Friday, May 9, 2025
Estranged father, mother and son each doubled in Jon Fosse’s mesmerising meditation
Watching the stricken faces on the split screen, I felt at times like callow Farfrae in Hardy’s The Ma…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 06:06AMSaturday, April 26, 2025
Let’s make a coronation opera, with bags of dramatic licence
Back in 2009, there were Ben and Wystan on stage (Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art). Last year came Ben and Master David Hemmi…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 07:06AMThursday, February 27, 2025
Variable ensemble yields some gripping scenes and monologues
Dublin theatregoers have been inundated with Irish family gatherings concealing secrets or half-buried sorrows, mixing “bog got…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 07:48AMThursday, November 28, 2024
Joyce’s great short story fully realised for ‘invited guests’ by a perfect ensemble
James Joyce’s Misses Morkan have gone up in the world for their Christmas gathering this year, fro…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 05:42AMThursday, October 24, 2024
Ibsen's pitiless take on the 'life lie' is another triumph for Norwegians in Notting Hill
“I think this is all very strange,” declares 14-year-old Hedvig Ekdal at the end of The Wild Duc…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 07:54AMFriday, July 19, 2024
Operettaish bitter-sweetness raised to the sublime in a miracle of perfect timing
Jerry Herman is the king of pep. Way too much of it in the first 20 minutes of the recent revue Je…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 05:02AMSaturday, May 25, 2024
Three talented performers in a revue that doesn’t add up to much
Catchy even when the lyrics are at their cheesiest, the Jerry Herman Songbook serves up a string of memorable tunes: you’…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 06:36AMFriday, April 19, 2024
Sophie Treadwell's 1928 hard hitter gets full musical and choreographic treatment
Virtuosity and a wildly beating heart are compatible in Richard Jones’s finely calibrated production of Re…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 06:24AMThursday, March 21, 2024
THISISPOPBABY serves up a joyous tapestry of Ireland contemporary and traditional
In what feels like the beginning, or at least the Old Testament, there was Riverdance. Now, ready to flow th…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 09:48AMMonday, March 4, 2024
Francesca Mills' protagonist is the vivacious, truthful heart of this fascinating production
“All discord without this circumference,” the Duchess of Malfi tells the good man she’s jus…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 07:32AMSaturday, February 17, 2024
Real-life triangle around the composer’s darkest masterpiece yields fitfully strong drama
David Hemmings was, by his own later admission, a knowing and bumptious boy when Britten cast him …
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 07:36AMWednesday, November 29, 2023
Five heroic women and two instrumentalists go Hellenic, with panache
This is the show that launched a thousand puns, mostly ancient-Greek-oriented, and just as many corny rhymes, all deliver…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 06:36AMWednesday, September 20, 2023
Patsy Ferran's vibrant Eliza Doolittle sparks Bertie Carvel's Henry Higgins into human life
Many of us have perhaps grown too accustomed to the friendly face of My Fair Lady. George Bernard …
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 04:25AMSunday, July 16, 2023
Teatro delle Albe's Don Quixote drama rivals Riccardo Muti's Paths of Friendship concert
Came for the music, returned for the theatre. I oversimplify: Riccardo Muti’s Roads of Friendship e…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 04:13PMMonday, June 19, 2023
Siobhán McSweeney goes way beyond the expected in a transfixing performance
Siobhán McSweeney is to be loved as a person for her speech when she received a BAFTA for Best Female Performanc…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 05:07AMWednesday, May 10, 2023
Cathy Belton’s devastating economy steers Mark O’Rowe’s quietly stunning Ibsen
Church and law are enemies of promise in Ibsen’s tragedy-without-catharis. You can see why this devasta…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 07:06AMSaturday, April 15, 2023
A suitably phantasmagoical vision in strong teamwork by Calderón's compatriots
Dream versus reality, fate and free will, love and death, nature versus nurture: they’re all here in Calder�…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 06:12AMMonday, March 20, 2023
White-heat Strindberg from Norwegian actors undeterred by technical hitches
You don’t have to be Scandinavian to act out Strindberg’s fantastical extremes at the highest level, but I’v…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 03:01AMThursday, March 9, 2023
Enda Walsh's second drama on now about ritualised isolation is mesmerising
Commuting between London and Dublin has its fascinations.10 days ago, I saw for the first time at the Southwark Pla…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 05:40AMMonday, February 27, 2023
Four spot-on performances confirm that Enda Walsh's queasy thriller is here to stay
The farce in question is fast and furious, but not often hilariously funny; that’s because it’s the in…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 03:44AMTuesday, October 4, 2022
Justin Vivian Bond and Anthony Roth Costanzo in an absolutely fabulous double act
You know you’re in good company the minute these two appear on stage: they are so splendidly what they are…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 06:55AMThursday, August 18, 2022
Masha Gessen, Shostakovich and Shakespeare’s Prospero wrestle order from chaos
Essay-writing can be a great art, at least when executed by Hubert Butler of Kilkenny, on a par - whether you…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 10:25AMWednesday, July 13, 2022
Completion of the city’s big Dante project with 'Paradiso' is only one of three wonders
For once, a festival theme has meaning. “Tra la carne e il cielo”, “Between flesh and heaven�…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 06:54AMFriday, June 17, 2022
Barry McGovern is odyssey master, while fine performers sag under awful script
A pot plant on a stand, two tables with glasses of water, two chairs – one plush, one high – are all the pr…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 10:24AMMonday, May 9, 2022
Happiest in home-territory epics, Ivo van Hove pulls off a Greek-tragedy stunner
Hunger for the gruesome horrors and euphoric highs of Greek tragedy seems to be stronger than ever. Yet when …
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 06:42AMSaturday, March 5, 2022
Good in parts, but Kit Harington’s king isn’t the best thing about this hard-working show
Sharp suits swapped for combat fatigues, a people’s commander: you’d think that Max Webster�…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 12:18PMWednesday, March 2, 2022
Ibsen anticipates Beckett in his strange final play, austerely staged with dashes of wit
In Ibsen's last and shortest play, further cut here, four people nominally climb a mountain, but actu…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 07:33AMTuesday, January 11, 2022
Skiing-resort trauma is played too much for easy laughs
It sounds like the title of a play by Rattigan. No such luck: “Force Majeure” – a legal term with which all too few will be fami…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 05:24AMSunday, December 12, 2021
Jessie Buckley and Eddie Redmayne constantly surprise in multilayered production
Turning a theatre into the Kit Kat Club, Berlin, early 1930s, is nothing new: the Edinburgh University Theatr…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 10:54PMTuesday, October 26, 2021
Near the end of her long journey, our refugee gets a welcome her real-life kin are denied
“I want to tell her that people will be good,” Tewodros Aregawe of Phosphoros Theatre confided t…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 07:03AMMonday, July 5, 2021
Band and singers energise the brilliant entertainment of Bernstein, Comden and Green
It’s a wonderful thing to hear a nine-piece Broadway-style band at full pelt, and to see real show danc…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 05:32AM 
