Thursday, June 20, 2024
'Brush Up Your Shakespeare' brings the house down in a strongly cast lineup
Lincoln Center’s Bartlett Sher is back in town to direct the Barbican’s latest summer blockbuster, Cole Porter…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:54AMMonday, June 10, 2024
Alice Childress's 1962 play about interracial love has lost none of its richness and fire
Alice Childress’s Wedding Band has arrived at the Lyric Hammersmith like an incendiary bomb, a wea…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:42AMWednesday, May 22, 2024
Giles Terera excels leading a livewire cast in an irreverent look at Black identity
From New York’s Public Theater, the venue that nurtured Hamilton, comes another estimable pocket musical…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:32AMMonday, April 22, 2024
Superb cast deliver Van Badham's anti-incel barbs and feminist wit with gusto
What would happen if a notorious misogynist actually fell in love? With a glacial Danish librarian? And decided …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:12AMSunday, April 14, 2024
Ian McKellen's Falstaff thrives in Robert Icke's entertaining remix of the Henry IV plays
Shakespeare’s plays have ever been meat for masher-uppers, from the bowdlerising Victorians to the…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:12AMTuesday, April 9, 2024
A five-women team spell out a feminist message with humour and strong singing
Many an Edinburgh Fringe transfer has struggled when it moves to the big city, but the Dirty Hare company’s Gu…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 01:24AMFriday, March 29, 2024
It's a great song and dance evening, but the story is an empty one
In a secret chamber somewhere, the producers of MJ the Musical may be keeping a portrait of the King of Pop that has acqu…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:12AMFriday, March 22, 2024
Director Rachel O'Riordan finds lighter moments in a tale of grief
Brian Friel’s Faith Healer isn’t noted for its laughs, but Rachel O’Riordan has found more than most directors do in…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:48AMThursday, February 29, 2024
Lucy Kirkwood’s latest mixes the birth of the NHS with a Brief Encounter-ish romance
Keeley Hawes onstage is something to look forward to, so rare are her appearances there. In Lucy Kirk…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:02AMWednesday, February 28, 2024
The rise of fascism in the 1930s East End is given a human face
Hot on the heels of Brigid Larmour’s updating of The Merchant of Venice to the East End in 1936, a spirited new musical acr…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:48AMSunday, February 25, 2024
Tracy-Ann Oberman turns Shylock into a heroic Jewish anti-fascist
It’s an unhappy time to be staging Shakespeare’s problematic play, given its antisemitic content, so hats off to adaptor…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:48PMFriday, February 23, 2024
Felicity Huffman, heading a superb cast, is a force of nature
In 2017, two years after Hir premiered, Taylor Mac was awarded a “Genius Grant” and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for drama…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:24AMSaturday, February 17, 2024
Sarah Snook gives a virtuoso performance amid a dazzling display of tech wizardry
Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novella The Picture of Dorian Gray has given the world a trope built for flattery, alon…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:42PMThursday, February 8, 2024
Age has not withered one jot the FAs' fury at the absurdities of modern life
You don’t expect a couple of septuagenarian contraltos, aided by a spring chicken of a soprano in her fifties,…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:32PMSaturday, February 3, 2024
Ingenious twists can't give Sam Holcroft's play a vital sense of danger
Take dollops of Orwell and Kafka, with a sprinkling of Pirandello for a lighter texture, then bake. That could be the …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:06AMTuesday, January 30, 2024
Bartlett Sher's intelligent reading is gorgeously staged and winningly performed
The giant crinolines are back, and the winsome little royal children with miniature temples on their heads, a…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:02PMFriday, January 26, 2024
Zoe Cooper's queer reading is a tonic: clever, funny and seriously silly
What Zoe Cooper has concocted in her loving rewiring of Jane Austen’s first completed novel looks at first sight li…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:06AMSaturday, December 23, 2023
Jonathan Spector is a Stoppard fan, but might Mamet have been better?
How do you make a play out of Stalin’s defecting daughter Svetlana, the psycho-economic theories of Daniel Kahneman an…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:12AMSunday, December 17, 2023
Les Enfants Terribles can't work their usual magic at the QEH
There are probably two distinct audiences for the latest adaptation from Les Enfants Terribles, The House with Chicken Legs: the…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:24PMFriday, December 15, 2023
Monsters of ego clash in David Ireland's demolition of posturing theatre types
David Ireland’s Edinburgh Fringe hit Ulster American is essentially a play about a play that a Hollywood big…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:24PMBeautiful Elvis Costello songs and stirring music underpin a fine adaptation
There’s a touch of Dr Zhivago about director Paweł Pawlikowski’s screenplay for his 2018 film Cold War. Its…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:24AMMonday, December 4, 2023
Terrific showcase for writer-director Kwame Owusu and his performer
Kwame Owusu’s 55-minute one-hander does just what it says on the tin: it features a young student who dreams he is drow…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:36PMSunday, December 3, 2023
Annie Baker delivers a richly satisfying piece about hungry women
A sun deck with seven pale-green padded loungers is the latest setting for the latest National Theatre premiere from Ameri…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:24AMFriday, December 1, 2023
Mischief Theatre’s sight gags are faultlessly timed, though the verbals need a trim
Mischief Theatre set themselves a big challenge when they evolved their brand of knowing slapstick. And…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:18AMThursday, October 26, 2023
Lynn Nottage and Lynette Linton reunite to deliver a rollicking evening
Lynn Nottage’s second London opening this year, the Donmar premiere of Clyde’s, is a comedy about a sandwich, the…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:04AMTuesday, October 24, 2023
Alexander Zeldin creates a complex portrait of a woman's struggle for self-esteem
How to describe Alexander Zeldin’s latest, The Confessions? It is almost a kitchen-sink drama, but also a …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 12:37PMFriday, October 20, 2023
James Graham's play works like a big joke that a whole nation is in on
It was interesting, in the same week that the England football team trounced Italy 3-1 in a Euros qualifier, to see Dea…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 10:25PMThursday, October 19, 2023
Mustapha Matura's 1981 play set in modern Trinidad is superbly served up
Mustapha Matura’s 1981 play, Meetings, is still a knockout. Supply the characters with mobile phones and it could …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 12:33PMMaggie O'Farrell's inventive retelling of the Shakespeares' love story needs a more inventive production
The RSC apparently has a hit on its hands with its West End transfer of Hamnet. Box o…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:49AMTuesday, October 3, 2023
Big Broadway show with a pleasing British accent
The Sondheim gala show Old Friends is a must for fans of the master, naturally, but its quality would knock anybody who loves musical theatre…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:25PMFriday, September 29, 2023
Ben Elton has written an odd musical-documentary, part comic-strip, part lecture
The Biba dresses are way too colourful, the shop’s interior about 10 times too bright… and did anybody re…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:55AM 
