3,498 stories from The Arts Desk
Be careful what you wish for. I've always moaned about the fact that British theatre is too naturalistic, and that its stagings are too banal, full of quotidian detail and a specific sense o…
I'm still pondering the title of Chris Urch's new play. On the surface it's clear enough: The Rolling Stone is a weekly newspaper in Uganda that has been notorious for pursuing that country'…
Since its unveiling at London's Royal Court in 1997, Conor McPherson's The Weir has become something of a modern classic, notching up dozens of productions worldwide and even inclusion in th…
It is a nightmare scenario: you have an accident that leaves you comatose. You are out of action in hospital for three weeks and then, when you wake up, you gradually realise that you don't …
Every incarnation of totalitarianism has its own specific mythology, which exists in different forms as it is believed at home and "translated" abroad (or not, in both cases). North Korea su…
You have to admire Rob Hayes's choice of titles. Although his latest doesn't quite have the shock value of Awkward Conversations With Animals I've Fucked, his 2014 Edinburgh Festival hit, Th…
When sorrows come they come not in single spies. It is a bad week to be 69. Hard on the heels of David Bowie's death from cancer comes Alan Rickman's. He was an actor who radiated a sinful a…
One of the more unusual Broadway offerings of recent times crosses the Atlantic with considerable style in an Off West End premiere of 2006 New York entry Grey Gardens that punches well abov…
The seemingly eternal British love affair with Guys and Dolls continues apace with the (somewhat recast) transfer to London of the Chichester production from two summers ago, and a more buoy…
Say what you will about London theatre during 2015, and by my reckoning it was a pretty fine year, there certainly was a lot of it. I can't recall a year that brought with it a comparable vo…
You'll feel guilty for having bothered with a programme after seeing The Lorax, the Dr Seuss adaptation that puts saving the environment centre-stage at the Old Vic just as the recent climat…
While Christmas is the season when traditional theatres trot out the tired clichés of panto, the ever-innovative National Theatre Wales have decided, in their wisdom, to stage a surreal, ps…
The last time I saw Janet McTeer, she was doing her best with the slightly underwritten role of sister to Glenn Close's lethal Patty Hewes in Damages, the ultimate TV series about the discre…
The proverbial pond that separates the New York and London theatres has had a seismic effect on The Dazzle, Richard Greenberg's ironically titled play from 2002 that in every way seems darke…
Christmas pantomime is all about letting go, and being carried away on a wave of communal jollity. The genre also delights in carnivalesque gender-bending, the anarchic undermining of author…
Past wrongs cast long shadows. Following the passing of the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act, successive Australian governments favoured migrants from English-speaking countries in what was …
The pleasures to be found in the pitfalls that are part of live performance rear their accident-prone head yet again in Peter Pan Goes Wrong, the latest exercise in controlled (or is it?) ch…
The first surprise in the Traverse Theatre's seasonal production comes on entering the theatre " being led backstage, then onto what's normally the performing area, and finally to two ranks …
Widely hyped as "an Alice for the online generation", and "a coming-of-age adventure that explores the blurred boundaries between our online and offline lives", this version of Lewis Carroll…
Is Jim Broadbent Britain's best-loved actor? The slate of screen roles he's accumulated over the years " this Christmas Carol is his return to theatre after a decade away " has surely given …
A supposed Stoppardian footnote gets a first-class reclamation in Howard Davies's sizzling revival of Hapgood, the espionage-themed drama from 1988 that resonates intellectually and emo…
There's a happy, cyclical logic to this first production of Cymbeline " Shakespeare's late tragicomedy of love and jealousy " in the Globe's Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The first play Shakespea…
North Korea is the kind of place that haunts the imagination of the West " and not in a good way. One of the last hardline Communist dictatorships, it is also a country of immense sadness, a…
Just what constitutes reasonable behaviour in an enlightened society? Not long ago, the death penalty fell under that umbrella in Britain, and state-sanctioned killing as punishment for the …
One of the joys about this stage adaptation of Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days is the contrast between its phlegmatic hero Phileas Fogg, who deals with everything in terms of preci…
