thu 28/03/2024

Theatre Features

A 21st-century Three Sisters

Anya Reiss

About a week after my modern adaptation of The Seagull closed in 2012 at Southwark Playhouse the director Russell Bolam texted me, "Same again?" So it’s now in 2014 that at (the new) Southwark Playhouse we’ve got our modern take on Chekhov’s Three Sisters, which has just opened.

Read more...

theartsdesk in Sydney: Strictly Ballroom's back

Jeremy Eccles

"Everyone is beautiful when they dance,” oozes the ballroom MC in the midst of a competition that reveals just how un-beautiful terpsichorean people can be when seriously challenged by other dancers, or by anyone radical enough to try to dance to a different tune. Yes, Strictly Ballroom the 1992 film has become Strictly Ballroom the Musical – premiered in Sydney last weekend with Kylie Minogue in attendance – as it was always destined to be.

Read more...

What Graeae did next

Jenny Sealey

As an 11-year-old, I used to love writing my address as My Bedroom, 50 Ridsdale Rd, Sherwood Rise, Nottingham, England, Great Britain, The World, The Universe. 

Read more...

Listed: Top 10 Children's Theatre Shows

Katie Colombus

If you are seeking to keep small children entertained this Easter, there's no need to sit around gorging on chocolate with so many egg-citing cultural experiences on offer throughout the UK. This week's edition of Listed suggests a range of choices, some in London, some touring, in theatres and beyond. Choose from sing-a-long characters and historical adventures, kooky eco-warriors and Shakespearean puppetry shows.

Read more...

Barry is ready for her close-up

Bridget Keehan

The idea for Day to Go – the show takes its name from a bus ticket – sprang from my own bus journeys around Barry and from a desire to make a piece of theatre specific and relevant to the town.

Read more...

Listed: Celebrating Dylan Thomas

Jasper Rees

It won’t have escaped the attention of anyone with an ear for poetry that Dylan Thomas turns 100 this year. He was born in a suburban house on a hill overlooking Swansea Bay a few months after the outbreak of war, and by his early 20s had been hailed a significant poetic voice by TS Eliot. By 39 he was dead, hastened to his grave by a lethal combination of alcohol, pneumonia and New York doctors.

Read more...

Dangerous Acts: filming Belarus Free Theatre

Madeleine Sackler

For the members of the Belarus Free Theatre, there are many risks to doing something that we might all take for granted: telling stories about our lives. These risks include censorship, blacklisting, imprisonment, and worse. But when the authorities forbid critical examinations of such topics as sexual orientation, alcoholism, suicide and politics, the Free Theatre responds by injecting these taboos into underground performances.

Read more...

theartsdesk in Sydney: Beyond the Cringe

alexandra Coghlan

I hadn’t heard the term “cultural cringe” until I went to live in Australia. Holiday encounters had been so full of sunshine, art, water and music that it hadn’t occurred to me to doubt the cultural confidence and energy of the nation that gave us Patrick White and Peter Carey, Baz Luhrmann and Brett Whiteley, Joan Sutherland and Robert Hughes. But once I did, the phrase was everywhere.

Read more...

I Found My Horn: Afterlife of a Book

Jasper Rees

When a book is published, there are broadly speaking three alternative fates which lie in wait. It goes global, it sinks without trace, or it sells modestly and steadily to the readership for whom it was intended. There is, however, another potential option, which is that it catches a thermal and veers off in an unforeseen direction.

Read more...

Final curtain for the Library Theatre

philip Radcliffe

We are witnessing the end of an era in the long history of Manchester’s theatreland: the disappearance, after more than 60 years, of the treasured Library Theatre. Coming full circle, it is ending as it began, with a production of The Seagull.

Read more...

Pages

Advertising feature

★★★★★

A compulsive, involving, emotionally stirring evening – theatre’s answer to a page-turner.
The Observer, Kate Kellaway

 

Direct from a sold-out season at Kiln Theatre the five star, hit play, The Son, is now playing at the Duke of York’s Theatre for a strictly limited season.

 

★★★★★

This final part of Florian Zeller’s trilogy is the most powerful of all.
The Times, Ann Treneman

 

Written by the internationally acclaimed Florian Zeller (The Father, The Mother), lauded by The Guardian as ‘the most exciting playwright of our time’, The Son is directed by the award-winning Michael Longhurst.

 

Book by 30 September and get tickets from £15*
with no booking fee.


latest in today

First Person: author-turned-actor Lydia Higman on a play tha...

I first read Anne Gunter’s story about five years ago, when I was in my first year of university at Oxford, little knowing it would over time lead...

The Origin of Evil review - Laure Calamy stars in gripping F...

A young woman (Laure Calamy; Call my Agent!; Full Time; Her Way) is trying to pluck up the courage to call her...

Foam, Finborough Theatre review - fascism and f*cking in a G...

In a too brightly tiled Gentlemen’s public convenience (Nitin Parmar’s beautifully realised set is as much a character as any of the men we meet...

Album: Ride - Interplay

What a time to be alive it is for fans of late Eighties, early Nineties ...

Schubert Piano Sonatas 4, Paul Lewis, Wigmore Hall review -...

“Death doesn’t scare me at all,” said my friend Christopher Hitchens during our last telephone conversation. “After all, it’s the only certainty...

Vossa Jazz 2024 review - Norwegian festival embraces William...

“The name of this group is Mayan Space Station.” In spite of the billing as The William Parker Trio, their bassist – coolly introducing himself as...

First person: playwright Paul Grellong on keeping pace with...

I’m writing this in the lobby of the...

Album: Sum 41 - Heaven :x: Hell

Sum 41 honour their 27-year career with Heaven :x: Hell, a 20-track double album, due to be their final, without a single skip. Harking...

3 Body Problem, Netflix review - life, the universe and ever...

From Game of Thrones producers David Benioff and DB Weiss, in cahoots with Alexander Woo, 3 Body Problem is Netflix’s daring...