3,498 stories from The Arts Desk
Lorraine Hansberry's career as a playwright proved tragically short. A Raisin in the Sun is by some distance her best-known work, a key piece about the African American post-war experience. …
Ernest Hemingway was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. But although his 1940 novel, For Whom the Bells Tolls, is familiar as a classic account of the Spanish Civil War…
Lesley Manville's performance as Mary (pictured below), the tortured morphine addict, wife and mother in Eugene O'Neill's dark masterpiece "Long Day's Journey Into Night" at the Bristol Old …
My skin is still tingling with the presence of imaginary critters. Never mind I'm A Celebrity… or Bear Grylls's latest expedition " Tracy Letts has got them beat when it comes to nightmari…
Poor Alice. She's alone all day, with a six-month baby boy, while her husband Ben " a doctor " is out at work. Working all hours. She sleeps at odd times of the day, and at first seems to ha…
'Thomas Aikenhead " who the fuck are you?' So goes the refrain to the opening number of I Am Thomas, a boisterous co-production between London's Told by an Idiot, and the National Theatre of…
This is set in "a world midway between Elizabethan pageant and haute-couture catwalk", a programme note for Scena Mundi's production says - and the initial signs certainly point to that. The…
Sequel-itis has spread to the stage. There's no caped crusader, but the troubled quartet of Neil LaBute's latest will be familiar to anyone who caught Reasons to be Pretty at the Almeid…
Recently, I've been meeting some pretty hyper people in the theatre. Fictional people. On stage. Lots of hyper women; lots of hyper agonised women. And men. Hypercative kids; hyped-up teens;…
Recovery depends on honesty, but Emma " not her real name " lies for a living. Duncan Macmillan's searing play, getting a well-deserved West End transfer from the National, complicates the f…
Marc Rees (b 1966) is an interdisciplinary artist-performer from Wales whose works are renowned for imaginitively mixing media, as well as for their underlying sense of fun. Over the years h…
The fourth production in Branagh's Garrick season is the revival of an odd-couple romp he brought to the Lyric, Belfast in 2011. Sean Foley (best known for his superlative Branagh-directed M…
It's easier to say what Jane Horrocks' new musical dance-drama isn't that what it is. Horrocks made a short speech at the beginning and end about the mysteries of love, as depicted in her se…
Infidelity, hypocrisy, disillusionment, betrayal " and yet this is by far the lightest of French playwright Florian Zeller's current London hat trick. Premiering in 2011, and thus sandwiched…
As settings for musical comedy go, this one promised some boom for your buck. Las Vegas in the early 1950s was just emerging as a magnet not only for hedonists and gamblers, mobsters and sho…
Seldom can the suggestion of a post-show discussion have seemed so… well, unappealing is probably the polite way of putting it.read more
Kaite O'Reilly's new play is a dark dark comedy, a Chekhovian family saga on a mainly bare stage that handles its subjects of aging, death and family with a rich and grounded intellectualism…
Shorter feels longer in the West End iteration of Motown the Musical, a minor-league jukebox musical that became a Broadway hit courtesy an unbeatable back catalogue - keep those hits coming…
Birdwatching is not the most thrilling subject for a drama. In fact, next to watching paint dry, it is probably the poorer option. So there is something wonderfully clever and theatrically b…
An innocently intended Friday night out turns into something fearsome indeed in I See You, a Royal Court co-production with the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, that puts the tensions of post-a…
It's often remarked that are no new stories, only old stories retold. The French playwright Jean Anouihl got the idea for his first play from a French newspaper report of 1919, about a young…
"Murder is hilarious," quips Zawe Ashton's scheming maid, and in Jamie Lloyd's high-octane, queasily comic revival of Jean Genet's radical 1947 play, it really is. It's also lurid, strange, …
Hurray, the two-part epic wizard-fest Harry Potter and the Cursed Child lands in the West End this summer, and its playwright is the ever-versatile Jack Thorne (who also successfully adapted…
A prevailing sense of farewell ripples through this closing production in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse's hugely welcome season of Shakespeare's final quartet of plays. That valedictory feel i…
Shakespeare's plays have proved remarkably resilient to everything that's been thrown at them down the years, including " in the case of A Midsummer Night's Dream with its flowery bowers and…
