3,498 stories from The Arts Desk
Alexander Payne's adored 2004 film adaptation of Rex Pickett's semi-autobiographical novel didn't just pick up an Academy Award " it led to a plummeting in sales of Merlot and Pinot Noir bec…
A Victorian transgender celebrity is a fitting and timely subject for this Brighton Festival premiere. Writer-director Neil Bartlett turns Stella's scandalous life into a stark horror story,…
Last seen at the National Theatre over 10 years ago, Brecht and Weill's The Threepenny Opera is back in a new adaptation by Simon Stephens. But looking at Rufus Norris's epic-theatre-lite pr…
Trouble remembering in which country Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers cross paths? Branagh's panting paean to Fellini will sort you out. Stylish as a monochromatic Vogue spread, and as self…
Is there any point to political satire? The great thing about the glory years of this genre in, say, the early 1960s was that the jokes punctured people's deepest held beliefs in a deferenti…
Running Wild is a theatrical safari with no expenses spared. This latest stage adaptation of a novel by Michael Morpurgo (of War Horse fame) boasts a jungle-full of puppets - a majestic elep…
As I sit down to write this, a crow is cawing outside my window while night falls; for an awkard moment I think it might be a raven, and this reminds me of Edgar Allan Poe. Is the black bird…
It's either serious or it's funny. That's a view I quite often encountered when working in Germany. A theatre professional there once advised me to remove all references to writing televisio…
According to Sellar and Yeatman in 1066 and All That, the true bible of English history, King John was a Bad (to be exact, an Awful) King. Shakespeare had quite an interest in Bad Kings - Ri…
In the long tradition of fictional characters who embody their monikers, the naming of Nick Bright hardly counts as the most colourful, but it has a sardonic edge when pinned to a young bank…
Joe Penhall's Blue/Orange is one of the best plays of the past two decades. First staged at the National Theatre in 2000, with the dream cast of Chiwetel Ejiofor, Andrew Lincoln and Bill Nig…
I knew that if I was going to write a play about female genital mutilation, I would have to try and understand why any mother or grandmother would make their child undergo such a brutal proc…
Gender deconstruction, fraught feminism and the perils of hook-up culture: George Bernard Shaw's comedy of manners, penned in 1893, shows we haven't come as far as we might think. It's a poi…
The sense of humour is a funny thing. It raises questions about whether what we find funny can tells us anything about who we are, or what we might become. The case of Screaming Lord Sutch, …
A few days after two Taliban rockets had quivered in the Afghan skies above us, I found myself looking up at an altogether different set of heavens in the Sistine Chapel. Moments of reflecti…
The Complete Deaths refers to the complete onstage deaths in Shakespeare's work, all 75 of them, including the "black ill favour'd fly" in Titus Andronicus. The latter becomes a persistent t…
Simon McBurney and Complicite have made plays about many things " maths, circuses, immigration, Japan, old age " but, at core, they're all really about the same subject: storytelling. Their …
Satire, we're solemnly instructed in Dougal Irvine's new musical The Buskers Opera, "has to strike a fine balance of entertainment and teaching". Well yes, but it's also generally wise (disc…
Smoke and Mirrors is a show based around circus skills. It's by the Ricochet Project, a performing unit consisting of Berlin-based US performers Cohdi Harrell and Laura Stokes. However, thos…
Joe Penhall first thwacked his way to the attention of British theatregoers more than 20 years ago with a series of plays about schizos and psychos and wackos. An iconoclastic laureate of li…
You've arrived at a party in a pub, tagging along with a guy you just met. You're attempting to catch the barman's eye, while scouting for a friendly face. The band declares that everyone mu…
Of all the 400th anniversary tributes to Shakespeare, this ramble through an allotment just outside Brighton has to be one of the oddest, and most unexpectedly moving. Brighton Festival has …
In his last minutes as the artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe, Dominic Dromgoole took to the stage to reflect on his years at the helm. Behind him was the cast of Hamlet, home after tw…
There's something endlessly fascinating about T E Lawrence. In popular culture, he has been immortalised by Peter O'Toole's dazzlingly blue-eyed performance in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabi…
In this 400th anniversary year, amid what feels like 400 million shows and tributes, it's increasingly difficult for a Shakespeare production to stand out. No such problem for Emma Rice's op…
