3,498 stories from The Arts Desk
Theatregoers suffering from First World War fatigue may want to pass on Jonathan Lynn's merely competent historical drama about two mythic figures: Charles de Gaulle and Philippe Pétain. It…
Paul Mahon's Hamlet in Andrew Hilton's production for Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory bristles with teen spirit and this is no bad thing. The Prince of Denmark, even before his father die…
Given that Edmond Rostand's 1897 tragicomic verse play Cyrano de Bergerac gave the word "panache" to the English language, it's an irony that panache is the quality most woefully lacking in …
Although everyone agrees that Sarah Kane was one of the most influential British playwrights of the 1990s, revivals of her work have been few and far between. Now, at last, some 17 years aft…
In the icy early hours of 1 February 1918 a bizarre figure was seen wandering aimlessly along the platform of a railway station in Lyon. A solider. Lost. When asked his name he answered, "An…
Eimear McBride's debut novel, the provocatively titled A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, won the first Goldsmiths Prize in 2013, as well as the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction a year later. T…
Actor and director Simon McBurney's one-man show has arrived in London after gathering plaudits in Edinburgh and elsewhere last year " before setting off again on a nationwide and European t…
War bad, theatre good. That's about the level of insight available from this amiable show, transferring after a successful run in Bath. It's one of the weaker entries in the ever-popular bac…
There will be blood. And expletives. And puppet sex that makes Avenue Q look positively monastic. But perhaps most shocking of all is that beneath the eye-wateringly explicit surface of Robe…
Uncle Johnny instead of Vanya, a passing reference to sharia law, and nary a samovar in sight: surely this can't be the Uncle Vanya that has long been a cornerstone of the British theatre, e…
As a subject for drama, theatre history is always popular in the West End. Between Mr Foote's Other Leg, which has recently closed at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, and Mrs Henderson Presents,…
Jack is an alcoholic. Stephanie is a whore. Joseph is stupid. Stevie is a broody neurotic. These identifiers are proudly proclaimed in the first minute of Matthew Perry's debut play, but if …
If one says, accurately, that Richard Bean's Toast is a comedy about Hull's lost bread industry, trade unions and the poor working man, you will possibly yawn and turn the page. But it is no…
Legendary director Peter Brook makes theatre that teaches audiences to be human. Now 90 years old, he brings his latest project to London from Paris, where he has been based at the Bouffes d…
The death of a child is an unnatural loss. There's no reassurance that the departed lived a full life, rather the jagged edge of one cut short. In the case of Becca and Howie, it's also nons…
For a play about silence " its uncanny ability to tell the truth, to "persuade when speaking fails" " The Winter's Tale is remarkably wordy. Of the sequence of late romances only Cymbeline c…
Demons, trolls and dead souls have a habit of latching on to Ibsen's bourgeois Norwegians. Surely the best way for actors to handle them is to keep it natural, make them part of the furnitur…
"One... Two... You know what to do": that coolly delivered rehearsal intro from a trombonist called Cutler (Clint Dyer) could serve as a synoptic appraisal of the simply overwhelming Nationa…
Lolita Chakrabarti's impassioned debut has only gained topicality since its 2012 Tricycle incarnation. Trevor Nunn's all-white Wars of the Roses and #OscarsSoWhite, among others, have fanned…
You might think that the combination of a play about one of the funniest comics of the second half of the 20th century, written by his biographer and directed by a member of Monty Python wou…
Za'atari set a precedent. Our performance in the Syrian refugee camp in Jordan became a template for how to perform Hamlet in every nation in the world " in a world that rendered travel to S…
Caryl Churchill is a phenomenon. Now 77 years old, she remains not only prolific but also immensely inventive, having notched up more than 35 original plays, many of which have been innovati…
Anne longs for 23-year-old son Nicholas to return home. One night, he appears. Or does he? Welcome back to the queasily elliptical world of Florian Zeller, where certainty fractures as famil…
The war in Afghanistan has not exactly been neglected by contemporary British theatre, and the plight of returned soldiers is a standard trope of new writing. These distant wars function in …
Feral kids are a media stereotype, but they make good strong subjects for drama. In Anna Jordan's new play, which was first seen at the Manchester Royal Exchange last year after winning the …
