theartsdesk com, first with arts reviews, news and interviews
Tom Birchenough
Friday, 14 November 2025
We are bowled over! We knew that theartsdesk.com had plenty of supporters out there – we’ve always had a loyal readership of arts lovers and professionals alike – but the...
Simon Thompson
Tuesday, 16 September 2025
My colleague Boyd Tonkin visited the Lammermuir Festival for the first time this year. His eyes and ears have been opened to its treasures, but some of us have been in on the...
Graham Rickson
Tuesday, 16 September 2025
Westerns had long been popular with German cinema audiences, some of the most successful being early 1960s West German adaptations of novels by Karl May, a slippery late-19th...
Adam Sweeting
Monday, 15 September 2025
That difficult second documentary – or if you will, “rockumentary” – seems to have been especially challenging for Spinal Tap, since it arrives no less than 41 years after its...
Stephen Walsh
Monday, 15 September 2025
So it’s come to this: WNO’s autumn season reduced to two operas, a Tosca borrowed from Opera North and a revival of their own Candide from two years back; then two next spring. a...
Demetrios Matheou
Monday, 15 September 2025
The Bush is likely to continue its fine recent run of hit plays, with this funny, poignant, culturally authentic and beautifully acted two-hander, about an estranged mother and...
Kieron Tyler
Sunday, 14 September 2025
Sometimes, record labels don’t like what those on their roster have recorded. Such was the case with BMG Sweden and Robin...
Tom Carr
Sunday, 14 September 2025
For the past decade, the Ohio alternative superstars Twenty One Pilots have cultivated a deep lore starting with 2015’s...
Helen Hawkins
Saturday, 13 September 2025
It can be a hostage to fortune to title anything “grand”, and so it proves with the last gasp of Julian Fellowes’s everyday...
Boyd Tonkin
Saturday, 13 September 2025
Critics (including this one) casually refer to John Wilson’s Sinfonia of London as an all-star outfit, an army made up of...
Thomas H Green
Saturday, 13 September 2025
“It’s a long way up from rock bottom/There’s been times I felt I could fall further.” So runs the opening line of Ed Sheeran...
Clare Stevens
Friday, 12 September 2025
If you were a devotee of Dmitri Shostakovich whose only opportunity to attend some live performances marking this year’s...
Demetrios Matheou
Friday, 12 September 2025
From its ambiguous opening shot onwards, writer/director Jan-Ole Gerster’s Islands is a tricksy animal, which...
Jenny Gilbert
Friday, 12 September 2025
Mind, body, body, mind. Medical science confirms the powerful two-way traffic between emotional and physical health....
Pamela Jahn
Friday, 12 September 2025
You won't find Sam Riley lying at the pool in a holiday resort – unless it's for work. "I'd rather stay home to be honest",...
Ellie Roberts
Friday, 12 September 2025
Everyone’s favourite angsty pop-punk nerds are back, balancing new with nostalgia and synths with guitars, this is exactly...
Aleks Sierz
Thursday, 11 September 2025
I love irony. Especially beautiful irony. So I’m very excited about the ironic gesture of staging a show with no words at...
Kathryn Reilly
Thursday, 11 September 2025
Quite why Baxter Dury isn't already a national treasure is a mystery to me. Not for his nepo connections but for his...
Boyd Tonkin
Wednesday, 10 September 2025
One piece that you’re unlikely to hear at the Lammermuir Festival is Lucia di Lammermoor. As co-director James Waters...
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Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces, we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.
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tv
Blu-ray: The Sweeney - Series One
Influential and entertaining 1970s police drama, handsomely restored
I Fought the Law, ITVX review - how an 800-year-old law was challenged and changed
Sheridan Smith's raw performance dominates ITV's new docudrama about injustice
The Paper, Sky Max review - a spinoff of the US Office worth waiting 20 years for
Perfectly judged recycling of the original's key elements, with a star turn at its heart
film
Blu-ray: The Sons of Great Bear
DEFA's first 'Red Western': a revisionist take on colonial expansion
Spinal Tap II: The End Continues review - comedy rock band fails to revive past glories
Belated satirical sequel runs out of gas
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale review - an attemptedly elegiac final chapter haunted by its past
Noel Coward is a welcome visitor to the insular world of the hit series
new music
Music Reissues Weekly: Robyn - Robyn 20th-Anniversary Edition
Landmark Swedish pop album hits shops one more time
Album: Ed Sheeran - Play
A mound of ear displeasure to add to the global superstar's already gigantic stockpile
classical
BBC Proms: Ehnes, Sinfonia of London, Wilson review - aspects of love
Sensuous Ravel, and bittersweet Bernstein, on an amorous evening
Presteigne Festival 2025 review - new music is centre stage in the Welsh Marches
Music by 30 living composers, with Eleanor Alberga topping the bill
Lammermuir Festival 2025 review - music with soul from the heart of East Lothian
Baroque splendour, and chamber-ensemble drama, amid history-haunted lands
opera
Tosca, Welsh National Opera review - a great company reduced to brilliance
The old warhorse made special by the basics
BBC Proms: The Marriage of Figaro, Glyndebourne Festival review - merriment and menace
Strong Proms transfer for a robust and affecting show
BBC Proms: Suor Angelica, LSO, Pappano review - earthly passion, heavenly grief
A Sister to remember blesses Puccini's convent tragedy
theatre
Not Your Superwoman, Bush Theatre review - powerful tribute to the plight and perseverance of Black women
Golda Rosheuvel and Letitia Wright excel in a super new play
Cow | Deer, Royal Court review - paradox-rich account of non-human life
Experimental work about nature led by Katie Mitchell is both extraordinary and banal
Deaf Republic, Royal Court review - beautiful images, shame about the words
Staging of Ukrainian-American Ilya Kaminsky’s anti-war poems is too meta-theatrical
dance
'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages of love and support
Much-appreciated words of commendation from readers and the cultural community
A Single Man, Linbury Theatre review - an anatomy of melancholy, with breaks in the clouds
Ed Watson and Jonathan Goddard are extraordinary in Jonathan Watkins' dance theatre adaptation of Isherwood's novel
Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby, Rambert, Sadler's Wells review - exciting dancing, if you can see it
Six TV series reduced to 100 minutes' dance time doesn't quite compute
comedy
'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages of love and support
Much-appreciated words of commendation from readers and the cultural community
Edinburgh Fringe 2025 reviews - Cat Cohen / Lachlan Werner / KC Shornima
Defying a health scare; a surreal invention & a distinctive new voice
Edinburgh Fringe 2025 reviews - Emmanuel Sonubi / Joz Norris
A second chance at life & a fantastical tale about artistic endeavour
Books
'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages of love and support
Much-appreciated words of commendation from readers and the cultural community
Elizabeth Alker: Everything We Do is Music review - Prokofiev goes pop
A compelling journey into a surprising musical kinship
Natalia Ginzburg: The City and the House review - a dying art
Dick Davis renders this analogue love-letter in polyphonic English
visual arts
'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages of love and support
Much-appreciated words of commendation from readers and the cultural community
Folkestone Triennial 2025 - landscape, seascape, art lovers' escape
Locally rooted festival brings home many but not all global concerns
Sir Brian Clarke (1953-2025) - a personal tribute
Remembering an artist with a gift for the transcendent
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