Saturday, June 11, 2016
Britten fathomed Phaedra's passion for her stepson in a shattering quarter of an hour's dramatic cantata. Euripides' Hippolytus takes about 90 minutes in the playing. Director Kryz…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:46AMTuesday, May 3, 2016
You rarely see a full production of Shakespeare's dream play so magical it brings tears to the eyes. But then you don't often get 42 players and 14 voices joining the cast to sing and play e…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:34AMMonday, April 25, 2016
Banished from the Barbican are the hollow kings of the mediocre RSC Henrys IV and V. In their place comes a whole new procession of living, breathing monarchs in a vision that's light years …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:09AMMonday, April 4, 2016
Could the fascination of Glenn Close's Norma Desmond transcend the frequent bathos of Lloyd Webber? Would they have sorted out the miking which wrecked last year's first choice of semi-ENO m…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:30PMThursday, February 4, 2016
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…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:02AMFriday, December 18, 2015
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 disc…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:55AMFriday, November 27, 2015
Greek family smashups at the Almeida now yield to northern agony sagas, less bloody but potentially just as harrowing. In Little Eyolf the 66-year-old Ibsen dissected a failed marriage as ru…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:15AMFriday, October 30, 2015
Never use one word when you can get away with two: that seems to have been the maxim of Eugene O’Neill even in one of his shorter plays. After all, when is an ape not hairy, and why does s…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:19AMFriday, October 2, 2015
With her strong, often fierce features and her convincing simulations of rage, Kate Fleetwood might have been born to play Medea. Unfortunately this isn’t Euripides’ Medea but Rachel Cus…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:22AMWednesday, September 30, 2015
No doubt this sophisticated bagatelle worked like a charm in the intimate space and woody resonance of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The Duke of York's Theatre is one of the West End’s smal…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:31AMFriday, September 18, 2015
Whose Don Juan – progenitor Tirso de Molina’s, Molière’s or Pushkin’s? None of the above. Unless you have a decent knowledge of Ukrainian culture, you won’t have heard of Lesya Uk…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:04AMSaturday, August 15, 2015
You don’t know Homer’s Iliad until you’ve heard it read aloud, all 24 books – well, very nearly all - and 16 hours of it, as the oral tradition would have kept it alive at least unti…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:25PMFriday, July 31, 2015
This is the real Greek, bloody-fantastical thing. After the fascinating but flawed attempt to bring Aeschylus’s Oresteia into the 21st century, the Almeida has turned to a more tradition-c…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:27AMSunday, July 26, 2015
Stop miking Bryn Terfel. Stop over-miking musicals; the show voices in a hybrid cast don’t need much. Too much ruined English National Opera’s recent Sweeney Todd, and in this Proms adap…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:49AMSaturday, June 27, 2015
Kafka and Jones, the names above this little shop of horrors, would be a marriage made in off-kilter theatreland if the Czech genius had written any plays. He didn’t, so Nick Gill has made…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:57AMSaturday, June 6, 2015
There are two fundamental ways to fillet the untranslatable poetry and ritual of Aeschylus, most remote of the three ancient Greek tragedians, for a contemporary audience. One is to find a p…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:38AMTuesday, April 28, 2015
Judge Judy meets The Only Way is Essex: this endlessly resourceful production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s first (mini) masterpiece Trial by Jury is one that cries out to appear on the telly.…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:30AMSaturday, April 18, 2015
When does a Gilbert and Sullivan chorus make you laugh, cry and cheer as much as any of the famous set pieces? In this case when Major-General Stanley’s daughters “climbing over rocky mo…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:00AMFriday, April 17, 2015
Russia isn’t the only country where violations of personal freedoms and censorship seem to be mounting by the day, but it’s surely the most confused: ask any of the persecutors what they…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:56AMWednesday, April 15, 2015
Vaudeville is alive and well in the Lilliputian gilded cave which might have been made for it (not that Victorian Savoyards could have had any inkling). If you find yourself, like last night…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:49PMTuesday, April 14, 2015
A journey into dreams through songs from Dowland to The Kinks; a Swiss director who, Covent Garden’s Director of Opera Kasper Holten assures us, is “one of the most important European th…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PMTuesday, March 31, 2015
Still they keep coming, 35 years on from the London premiere: Sweeneys above pubs, in pie shops, concert halls and theatres of all sizes, on the big screen, Sweeneys with symphony orchestras…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:06PMFriday, March 27, 2015
All Savoyards, whether conservative or liberal towards productions, have been grievously practised upon. They told us to expect the first professional London grappling with Gilbert and Sulli…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:53AMTuesday, March 3, 2015
How can a feisty village dame duetting “lackaday”s with the mounted head of a long-lost, nay, long-dead love be so deuced affecting? Ascribe it partly to the carefully-applied sentiment …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:31AMThursday, February 5, 2015
"The fantastical should come so close to the real that you must almost believe it", declared Dostoyevsky on Pushkin’s masterly ghost story The Queen of Spades. Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota and hi…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:55AMWednesday, January 21, 2015
Ever been stuck in a claustrophobic space with a group of really unpleasant people? Add mayhem, murder and a razor-sharp wit to be found in only a very few of the nastiest individuals, and y…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:39AMTuesday, December 16, 2014
All that glisters is not gold in the casino and television game-show world of Rupert Goold’s American Shakespeare. Nor are all the accents, though working on them only seems to have made a…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:52AMSunday, December 14, 2014
Heritage Shakespeare for the home counties and the tourists is just about alive but not very well at the Royal Shakespeare Company. If that sounds condescending, both audiences deserve bette…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:10AMWednesday, December 10, 2014
Strange world, isn’t it. Yesterday morning, buoyed up by the Royal Opera’s impressive Tristan und Isolde, I was listening on CD to Linda Esther Gray, a Wagnerian soprano for the ages, si…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:10AMSunday, December 7, 2014
Not so much a national hero, more a national disgrace. That seems to be the current consensus as Norway moves forward from canonizing the loose-cannon wanderer of Ibsen's early epic Peer Gyn…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:42AMThursday, November 13, 2014
Earlier this year two giant puppets, plus a bottom (lower case, human) on wheels, dominated Shakespeare’s dream play at the Barbican. Replace the bottom with an ever-present little dog and…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:32AM 
