Saturday, 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 03:32AMSaturday, October 25, 2014
Ibsen cast a cruel eye on the characters of his most relentlessly symbolic play, wild ducks wounded or domesticated by fate or character. They speak or act unsympathetically, for the most pa…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:14AMSaturday, October 11, 2014
Like Ibsen’s titanic character in search of a self, the Barbican’s theatre programme globetrots to find the richest and rarest. Yet it certainly doesn’t reach the conclusion of Peer Gy…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:27AMTuesday, September 16, 2014
“It takes a star to parody one,” wrote theartsdesk’s Edward Seckerson, nailing the essence of this immortal spoof-fest’s last incarnation at the Menier Chocolate Factory. Star qualit…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:48AMSunday, September 7, 2014
“You feel like you’re walking into Fame the movie,“ says one of three third-year drama students towards the beginning of this six part documentary. That’s what we might have hoped of…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 01:02AMTuesday, July 29, 2014
It should work as pure musical theatre. Yet what precisely is Gershwin’s - or rather “The Gershwins’”, as this title frames it, though Ira wasn’t quite Gilbert or Brecht - Porgy an…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:51AMThursday, July 17, 2014
“Some might say we’re getting too old for this sort of thing,” declares Martin Jarvis’s Jack – or should I say “Jack” – going off Wildean piste. Well, we had wondered whether…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:13PMWednesday, July 16, 2014
You can usually trust the buzz around rehearsals. From Glyndebourne, five weeks into preparation for La traviata, which opens tomorrow, one of the team working on Tom Cairns’ new productio…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:51AMThursday, May 8, 2014
If you’re tempted to see Fiona Shaw’s impressive solo performance as Mary the mother of a son she can’t bring herself to name – and see it you probably should – then bear two thing…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:57AMFriday, April 25, 2014
London has had its fair share recently of Chekhov productions from Russia, though none anywhere near as quietly truthful as these from Moscow's Mossovet State Academic Theatre. Veteran film …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:57AMFriday, March 28, 2014
We’ve now learned from the films of Paolo Sorrentino and honorary Roman Ferzan Ozpetek what great and nuanced ensemble acting the Italians can produce. Even so, the towering star of the cu…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:00AMMonday, February 17, 2014
Showboys will be boys – gym-bunny sailors, in this instance – as well as sisters, cousins, aunts, captain’s daughters and bumboat women. We know the ropes by now for Sasha Regan’s al…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:39AM 
