Tuesday, March 25, 2014
When Julian Mitchell wrote Another Country in a couple of months in 1980, Anthony Blunt had just been exposed as one of the Cambridge spy ring. Donald Maclean and Kim Philby were still livin…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:04AMWednesday, March 19, 2014
As Other Desert Cities comes to The Old Vic, three theatrical veterans discuss sibling rivalry, standing ovations and power politics
SOURCE: The Telegraph at 02:00PMMonday, March 17, 2014
When a book is published, there are broadly speaking three alternative fates which lie in wait. It goes global, it sinks without trace, or it sells modestly and steadily to the readership fo…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:00AMSaturday, March 1, 2014
The board of Sheffield Theatres has a history of appointing actors to run the show. Michael Grandage had very little directing experience when he became artistic director of the city’s thr…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 01:50AMMonday, February 3, 2014
Two lanky, totemic marionettes with stern carved faces – one male, one female - coast haltingly around a rehearsal room in Bristol. They are being operated from inside metal framing by act…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PMSaturday, January 4, 2014
The actor talks about preparing for the most daunting role of them all
SOURCE: The Telegraph at 05:00AMTuesday, December 31, 2013
The fledgling career of Michael Codron, who has been knighted in the New Year's Honours list at the age of 75, might have ended almost as soon as it began. He embarked on a career as a solo …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:33AMFriday, December 13, 2013
Nelson Mandela had a nose for the dramatic gesture. The evidence is there in his speech at the Rivonia Trial in 1964, in his symbolic walk to freedom as he emerged on foot from captivity in …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMSunday, December 8, 2013
Ibsen's play has taken Lesley Manville to the depths of grief - and the pinnacle of her 40-year career, she tells Jasper Rees
SOURCE: The Telegraph at 03:00AMTuesday, December 3, 2013
Ahead of the premiere of American Psycho at the Almeida Theatre, director Rupert Goold, songwriter Duncan Sheik and set designer Es Devlin tell Jasper Rees about the 'worst idea for a musica…
SOURCE: The Telegraph at 06:30AMFriday, November 22, 2013
Tom Hiddleston and the stars of today come face to face with the first folio of Shakespeare
SOURCE: The Telegraph at 10:48AMSaturday, November 9, 2013
In Radcliffe, an early novel by David Storey, one character murders another with a telling blow from a hammer. The author was later advised that Kenneth Halliwell was reading Radcliffe on th…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:10AMSaturday, November 2, 2013
These celebrations of our yesterdays can easily end up all camembert and wind. But while film people and television people will generally cock such things up, we do still have the odd cultur…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:54PMDavid Storey is the last of the Angry Young Men who, in fiction and drama, made a hero of the working-class Northerner. His father spent his life down a Yorkshire pit, and out of guilt that …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:00PMSunday, October 27, 2013
Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem was one of those once-in-a-decade, trade-a-granny-for-a-ticket theatrical events, a swearing, sweating rave with firecracker dialogue hurled in. At the Roy…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:00AMTuesday, October 15, 2013
The sixth artistic director of the National Theatre of Great Britain will be Rufus Norris, it was announced this morning. The bookies’ favourites such as Marianne Elliot, Michael Grandage …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:53AMThursday, September 19, 2013
Arnold Wesker has a theory that plays require a certain DNA to endure. When thoughts turn to the 1950s and the revolution in British theatre which allowed ordinary working-class life up onto…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:00AMSaturday, September 14, 2013
There’s a song in the musical version of Legally Blonde, in which peroxide ditz Elle celebrates her impending good fortune. “Oh my god, oh my god, you guys,” she sings exultantly as sh…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:50PMWednesday, September 4, 2013
Who is Terry Johnson? For a period of two decades between, say, 1982 and 2003, he was predominantly a playwright. He was sufficiently successful at it that for a period in 1995, three of his…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:06AMSunday, September 1, 2013
David Frost, who has died at the age of 74, was a character. The oituaries will tour the entirety of his career as swinging young presenter of TW3, as the first transatlantic celebrity of th…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 11:25AMSaturday, August 31, 2013
Hysteria is back. Terry Johnson’s comedy was written for the Royal Court in 1993, and for its 20th anniversary it is returning to Hampstead Theatre. It is a homecoming in more ways than on…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:17AMSaturday, July 6, 2013
Even now, as Edward Snowden floats in the diplomatic neverwhere of Sheremetyevo airport, someone somewhere is plotting the movie. Currently the story of the man who blew the whistle on the N…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:00AMSaturday, June 15, 2013
There is no formula for creating a hit musical. If there were, the history of the West End and Broadway would not be haunted by the many ghosts of bygone disasters. Let us not list them here…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:58AMMonday, May 20, 2013
Circus is a broad church these days. It can be housed on the street, a grand proscenium stage and all points in between, though for this latest raucous reinvention of the form, it makes its …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 12:20PMMonday, April 29, 2013
In recent years theatre has sought assistance from a pair of popular art forms. Shows based either on movies, or on pop groups’ back catalogues, have become mainstays of the theatrical eco…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:14PMSaturday, April 27, 2013
The revival this week at the Donmar Warehouse of The Weir has reminded theatre-goers of Conor McPherson’s hypnotic powers as a dramatist. Sitting in the theatre on the first night as, on a…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:13AMWednesday, April 24, 2013
Knock knock. Who's there? Eamonn. Eamonn who? Eamonn Etonian. There's an Eamonn at No 10, an Eamonn is Mayor of London, an Eamonn is even Archbishop of Canterbury. Oh, and Eamonns are third …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 09:06PMTuesday, April 9, 2013
Mrs Thatcher famously presided over a huge rise in unemployment, but down the years she kept a large sorority of impersonators (and one male one) off the dole. She was lucky with her mimics,…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:12AMFriday, March 29, 2013
Richard Griffiths, who has died at the age of 65 from complications during heart surgery, will be remembered above all for three performances, two on screen and one onstage. In Withnail &…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:18AMMonday, March 18, 2013
There has always been a keen air of propulsion to the career of James McAvoy. He made his name on television in State of Play and Shameless, while early film roles in Starter for 10 and Insi…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:00PMSunday, March 10, 2013
Coalitions make for drama, and for comedy. We know that from, respectively, Borgen and the final series of the Thick of It. It is little wonder therefore that soon after the 2010 election de…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:30PM 
