3,498 stories from The Arts Desk
As we finally go to the polls, casting votes based on our view of national identity and Britain's place in the world, here comes Shakespeare's ever-topical play. Robert Hastie's thoughtful t…
There's a one-man play inside every politician " and a one-woman play behind each male leader. Linda Griffiths's and Paul Thompson's solo show, Maggie and Pierre, explores Maggie Trudeau's s…
It's a little over two years since I was approached to adapt The Mighty Walzer by Howard Jacobson for Manchester Royal Exchange. I was living in Liverpool at the time and had recently seen T…
In the town of Nizhni Novgorod where Maxim Gorky was born, it was said that "the houses are made of stone, the people of iron". Vassa Zheleznova, the titular matriarch of this rarely perform…
Who do you trust? The EU Referendum campaign has exposed a mounting suspicion of the establishment, from financial institutions to press and politicians, and our sense of nationhood has neve…
Harold Brighouse's time-honoured English comedy from a century ago survives, its virtues mostly intact especially once attention shifts away from the snarling patriarch of the title, Henry H…
The Holland Festival is one of the greats. It has a British director, the articulate Ruth Mackenzie, formerly of the Chichester Festival and the cultural Olympiad, now into her second year. …
"I can add colours to the chameleon," Richard III remarks of himself early in his anguished, marauding ascent to the throne, and the description could equally apply to the electrifying actor…
Polymath playwright Philip Ridley is endlessly inventive. Having written a couple of exciting pieces of bravura storytelling " Tender Napalm (2012) and Dark Vanilla Jungle (2014) " he went o…
If anyone harboured any doubts as to how diverse the world of musical theatre can be, this past week will surely have proved an ear and eye-opener. While Richard Taylor and David Wood'…
On the face of it, there is nothing in this tightly focussed little piece that says anything new about the Holocaust. The plight of a poor Jewish boy unfortunate enough to be growing up in 1…
Storage spaces units are not a nice place to hang out. Chilly and quiet, vaguely depressing and horribly lit, they bring on a desire to leave almost immediately. The same impulse is palpable…
Britten fathomed Phaedra's passion for her stepson in a shattering quarter of an hour's dramatic cantata. Euripides' Hippolytus takes about 90 minutes in the playing. Director Kryz…
Infertility affects one in six couples, but it's still something of a taboo subject. Gareth Farr's new play throws welcome light on the challenges of conception, and is accompanied by a Fert…
Thought Terrence Rattigan was a playwright of the drawing room? Think again. A day after his defining work The Deep Blue Sea opened in an acclaimed revival at the National, Chichester Festiv…
Opera North's ongoing Ring isn't taking up much of the chorus's time, which presumably is one of the reasons that many of its members have decamped half a mile east to collaborate with the W…
From being the Aunt Sally of contemporary British theatre, attacked by the angry young men in the 1950s and the new wave of social and political realists for three decades after that, playwr…
It has taken six years - and Michael Crawford - to bring Richard Taylor and David Wood's poetic musicalisation of LP Hartley's The Go-Between to the West End stage. And before the tired old …
Nothing quite prepares you for your first sight of Thiepval, the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. I had read about the events it commemorated and, before that, been told about them as a…
Doctor Peter Raby (Emeritus Fellow at Cambridge University) was quick to pull me up on my first stab at A Midsummer Night's Dream; an indulgence-of-a-production played out in a university pa…
The journey begins amid the glassy modernity of Perth's gleaming Concert Hall. From there, you're bussed a few miles out into the Perthshire countryside to a blasted, burnt-out farmhouse. An…
There's a problem with The Taming of the Shrew, and it isn't the one of Shakespeare's making. So legendary are the work's difficulties, so notorious its potential misogyny, that each new pro…
Like the 1956 Suez Crisis for a previous generation, the 1982 Falklands War (or should that be Islas Malvinas War?) was a turning point for all those who lived through the Thatcher decade. S…
"The most interesting characters are initially difficult to like," proclaims Jesse Eisenberg's would-be filmmaker protagonist, in case his cringe comedy's mission statement was otherwise unc…
Greece has had a bad press in recent years. A place that used to conjure up visions of lazy days on sun-soaked islands, with summer food and warm seas, now just reminds us of the migration c…
