Theatre Reviews
Adler & Gibb, Royal Court TheatreThursday, 19 June 2014![]()
Theatre-maker Tim Crouch has a thing about art. One of his plays, ENGLAND, was performed in art galleries across the world; another was called An Oak Tree, after the 1973 conceptual art piece by Michael Craig-Martin. In fact, Crouch even looks like an arty type. Now, in his latest production, he tells a story about two fictional artists: Janet Adler and her lover Margaret Gibb. But, really, his main theme, as ever, is the relationship between art and reality. Read more... |
Skylight, Wyndham's TheatreThursday, 19 June 2014![]()
A totemic play from (nearly) 20 years ago surfaces afresh in Stephen Daldry's West End revival of Skylight, the power of David Hare's intimate epic fully intact if somewhat redistributed as is to be expected from the passage of time and a new cast. Read more... |
Hobson's Choice, Open Air Theatre, Regent's ParkWednesday, 18 June 2014![]()
Director Nadia Fall has taken that patriarchal purveyor of footwear Henry Horatio Hobson and his family out of their natural habitat - a traditional proscenium arch theatre - and into a different time, the 1960s. Does this staple of British drama, written by Harold Brighouse in 1915 but set in 1880, benefit from relocation from plush indoor environs to the open air and from the era of button boots to sling-back stilettos? Up to a point. |
Café Society Swing, Leicester Square TheatreWednesday, 18 June 2014![]()
Alex Webb’s musical Café Society Swing, about a provocatively liberal Manhattan jazz club in the 1940s, made a much-anticipated return to the Leicester Square Theatre last night. With remarkable ingenuity and economy, Webb tells the story of the real Café Society, a radical and subversive multi-faceted entertainment venue, which on opening in December 1938 was the first non-segregated club in America. Read more... |
Klook's Last Stand, Park TheatreSunday, 15 June 2014![]()
If you've been rolling your eyes at the rash of articles hailing London's ever-increasing number of dry bars, allow writer-director Ché Walker to convince you of their amatory relevance. In his new musical drama, smooth-talker Klook and hard nut Vinette fall for one another over a long tall glass of carrot juice, with just the right kick of ginger. Read more... |
Orange Tree Theatre Festival, Programme 1, Orange Tree TheatreSaturday, 14 June 2014![]()
Sam Walters, Britain's longest-serving artistic director of a theatre (43 years!), looks to the past as well as the future with his Orange Tree swansong. This varied festival features nine plays and six world premieres across two programmes, all of them staged by returning graduates of the Richmond venue's trainee director scheme. Read more... |
Mr Burns, Almeida TheatreFriday, 13 June 2014![]()
In creating Mr Burns, Anne Washburn was trying to answer a question overlooked by most purveyors of dystopian fictions: what would happen to pop culture after an apocalypse? The physical and emotional challenges of life after civilisation have been endlessly explored, but very little attention has been paid to the fate of the ever-evolving collection of stories that we carry inside our heads. Read more... |
Khandan (Family), Royal Court TheatreThursday, 12 June 2014![]()
Some days, I feel very sorry for playwrights, especially those that become notorious through no fault of their own. If their most famous play causes enough controversy, it can take decades before people forget it. So now, 10 years since Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s early play, Behtzi (Dishonour) caused violent protests at the Birmingham Rep because of its depiction of a rape in a Sikh temple, I can’t think of any other way of starting this review of her latest without mentioning it. Read more... |
Fathers and Sons, Donmar WarehouseWednesday, 11 June 2014![]()
Brian Friel’s affinity with Russian writers, notably Chekhov and Turgenev, is central to his work, the playwright seeing similarities between their tragi-comic characters, hanging onto “old certainties” despite knowing in their hearts that their time is up, and people of his own generation in Ireland. The correspondences go beyond theme, of course; he’s not known as the Irish Chekhov for nothing. Read more... |
Hotel, National TheatreThursday, 05 June 2014![]()
Posh hotels are good settings for drama. They look cool, feel alien and can rapidly acquire a sense of claustrophobic intensity. Most importantly, in real life they feel like stage sets. Playwrights from Noël Coward (Private Lives) to Sarah Kane (Blasted) have set their work in luxury hotels, so Polly Stenham’s latest play, her first for the National Theatre (and performed in the small studio space), follows in some large footsteps. 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

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...

Emotions run high at WNO these days. When the company’s co-...

I can’t hear Joan Armatrading without being instantly transported back to Liverpool, and my student digs just around the corner from Penny Lane. I...

When Vladimir Jurowski returns to what used to be “his” London Philharmonic Orchestra, you’d better jump. I would have done on Wednesday had I...

The sax-player Kenny Garrett established a reputation as one of Miles Davis’s band in the Amandla (1989) period. He was also a member of...

The titular “lighthouse of glass” is a place where the narrator is “crying into the sun,” in which there is a need to “stand by my solitude.”...

Stereo Instrumental Music was recorded in July 1976 and originally issued only on cassette. The release was organised by...

Akira Kurosawa described his 1961 hit Yojimbo as a tale of “rivalry on both sides, and both sides are equally bad… we are weakly caught...

Igor Levit is a master of the unorthodox marathon, one he was happy to share last night with 24-year-old Austrian Lukas Sternath, his student in...

Is the theatre of the absurd dead? In today’s world, when cruel and crazy events happen almost daily, the idea that you can satirize daily life by...