Sunday, 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 08:30PMTuesday, February 5, 2013
Last weekend it was the 50th anniversary of an important event in postwar Welsh history. In early February 1963 the Welsh Language Society – Cymdeithas yr Iaith Cymraeg – protested for t…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMSunday, January 27, 2013
A Chorus Line is one of the great American musicals. It opened off Broadway in 1975, rapidly barged a path to a larger Broadway house and proceeded to run for over 6,000 performances, breaki…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:30PMFriday, January 18, 2013
The generation of alternative comedians who emerged around 30 years ago have long since elbowed their predecessors into the long grass and themselves become the establishment. Of no performe…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:28PMSunday, December 30, 2012
The Mayan calendar recently suggested it was all over. It is now, almost. 2012 was, by anyone’s lights, an annus mirabilis for culture on these shores. The world came to the United Kingdom…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMSaturday, December 29, 2012
Success can be a terrible burden. Wonderful while it lasts, once the applause has petered out, the looks have faded and the fame has dwindled, what do the stars of yesteryear have to live fo…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:05PMSaturday, December 15, 2012
In 1972 John Kander and Fred Ebb were invited by Bob Fosse to a private screening of his film version of their hit stage musical, Cabaret. The movie starred their protégée, Liza Minnelli, …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:54AMSaturday, September 22, 2012
Michael Frayn (b 1933) has been having an annus mirabilis. The play the hapless actors of Noises Off are touring is called Nothing On. In the playwright’s case, almost everything has been …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMFriday, September 14, 2012
“People think you’re dead. No one knows you’re alive.” A couple of years ago Roger Rees suffered the harshest judgement available to an actor when someone put these words to him. The…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:01PMSaturday, September 8, 2012
Is Steptoe and Son the platonic ideal of the British sitcom? Two men trapped in eternal stasis, imprisoned by class and bound together by family ties as if by hoops of steel, never to escape…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:01AMTuesday, August 7, 2012
Marvin Hamlisch’s three Oscars all came in 1974. "I think now we can talk to each other as friends," he said as he accepted his third award of the night, packaging his sizeable self-esteem…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:53PMSaturday, July 28, 2012
Simon Stephens (b. 1971) is the most prolific British playwright of his generation. Born and brought up in Stockport, he began writing as a student in York University and had produced seven …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMFriday, July 13, 2012
Producers did say it was going to be a bad summer for West End theatre, but the announcement of the closure of Chicago is still a curveball. For 15 years the musical - with music by John Kan…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 03:22AMSunday, June 24, 2012
“Let slip the dogs of war.” Somewhere in the bowels of Kiev’s Olympic Stadium, a football coach will have said something along these lines around the half seven mark. Meanwhile, over o…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:04PMMonday, June 4, 2012
We’re fresh out of superlatives. The Globe to Globe season has put a girdle around the earth in 37 languages, and the visiting companies have now left the building. You have to high-five t…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:32AMThursday, May 31, 2012
Apart from “I did not have sex with that woman” and maybe “It’s the economy, stupid”, Bill Clinton seems never to have said anything quite as memorable. Indeed, of all the phrases …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:59PMFriday, May 11, 2012
The concept sounds like something dreamed up towards the bottom of a bottle in a Harare shebeen: Two Gentlemen of Verona performed by two gentlemen in Shona. If any of the plays can withstan…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:00PMSunday, May 6, 2012
One day soon Beatles scholars and Professors of Fabology will emerge from their caverns and their ashrams to inform us that it was 50 years ago today. On 5 October 1962 “Love Me Do” was …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:53AMSaturday, April 28, 2012
Something extraordinary is happening at Shakespeare’s Globe. However unlikely the appeal, audiences are flocking to every one of Globe to Globe’s visiting productions. But sometimes logi…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 05:50AMSaturday, April 21, 2012
Shakespeare’s Coming Home, boasts the strapline of a highly ambitious strand of London 2012’s Cultural Olympiad. Between now and 9 June, 37 productions of the complete canon by Shakespea…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:11PMWednesday, April 18, 2012
There'll be no avoiding Chariots of Fire this summer. The Olympics being shortly upon us, Hampstead Theatre are soon to launch a stage verison of the Oscar-winning 1981 film. The success of …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:32AMTuesday, March 6, 2012
Robert Sherman, who has died at the age of 86, was three years old than his brother Richard. And much much quieter. On the two occasions I interviewed the songwriting brothers – once in pe…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 06:26AMSunday, February 12, 2012
Zach Braff (b 1975) is overwhelmingly known as the star of Scrubs, the hugely popular American hospital comedy which came with a side order of surrealism. But fans of low-budget indie cinema…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 02:00AMSaturday, January 7, 2012
Siân Phillips (b 1933) belongs to the remarkable generation of British actresses. They include Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Joan Plowright and Sheila Hancock. …
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 04:30AMSunday, January 1, 2012
On Easter Monday, as the sun came down over the sea, a crowd of 15,000 – it’s not quite right to call them theatre-goers – followed Michael Sheen as he dragged a cross to Port Talbot�…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 07:15PMSunday, December 18, 2011
In Rock’n’Roll, the play by Tom Stoppard, two characters haunt the stage without actually appearing on it. One of them, Syd Barrett, absconded from Pink Floyd to lead the life of a hermi…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 08:07AMSaturday, December 17, 2011
To just about everyone, the name will mean absolutely nothing. "I'm a jobbing actor," he says, and for most of the year it is true. He does little bits of telly, the odd tiny film role, a ce…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 11:12AMTuesday, September 20, 2011
There is somewhere called Leighland, where people may be ineffably sad or existentially cheerful, old or young, live in a high rise or a semi. But they are all recognisably inhabitants of th…
SOURCE: The Arts Desk at 01:55PM 
