "one of the major minor contemporary dramatists in Britain" makes sense when you see this. Here are two chamber pieces, both two-handers, writte…
To begin writing a book is to start something over which you are going to lose control. As it comes to life, a book acquires its own quiddity, its own interior authority, and if the writer d…
Ye olde love triangle returns, this time as the centrepiece of a rock chamber musical that premiered Off-Broadway in 2013 and now makes its UK premiere. There's a good guy, a bad boy, and th…
Fleeing rape and forced marriage in their war-torn homeland, a boatload of women refugees washes up in Greece, where they beg asylum from the suspicious locals.read more
