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Theartsdesk
Wednesday, 01 October 2025
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.It followed some hectic and intensive months when a disparate and eclectic...
Adam Sweeting
Thursday, 22 May 2025
Whether it is or isn’t the final Mission: Impossible film, there’s a distinct fin-de-siècle feel about this eighth instalment, and not only because of its title. An early scene...
Helen Hawkins
Thursday, 22 May 2025
In the guided tour of Britain’s cathedral cities that is the primetime TV detective series, the spotlight has now landed on Canterbury. Code of Silence frequently inserts a...
Rachel Halliburton
Thursday, 22 May 2025
A society ruled by hysteria. Lurid lies that carry more currency than reality. There’s no shortage of reasons that Arthur Miller’s 1953 drama about witchcraft and revenge...
Guy Oddy
Thursday, 22 May 2025
Pixies might just be the ultimate Radio 6 Dad band. They’ve been around (on-and-off) for around 40 years; they’ve got a fine back catalogue of slightly weird, guitar-driven scuzzy...
Thomas H Green
Thursday, 22 May 2025
How do you solve a problem like Sports Team? Taking them at face value, they’re a living metaphor for the slow music biz relegation of the working class in favour of the...
Alexandra Coghlan
Wednesday, 21 May 2025
With French baroque opera all but banished from the UK’s major opera companies, it’s left to concert halls and country...
Joe Muggs
Wednesday, 21 May 2025
Stereolab always walked a knife edge between deadly serious and dead silly. Their sound was constructed around the sort of...
Helen Hawkins
Tuesday, 20 May 2025
The plays of David Ireland have a tendency to build to an explosion, after long stretches of caustic dialogue and very funny...
Bernard Hughes
Tuesday, 20 May 2025
Every now and then a concert programme comes along that fits like a bespoke suit, and this one could have been specially...
Veronica Lee
Tuesday, 20 May 2025
Nick Mohammed invented his Mr Swallow character – camp, lisping, with an inflated ego and the mistaken belief that he has...
Caspar Gomez
Tuesday, 20 May 2025
Photographer Finetime and I have our first pints outside Dalton’s, a bar on Brighton seafront, at almost exactly midday....
David Nice
Monday, 19 May 2025
There’s a grail, but it doesn't glow in a mundane if perverted Christian ritual. Three of the main characters have young and...
Adam Sweeting
Monday, 19 May 2025
The appalling destruction of Pan Am’s flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988 was put under the spotlight in January this year in...
Jenny Gilbert
Monday, 19 May 2025
Ballet is hardly a stranger to Broadway. Until the late 1950s every other musical had its fantasy ballet sequence – think...
Kieron Tyler
Monday, 19 May 2025
“Tell me what you see” invites Robert Forster during Strawberries' “Tell it Back to me.” The album’s eight songs do not...
Kieron Tyler
Sunday, 18 May 2025
Quoted in an early music press article on his band Chapterhouse, singer-guitarist Stephen Patman said their ambition was “to...
Tim Cumming
Saturday, 17 May 2025
Songlines Encounters is your round-the-world ticket to great world music and performances, a chance to travel widely in...
Matt Wolf
Saturday, 17 May 2025
The water proves newly inviting in The Deep Blue Sea, Terence Rattigan's mournful 1952 play that some while ago established...
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disc of the day
Album: Sports Team - Boys These Days
Genial guitar pop that leans into poshness, boasts smart lyrics, but lacks musical bite
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tv
Code of Silence, ITVX review - inventively presented reality of deaf people's experience
Rose Ayling-Ellis maps out her muffled world in a so-so heist caper
The Bombing of Pan Am 103, BBC One review - new dramatisation of the horrific Lockerbie terror attack
Six-part series focuses on the families and friends of the victims
theartsdesk Q&A: Zoë Telford on playing a stressed-out psychiatrist in ITV's 'Malpractice'
She nearly became a dancer, but now she's one of TV's most familiar faces
film
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning review - can this really be the end for Ethan Hunt?
Tom Cruise's eighth M:I film shows symptoms of battle fatigue
Good One review - a life lesson in the wild with her dad and his pal
A wise-beyond-her-years teen discovers male limitations in a deft indie drama
new music
Pixies, O2 Academy, Birmingham review - indie veterans pack the house
Black Francis and his crew blow the crowd up with tunes old and new
Album: Sports Team - Boys These Days
Genial guitar pop that leans into poshness, boasts smart lyrics, but lacks musical bite
Album: Stereolab - Instant Holograms on Metal Film
Picking up their never-ending, archly peculiar groove, after 15 years
classical
Josefowicz, LSO, Mälkki, Barbican review - two old favourites and one new one
Julia Perry well worth her place alongside Stravinsky and Bartók
Classical CDs: Jelly Babies, porridge and kazoos
German art songs, French piano concertos and entertaining contemporary music
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Wigmore Hall review - too big a splash in complete Ravel
Panache but little inner serenity in a risky three-part marathon
opera
Pygmalion, Early Opera Company, Curnyn, Middle Temple Hall review - Rameau magic outside the opera house
Welcome opportunity to catch opera-ballet, though not everything is in perfect focus
Parsifal, Glyndebourne review - the music flies up, the drama remains below
Incandescent singing and playing, but the production domesticates the numinous
theatre
The Crucible, Shakespeare's Globe review - stirring account of paranoia and prejudice
Ince's fidelity to the language allows every nuance to be exposed
The Fifth Step, Soho Place review - wickedly funny two-hander about defeating alcoholism
David Ireland pits a sober AA sponsor against a livewire drinker, with engaging results
The Deep Blue Sea, Theatre Royal Haymarket review - Tamsin Greig honours Terence Rattigan
The 1952 classic lives to see another day in notably name-heavy revival
dance
Ballet to Broadway: Wheeldon Works, Royal Ballet review - the impressive range and reach of Christopher Wheeldon's craft
The title says it: as dancemaker, as creative magnet, the man clearly works his socks off
The Forsythe Programme, English National Ballet review - brains, beauty and bravura
Once again the veteran choreographer and maverick William Forsythe raises ENB's game
comedy
Mr Swallow: Show Pony, Richmond Theatre review - magic tricks and mayhem
Nick Mohammed gives his creation's origin story
Books
Zsuzsanna Gahse: Mountainish review - seeking refuge
Notes on danger and dialogue in the shadow of the Swiss Alps
Patrick McGilligan: Woody Allen - A Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham review - New York stories
Fair-minded Woody Allen biography covers all bases
visual arts
Do Ho Suh: Walk the House, Tate Modern review - memories are made of this
Home sweet home preserved as exquisite replicas
Ed Atkins, Tate Britain review - hiding behind computer generated doppelgängers
Emotions too raw to explore
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