Thursday, December 13, 2018
Love it or leave it production sends the RSC on a laboured way to EssexFor those of us who have never thought much before about links between pantomime and Shakespeare, Fiona Laird’s new M…
Linked From theartsdesk.com at 11:32AMFriday, December 7, 2018
Natasha Gordon joins the company as her debut drama transfers from the NationalThis is Natasha Gordon’s first play, and in it she has created a whole world. A world of grief and laughter, …
Linked From theartsdesk.com at 08:36AMThursday, September 27, 2018
Supreme lucidity and two commanding performances make for a moving productionYou always wonder about those final scenes of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Are they really needed dramatically; do …
Linked From theartsdesk.com at 08:48AMSaturday, September 22, 2018
Back to the 17th century: the village that cut itself off to dieThe end-of-season contemporary writing slot at the Globe must be a proposal as full of promise for playwrights as it is perhap…
Linked From theartsdesk.com at 04:06AMMonday, September 10, 2018
A furious, darkly comic riff on race, this frenetic two-hander dazzlesUnderground Railroad Game is scabrous theatre – in every sense. To start with, Jennifer Kidwell and Scott R Sheppard…
Linked From theartsdesk.com at 09:04AMThursday, August 30, 2018
The ladies of France shine in a production that otherwise makes heavy weather If ever there was a play of “well bandied” words, it’s surely Love’s Labour’s Lost. The early Shakesp…
Linked From theartsdesk.com at 09:06AMFriday, August 10, 2018
Jordan Seavey paints a landscape of New York gay life that is as moving as it is witty I’m still not entirely sure what the full associations of the title of New York playwright Jordan Sea…
Linked From theartsdesk.com at 08:24AMTuesday, June 5, 2018
Orlando Bloom compels as the hitman-cop ruling Tracy Letts's dark, gothic worldRight from the beginning of this production of Tracy Letts’s very first play, it’s clear we’re in fo…
Linked From theartsdesk.com at 06:48AMWednesday, May 30, 2018
Calixto Bieito's melange of text and music delivers a mesmerising agony of desolationCalixto Bieito has a reputation as a radical theatre-maker, and by any traditional standards The Str…
Linked From theartsdesk.com at 06:24PMFriday, May 18, 2018
Michelle Terry's new company explores gender fludity, charts new directionsThere’s a distinct feeling of back-to-basics to this opening double bill at the Globe under the theatre’s …
Linked From theartsdesk.com at 10:06AMSaturday, April 21, 2018
Bravura performance from Tanya Moodie in sharp new American drama of racial discordConflict and comedy can be unpredictable bedfellows, and Chicago playwright Joel Drake Johnson’s 2014 pla…
Linked From theartsdesk.com at 09:48AMMonday, January 29, 2018
★★★★ THE OPEN HOUSE, THE PRINT ROOM A tyrannical family reunion and a dramatic volte-face in Will Eno's ingenious new dramaA tyrannical family reunion and a dramatic volte-face in Wi…
Linked From theartsdesk.com at 05:45AMThursday, April 14, 2016
Was Tennessee Williams breaking rules, or breaking apart when he wrote this 1969 play? A bit of both, probably, and the two main characters of the rarely performed In the Bar of a Tokyo Hote…
Linked From The Arts Desk at 03:19AMFriday, April 1, 2016
Lorraine Hansberry’s career as a playwright proved tragically short. A Raisin in the Sun is by some distance her best-known work, a key piece about the African American post-war experience…
Linked From The Arts Desk at 09:09AMThursday, January 21, 2016
I’m still pondering the title of Chris Urch’s new play. On the surface it’s clear enough: The Rolling Stone is a weekly newspaper in Uganda that has been notorious for pursuing that co…
Linked From The Arts Desk at 10:21AMFriday, January 15, 2016
Every incarnation of totalitarianism has its own specific mythology, which exists in different forms as it is believed at home and “translated” abroad (or not, in both cases). North Kore…
Linked From The Arts Desk at 08:20PMThursday, December 10, 2015
Is Jim Broadbent Britain’s best-loved actor? The slate of screen roles he’s accumulated over the years – this Christmas Carol is his return to theatre after a decade away – has surel…
Linked From The Arts Desk at 09:46AMFriday, December 4, 2015
One of the joys about this stage adaptation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days is the contrast between its phlegmatic hero Phileas Fogg, who deals with everything in terms of pre…
Linked From The Arts Desk at 08:31AMSaturday, November 21, 2015
In the world of rediscoveries, half a century may not be a long time. Slightly more, in fact, with Robert Bolt’s first performed stage play Flowering Cherry, which premiered in 1957 with R…
Linked From The Arts Desk at 07:54AMSaturday, September 12, 2015
The repercussions of loss ripple inexorably through Simon Stephens’ 2003 play One Minute. Foreshadowing elements developed in his later work, it’s a testing piece that speaks most of all…
Linked From The Arts Desk at 05:33AMFriday, August 21, 2015
If you were expecting a fusty, formal adaptation of Anthony Trollope – and one of his least known novels, to boot – Lady Anna: All At Sea will come as a breath of fresh air. Colin Blumen…
Linked From The Arts Desk at 08:21PMThursday, August 6, 2015
Helen Edmundson’s The Heresy of Love may be set in 17th century Mexico and follow the conflict between strict religion and personal development, but its theme of a woman denied her voice b…
Linked From The Arts Desk at 12:01PMSaturday, July 11, 2015
There’s a clear territorial divide in the small space of the Jermyn Street Theatre at the opening of Ashley G Holloway’s Lesere. At the centre of Ellan Parry’s persuasive design there…
Linked From The Arts Desk at 07:14AMSaturday, March 28, 2015
The devil gets the best lines. That may depend, of course, on whether we’re prepared to qualify David Cameron as the devil, but in William Gaminara's rapid-firing farce The Three Lions, th…
Linked From The Arts Desk at 02:07AMThursday, March 19, 2015
Jacobean playwright John Ford is flavour of the season at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. His better-known, and simply better, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, opened the venue’s new programme la…
Linked From The Arts Desk at 11:14AMTuesday, January 13, 2015
It’s true that there is something wildly, garishly, theatrical about Pedro Almodóvar’s films – none more so than this rampant farce – but it’s equally true that their sensibility …
Linked From The Arts Desk at 05:42AMThursday, December 4, 2014
The single spacious room that is the central location of Tena Štivičić’s 3 Winters has seen plenty of ghosts. It’s part of an old Zagreb mansion, and through the course of the pl…
Linked From The Arts Desk at 10:25AMFriday, October 10, 2014
“I am spiteful! I am ill! You are not going to like this!” With these words Harry Lloyd opens his one-man show that adapts the Dostoevsky 1864 novella that is often hailed as the first w…
Linked From The Arts Desk at 05:01AMTuesday, December 17, 2013
There’s cruel comedy and human drama aplenty in Fortune’s Fool, so much so that it’s hard sometimes to know whether we’re watching farce or tragedy. But it’s a mixture that works w…
Linked From The Arts Desk at 07:25AMTuesday, October 15, 2013
Southwark Playhouse's new production of The Love Girl and the Innocent is London’s first in over 30 years, and there’s a reason Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s play rarely reaches the stage: …
Linked From The Arts Desk at 11:35AMWednesday, October 2, 2013
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was two years out of prison camp when he wrote The Love Girl and the Innocent. The experience of the eight years of hell that followed his sentence in July 1945 for an…
Linked From The Arts Desk at 03:27AM 
