Sunday, 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 03:39AMTuesday, February 11, 2014
An insider once told me that you get a grant for including puppets in a production. Which may account for the amount of crap puppetry haphazardly applied in the theatre. That’s certainly c…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:53AMThursday, January 30, 2014
For those of us who never saw Samuel Beckett’s favoured performer Billie Whitelaw on stage as indomitable, buried-alive Winnie, peculiarly happy days are here again with another once-in-a-…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:10PMThursday, December 5, 2013
Read Erich Kästner’s 1928 novel about young Emil Tischbein and the Berlin boys he enlists to catch a thief, and you’ll come away feeling warm if slightly incredulous at the strong moral…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:37AMSaturday, November 16, 2013
Now here’s a funny thing, possums. Back in 1990 when one great Australian Dame, Joan Sutherland, gave her farewell performance, another, a certain housewife superstar from the Melbourne su…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:50AMTuesday, October 8, 2013
It has be partial, because of the iconoclastic French actor-director’s 10 opera productions, I’ve only seen two, on screen only – but a big two at that – and only three of his 11 fil…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:15AMThursday, September 26, 2013
Arturo Ui, king of the Chicago cabbage trade, is Brecht’s Richard III. Egad, he even speaks in iambic pentameters, with a fair few nods at Shakespeare, though a certain cowlick and moustac…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:30AMThursday, September 5, 2013
Shallow in its cartoonish whizz through the tergiversations of a troubled reign, hugely energetic in its language and structure, Marlowe’s horrible history is never less than compelling an…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:06AMThursday, August 8, 2013
Sicilian location, Irish populace, Balkan Roma music: Richard Eyre’s production of a Pirandello bagatelle could easily have turned into the kind of Europudding more common in cinema. That …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:48AMSunday, August 4, 2013
Rodgers and Steinbeck: sound unlikely? Well, self-proclaimed “family show” man Hammerstein may have baulked at words like ‘whorehouse’ when he created a play for music out of Steinbe…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:31AMSaturday, July 20, 2013
If there’s a more thinly written, loosely structured and hammily acted play than Samuel Adamson’s panorama of Purcell’s London, then I have yet to endure it. Baffling, because this is …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:04PMWednesday, July 17, 2013
No theatre in London, surely, has offered us more miracles of transformed space than the Young Vic. Small it may be, but its productions often feel big in every way, and none more so than Jo…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:03AMFriday, June 7, 2013
There are two dances to unheard music in Howard Brenton’s pithy Strindberg reduction. One spells trouble for the interloper between the vampire couple who suck the blood of others to susta…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:11AMTuesday, May 14, 2013
Everything seems so free and easy, so do-as-you-darn-well-pleasey, in the Stockmanns’ fjord-view model home. Cheery friends in bright 70s clothes drop in to chew the social cud as well as …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:55AMSaturday, April 13, 2013
Or, The Lord and Lady Macbeth of the Seizième, as imagined by a bourgeois teenager who fancies himself to be Bougrelas, heir to the Polish throne. That's one way of looking at the concept s…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:49AMTuesday, March 12, 2013
Snow flurries outside, steam heat within. Writer-director Yael Farber’s transposition of Strindberg from a Swedish estate to a farm in South Africa’s Karoo region on the eve of a storm i…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:15AMSunday, March 3, 2013
Given a fair few strange and languishing Brecht-Weill pieces that The Rest is Noise Festival’s Berlin strand might have explored, Vladimir Jurowski and the LPO had a tough time of it by pi…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:06AM 
