Theatre Reviews
A Midsummer Night's Dream, RSC, Barbican review - visually ravishing with an undercurrent of violenceWednesday, 11 December 2024
Hermia is a headbutting punk with a tartan fetish, Oberon looks like Adam Ant and Lysander appears to have stumbled out of a Madness video. Yet Eleanor Rhode’s exuberant A Midsummer Night’s Dream – which has transferred from a triumphant run at Stratford-Upon-Avon – is no straightforward Eighties tribute, but a psychedelic mashup that’s as ravishing as it’s gritty. Read more... |
The Devil Wears Prada, Dominion Theatre review - efficient but rarely inspiredWednesday, 11 December 2024
It's second time only quasi-lucky for The Devil Wears Prada, the stage musical adaptation of the much-loved Meryl Streep film from 2006 that nosedived in Chicago a few summers ago and has resurfaced on the West End to see another day. Read more... |
Hansel and Gretel, Shakespeare's Globe review - too saccharine a retelling for our timesSaturday, 07 December 2024
Growing up within a few hundred yards of a major dock, I hardly knew darkness or quiet – the first time I properly felt their terrible beauty was on the Isle of Man ferry in the middle of the Irish Sea, its voids still vivid half a century on. Read more... |
The Importance of Being Earnest, National Theatre review - no shortage of acid-tipped delightSaturday, 30 November 2024
If Harold Pinter’s work represents, as he slyly joked, the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, then Oscar Wilde’s represents the stiletto in the Victorian sponge – at a time when the stiletto was a slim dagger used for assassination. Beneath the fopperies and fripperies of his fin-de-siècle classic, every line draws blood as he skewers the false gods and hypocrisies of his age. Read more... |
Twelfth Night, Orange Tree Theatre review - perfectly pitched sad and merry musical mayhemSaturday, 30 November 2024
It's all too easy to underplay the melancholy of Shakespeare's comedy of divided twins, misplaced – sometimes narcissistic – love, drunken frolics and a Puritan given his comeuppance. Tom Littler's decision to present the action in a very English Illyria during the years following World War II immediately sets the melancholy tone, but with pleasure bursting to make an entrance. Read more... |
The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical, The Other Palace - all Greek to meSaturday, 30 November 2024
Percy Jackson is neither the missing one from Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael, nor an Australian Test cricketer of the 1920s, but a New York teenager with dyslexia and ADHD who keeps getting expelled from school. He’s a bit of a loner, too intense to huddle with the geeks, too stubborn to avoid the fights with the jocks, and his mother won’t tell him anything about his absent father. Who turns out to be a Greek god. Could happen to any kid. Read more... |
Expendable, Royal Court review - intensely felt family dramaFriday, 29 November 2024
British theatre excels in presenting social issues: at its best, it shines a bright light on the controversial subjects that people are thinking, and talking, about. Emteaz Hussain’s excellent new play, which opens at the Royal Court, is based on the appalling crimes, which took place from the 1990s to the 2010s, which involved hundreds of young girls being sexually exploited in northern towns by gangs of predatory men. Read more... |
The Purists, Kiln Theatre review - warm, witty, thoughtful and un-wokeFriday, 29 November 2024
Watching Dan McCabe’s 2019 play, older folk might be reminded of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s indelible lyrics, “Can blue men sing the whites, or are they hypocrites…?” The Purists moves the question into the 21st century in a teasing but very enjoyable way. Read more... |
The Dead, ANU, Landmark Productions, MoLI Dublin review - vital life, love and death in perfect equilibriumThursday, 28 November 2024
James Joyce’s Misses Morkan have gone up in the world for their Christmas gathering this year, from the upper part of a “dark, gaunt house” on the Liffey to the splendour of No. 86 St Stephen’s Green, now home to the Museum of Literature Ireland. Those of us with an "invitation" felt we were more in the grand house of the Ekdahls in Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, but we “got” the Irish conviviality and just about every nuance of the masterly short story, with more besides. Read more... |
All's Well That Ends Well, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse review - Shakespeare at his least likeableMonday, 25 November 2024
"All’s well that ends well". Sounds like the kind of phrase a guilty parent says to a disappointed child after they’ve been caught in a white lie and bought them a bag of sweets to smooth things over. It’s a saying that betokens bad behaviour, a need to sweep things under the carpet, portending a fresh start. There’s an edge of power in it too, implying that the speaker can now define their interlocutor’s feelings. In short, it’s ugly. 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
Help to give theartsdesk a future!
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
Mrs. Warren's Profession, Garrck Theatre review - mothe...
How do you make Bernard Shaw sear the stage anew? You can trim the text, as the director Dominic Cooke has, bringing this prolix writer's 1893...
The Phoenician Scheme review - further adventures in the idi...
It’s not what he says, it’s the way he says it. Few filmmakers have bent the term “auteur” to their own ends more boldly than...
Album: Ammar 808 - Club Tounsi
Ammar 808 is the high octane vehicle for the Tunisian-born producer Sofyann Ben Youssef, now based in Denmark. His first album Maghreb United...
Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning review - can this...
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...
Code of Silence, ITVX review - inventively presented reality...
In the guided tour of Britain’s cathedral cities that is the primetime TV...
The Crucible, Shakespeare's Globe review - stirring acc...
A society ruled by hysteria. Lurid lies that carry more currency than reality. There’s no shortage of reasons that...
Pixies, O2 Academy, Birmingham review - indie veterans pack...
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...
Album: Sports Team - Boys These Days
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...