3,498 stories from The Arts Desk
If Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes were (a lot) more like Ibsen, our national viewing habits would be in good hands. But then, as the hero of 'An Enemy of the People' discovers, presum…
You rarely see a full production of Shakespeare's dream play so magical it brings tears to the eyes. But then you don't often get 42 players and 14 voices joining the cast to sing and play e…
And so, it's farewell to Mark Thomson with his final production as artistic director of Edinburgh's Lyceum Theatre, after 13 years in the job (incoming artistic director David Grieg unveils …
Playwright Nick Payne has carved out a distinctive dramatic territory " neuroscience. In his big 2012 hit, Constellations, he explored the effect on memory of living with a brain tumour, whi…
Smoking weed on the Orient Express. Drinking at a brothel in Paris. Tricking the military police in Istanbul. Smuggling a Da Vinci into Paraguay. As travel itineraries go, it's certainly no …
The Cotton Blossom looks mighty fine in its latest London iteration, Daniel Evans's winning Sheffield Theatre revival of Show Boat joining the ongoing runs of Guys and Dolls and Funny Girl t…
Blood, sexual violence, power games and lashings of nudity. Not Game of Thrones, whose new season has just premiered (yes, he's really dead. Well, for now) " and whose shadow Kit Harington i…
Banished from the Barbican are the hollow kings of the mediocre RSC Henrys IV and V. In their place comes a whole new procession of living, breathing monarchs in a vision that's light years …
Today marks 400 years since the death of William Shakespeare. To celebrate this and, indeed, put the two together, the Brighton Festival 2016 commissioned The Complete Deaths, a show based a…
Vaudeville is having quite the West End moment, with Funny Girl inheriting the Savoy from Gypsy and Mrs Henderson Presents over at the Noël Coward. Gypsy is the pick of the bunch dramatic…
A Pulitzer Prize and numerous walkouts: The Flick, infamously, courts extreme reactions. Yet this latest American import is dedicated to minutiae. In Annie Baker's slow-burning (three hours-…
Charlotte Keatley's 1987 feminist classic is one of the most often performed plays by a woman writer. It is typical of its time in that this story of four generations of women in one family …
Andrew Hilton's new production of "All's Well The Ends Well" makes the most of the complexities of this 'problem play', neither comedy nor tragedy, and navigates this startling mix of emotio…
The playwright Anders Lustgarten has spent a considerable chunk of his life reading and writing and thinking about China, and clearly wants to set a few points straight. Tired of the persist…
Why do young British Muslims go to join the so-called Islamic State? Since the entire media has been grappling with this question for ages now, it is a bit puzzling to see our flagship Natio…
It's all change once more for Gordon Greenberg's slick, protean revival, which began life at Chichester back in 2014, as three new leads join the show's transfer from the Savoy to the Phoeni…
Was Tennessee Williams breaking rules, or breaking apart when he wrote this 1969 play? A bit of both, probably, and the two main characters of the rarely performed In the Bar of a Tokyo Hote…
Contemporary London life in all its forbidding, faceless swirl makes for a visually busy evening at Boy, the Leo Butler play that finally isn't as fully arresting as one keeps wanting it to …
Of all the dramas with the name Arnold Wesker attached to them, the most absorbing ran as long as The Mousetrap, but offstage rather than on. It was in the style of a remorselessly black far…
Generation Y are worriers. There's certainly plenty to fuel that angst, from mounting debts, employment uncertainty and the ever-worsening housing crisis to international conflict and terror…
It's raining. Well, of course " it's April in London. But it's also pouring down on the Old Vic stage, hammering an already battered slate roof. When it lifts to reveal the semi-derelict att…
In 2014, Pomona stormed the Orange Tree, turning the previously staid venue into a place of both lauded theatre revolution and disgruntled walkouts. Could Alistair McDowall repeat the feat a…
I notice a teenage boy hanging around the bus stops near where I live in south-east London. I'm reminded of myself when I was 17, after I'd left school with hardly any qualifications, lookin…
Could the fascination of Glenn Close's Norma Desmond transcend the frequent bathos of Lloyd Webber? Would they have sorted out the miking which wrecked last year's first choice of semi-ENO m…
Alan Ayckbourn's How the Other Half Loves - first performed in 1969, in the round at the Library Theatre in Scarborough - was only his second play. Already, though, it has a few Ay…
