Wednesday, September 15, 2021
An intriguing if flawed evening, boosted by ebullient ensemble work
Indecent is a play wrapped inside a news story about stigma. Playwright Paula Vogel was at Cornell University when she s…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 06:54AMTuesday, August 31, 2021
Playwright Josh Azouz's absurdism owes as much to Sacha Baron Cohen as to Beckett
An ageing Nazi, stuffed into a slightly too tight white linen suit, sits at the opposite end of the dining …
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 08:24AMMonday, July 19, 2021
Edward Baker-Duly seems to have sprung fully formed from the pages of 'Punch'
If you’re looking for a distraction from the apocalyptic headlines that seem to be the norm right now, then it…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 12:36PMSaturday, July 10, 2021
Too many of the messages seem reductive and irrelevant
"It is dangerous for women to go outside alone," blares the electronic sign above the stage of the new Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare'…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 09:36AMWednesday, June 30, 2021
Raine beautifully evokes how music captures the mess of life
In John Eliot Gardner’s magnificent wide-ranging biography of Bach, Music In The Castle of Heaven, he tells the story of the co…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 06:36AMFriday, June 4, 2021
Uncomfortable truths beneath the poisoned patter
This blistering, fearless play about an 18-year-old black entrepreneur on the King’s Road raises a myriad of uncomfortable questions that r…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 07:36PMSaturday, May 29, 2021
A production that revels in the joyously absurd while hinting at the play's darker edges
A little less than two years after Sean Holmes’s kick-ass Latin American carnival-style A Midsummer…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 06:54AMMonday, May 3, 2021
A vivid and credible production that is also limited by its form
To accept or not accept a donation: that’s certainly the burning political question of the moment.
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 04:03AMWednesday, March 17, 2021
Co-production with Manchester International Festival, Marshmallow Laser Feast and Philharmonia Orchestra brings Shakespeare's metaphor to life
Which of Shakespeare’s plays is most plagued …
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 06:03AMMonday, February 22, 2021
Celie learns how to live from the strong, rebellious women she encounters
This production of The Color Purple is an extraordinary testimony to the fact that many of the twentieth century’s…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 07:33AMWednesday, February 17, 2021
The tilt between our actual selves and our idealised selves will never cease to be an existential tension
This stunningly delivered online monologue from a bereaved widow to her husband feel…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 07:03AMThursday, December 10, 2020
Skilfully interwoven accounts of a life in which togetherness is forbidden
How do you create a secular version of the Nine Lessons and Carols? The original can feel like a formulaic trot thr…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 06:48AMSaturday, December 5, 2020
An ingenious depiction of the artist's gravity-defying love
One of Marc Chagall’s last commissions was for a stained-glass window in Chichester Cathedral, which channelled his characterist…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 04:03PMFriday, October 23, 2020
It's a true achievement to feel the chemistry of a cast whirring into action again
The Prohibition-era setting of The Great Gatsby brings an appropriately illicit feel to this bold decisio…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 05:03AMFriday, September 11, 2020
Alan Bennett's monologues make us reflect on our own little worlds
For some of us, it doesn’t take a lockdown to imprison us in our own hellish little world. Since his first series of dram…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 06:02AMSunday, August 30, 2020
Theatre itself become an act of rebellion against the microbe
For a riveting, cathartic – and often surprisingly humorous – 50 minutes Ralph Fiennes paces the stage at the Bridge Theatre…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 08:12PMFriday, July 17, 2020
As Mozart, Adam Gillen erupts onto the stage as a Tourette’s tornado
It is 41 years since Peter Shaffer ripped off Mozart’s respectable façade to reveal a foul-mouthed verbally incontin…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 08:24AMFriday, July 10, 2020
Helen McCrory is the broken, irreparable heart of this production
Helen McCrory is an actor who can inject a world of feeling into one syllable that many actors would struggle to muster in a…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 06:48AMFriday, July 3, 2020
Food crimes of the Sixties and Seventies are revealed here as Michelin-starred memories
I knew what a Howard Hodgkin painting would look like before I ever saw one because of Nigel Slater. T…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 04:03AMFriday, June 12, 2020
A story told with the wit and elegance of a tune played on a harpsichord
It has been the fate of George III – who on many levels was a visionary and accomplished monarch – to go down in …
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 12:24PMFriday, June 5, 2020
The power of the mob still resonates in a production that speaks powerfully to our times
An arrogant leader contemptuous of his people. Could there be a more perfect timing for Josie Rourke�…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 08:06AMFriday, May 29, 2020
James Graham acutely perceives the obsessions and motivations of our times
There is a line of argument that – unfairly – blames playwright James Graham for Dominic Cummings. Would Cummin…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 01:42PMSaturday, May 16, 2020
Barbershop banter and the place it occupies in black male identity
Barber shops – as we are all starting to appreciate in this time of lockdown – fulfil an emotional as much as a cosmeti…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 07:54AMSunday, March 15, 2020
Robert Lepage seizes on the fragments of human lives to build an epic
If you want to pinpoint the genius of Robert Lepage’s multi-faceted seven-hour epic, that has returned to the National…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 11:48PMSunday, March 8, 2020
Paul Kember's play doesn't sing convincingly any more
It may seem strange to watch a play about four English people on a kibbutz in the Seventies, and find yourself thinking about Brexit, bu…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 09:32PMFriday, February 28, 2020
In the #Metoo era, the exploitation of the female characters is particularly resonant
This raunchy, gleefully cynical production takes one of Thomas Middleton’s most famous tragedies and t…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 06:18AMMonday, February 10, 2020
Joe Crilly believed in skewering the romance surrounding sectarian violence
The news that the Continuity IRA created a bomb destined for England on Brexit Day has added to the timeliness of …
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 05:32AMMonday, December 23, 2019
Raw depiction of a community where dreams go to die
Despair hangs like mildew over the small iron-ore mining town of Duluth, Minnesota, where dreams go to die, and the living haunt the clapp…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 10:12AMMonday, December 16, 2019
An interrogation of power, womanhood and the mythologies with which we surround ourselves
History has corseted Elizabeth I with the title of “Virgin Queen” for centuries, but in Ella Hic…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 08:42AMThursday, December 12, 2019
A stunning tribute to the wild and wonderful life of the mind
This scary, electrically beautiful adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s book about living on the faultline between imagination and real…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 03:36PMTuesday, November 26, 2019
An electric interpretation in which the White Witch – like the devil – has all the best tunes
We all remember that moment when we walked through the back of the wardrobe: the heaviness o…
SOURCE: theartsdesk.com at 06:33AM 
