We’ve not been short of memorable London productions of Arthur Miller’s best known works. Ivo van Hove’s triple Olivier award-winning A View from the Bridge, which transferred to the W…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:00AMAs Shakespeare is to these native isles, so Pushkin is to Russia. And Eugene Onegin, Alexander Puskin’s enduring verse novel first published in serial form in 1825, is the most honoured an…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:00AMSo, Exhibit B, the controversial “human zoo” using black actors to re-enact the role of ethnographic exhibits – semi-naked, chained, silenced by metal masks and degraded in metal colla…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:51AMImagine an industrial disaster that manages to kill, maim or make homeless a significant percentage of the population of a densely populated city. Then imagine the effects of that disaster f…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:07AMAdapted by Linnie Reedman and with music by Joe Evans, Oscar Wilde’s only novel – the more scandalous original version serialised in 1890, which Wilde himself later expurgated – finds …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:40AMLizzie Siddal, Pre-Raphaelite muse and model for John Everett Millais’ 1852 sensation Ophelia, died a tragic death aged 32 from a laudanum overdose, the Victorian’s opiate of choice to w…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:30AM“Monet is only an eye, but my God, what an eye,” Cézanne once said of the Impressionist painter. Unlike Cézanne, British artist William Blake Richmond, named by his artist father after…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:00AMWhat’s this? Harold and Albert turfed out of their old stamping ground of Shepherd’s Bush and turned into West Country natives? Any change to a cherished sitcom comes at the theatre dire…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:00AMThere are a few laughs in this new adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, Henry James’s chilling and ambiguous novella, written in 1897 after he was told a tale of children possessed by…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:54AMThere’s no attempt to romanticise the hero of Nick Dear’s new play about the Anglo-Welsh poet Edward Thomas. Thomas, who died in action in the Battle of Arras in 1917 after enlisting at …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:22AMLet one visual artist and one fashion designer loose on a theatre production and you may find both set and costumes upstaging the actors. Laurent P Berger has designed a Miers Van der Rohe-t…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:32AMAs soon as the two leads entered the stage you were left in no doubt that you were in the presence of stars, at least in their native Turkey: thunderous applause, cheers and whistles accompa…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:29AMThe Globe to Globe season has enjoyed tremendous goodwill from audiences and critics alike. And this has been largely repaid, for it’s been a joy and a wonder to learn just how much contem…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:10AMMention that a Palestinian theatre company are performing Richard II and the play’s themes are immediately thrown into sharp relief: usurpation, homeland and banishment, and the idea…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:55AMThe Master and Margarita is a rare beast. Not only is it considered to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, it also regularly tops reader-lists of all-time favourite books. So …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 01:55AMLast year, like every year, is a bit of a blur. I saw a lot, but all the good stuff seems to have clustered near the end. Maybe an end of year cultural bloat has finally settled. Anyway, to …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:30AMWhat’s so remarkable about a group of working-class men learning to paint? You may think there is, or you may think there isn’t. You may think that anyone with very little formal educati…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:06AM