3,497 stories from The Arts Desk
Is this the most dazzling play of a dazzling playwright? First staged in 1974, Travesties is the one which manages to squeeze avant-garde novelist James Joyce, DaDa godfather Tristan Tzara a…
Nobody said that a 70-minute audience with the undead was going to be easy. You can read Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing in your own time, pausing for thought, leaving off, coming back. W…
Is Katori Hall (b. 1981) the embodiment of Martin Luther King's dream? She was born in Memphis, the city where King died. The Mountaintop, her play about his last night alive, had its world …
It's one of those true stories you couldn't make up: in 1920s Kentucky, Floyd Collins, visionary cave explorer, happens across the spectacular sand cave of his dreams only to become trapped …
Restoration theatre has the reputation of being a rake's paradise " all those randy young aristos in hot pursuit of buxom wenches. But even in the depths of 17th-century playwriting, there w…
What's in a name? Imogen has a softer music to it than Cymbeline, the only one of Shakespeare's plays in which the title character is marginal - even if Hal and Falstaff just outshine Henry …
At its best, theatre is great at putting resonant metaphors on stage. And, as Elinor Cook's new play abundantly proves, the activity of mountain climbing seems very promising as a metaphor f…
Very occasionally the playing of a play leaves a deeper impression than does the play itself. This is the case with Good Canary, a lippy, sweary tragicomedy by Zach Helm about secrets and ad…
Michael Head's new play is based on the book They Took the Lead by Stephen Jenkins, which tells the true story of events at Clapton Orient (now Leyton Orient) Football Club during the First …
We are lost in the wood. In the limbo state between dream and reality, memory and present, youth and age, companionship and seclusion, life and death, struggle and success, fame and obscurit…
On a sunny afternoon in April four young women pile themselves into a toilet at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. They lock the door. They have come here to make some intimate re…
Growing up is a kind of grief: losing the person you once were to embrace the person you will become. That loss can fracture familial relationships, forced to adjust and reform as offspring …
"I've always thought there's nothing worse than coming to the end of your life and realising that you haven't participated in it, and so I write about people who've done that to a certain ex…
The confidence trick to end all tricks, Ben Jonson's The Alchemist is so utterly recognisable, so clearly contemporary, that to update the setting feels a bit like underlining the point in r…
The family is a war zone. Bam, bam, bam. For some people, it can be the most dangerous place on earth. Its weapons include domination and betrayal, blackmail and abuse, and its frontline is …
What price a human soul? That's the question Marlowe's Doctor Faustus asks " a question whose answers are rooted in faith and theology. But in a society with little use for faith and still l…
We're living in the age of the small play. Although there are plenty of baggy epics around on our stages, they are outnumbered by the small and short two-hander, whether it is John O'Donovan…
She gave us the most moving of King Lears years before the news broke that Glenda Jackson would be playing the role. Only Mark Rylance has recently matched the malicious wit of her Globe Ric…
Part Biblical melodrama, part Carry On Up The Colosseum, with a bit of Horrible Histories thrown in for good measure, it's hard to see how John Wolfson's wildly uneven The Inn at Lydda gradu…
Ever since Lucy Prebble's hit masterpiece, Enron, opened our eyes to the possibilities of staging plays about global finance in a thrillingly theatrical way, the hunt has been on for another…
Alice Birch is one of the most exciting playwrights to have arrived in the past five years. This restaging of the brilliantly titled Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. " which was first put on …
For the final show in his year-long stay at this West End address, Kenneth Branagh has chosen to revive and star in John Osborne's 1957 play. By doing so, he finds himself once again treadin…
Do you carry a small part of the Congo every day on your person? Probably. Your mobile phone will contain coltan, aka columbite tantalum, which is used to make your electronics work better. …
Angel by Henry Naylor, Gilded Balloon ****Rehana tells us what her hometown Kobane in Syria, is like - "A small border town where nothing happens … like Berwick-on-Tweed," she says " a typ…
Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songsread more
