wed 07/05/2025

poetry

theartsdesk Q&A: Theatre Director Dominic Dromgoole

Dominic Dromgoole (b. Oct.1963) had directed professionally precisely one Shakespeare play - Troilus and Cressida for the Oxford Stage Company, with a then little-known Matt Lucas as Thersites - when he was appointed artistic director of Shakespeare...

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A Room and a Half

Faces from the past: Alisa Freyndlikh and Sergei Yursky in 'A Room and a Half'

Definitely no standard biopic, Russian director Andrei Khrzhanovsky’s A Room and a Half captures part of the life, and a great deal of the spirit, of Russian poet Joseph Brodsky in a rare and rather brilliant gallimaufry of forms – from archive...

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Laurie Anderson, Barbican Theatre

“I want to tell you a story. About a story.” Thus spake Laurie Anderson at the beginning of her new show, Delusion, which is running for four nights as part of the Barbican’s Bite season. It was a typically cryptic, teasing prologue from a woman who...

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Breakfast with Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson's new show Delusion opens at the Barbican in London next week. Since the late 1960s she has been at the forefront of artistic innovation. From early pieces where she appeared in art galleries (wearing ice-skates in a block of ice...

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theartsdesk in Abu Dhabi: Doing Things by the Book

One of the most serious crises facing the Arabic-speaking world in recent years - but which has received precious little comment both in the Middle East and internationally - has been the serious decline in literacy and the art of reading. A United...

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theartsdesk in Galle: Beer and Roving in literary Sri Lanka

Thursday Never been to the Galle Literary Festival before. Very excited. A long weekend of bona fide book-nerdishness is just what I need – if only to stop me lying on the roof for three days with a book. Also I have one-on-one time lined up...

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Tom Paulin on Translating Medea

I came to Medea because 26 years back, the Field Day Theatre Company in Derry - started by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea - asked me to a version of Antigone. Entitled The Riot Act, it was staged in the Guildhall in Derry in September 1984 and toured...

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The Habit of Art, National Theatre

It sounded a dry subject and a dry title for Alan Bennett’s first play for five years - a fictional meeting between composer Benjamin Britten and poet W H Auden 25 years after they fell out, two old buggers, one furtive, the other extrovert. But at...

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theartsdesk in New York: Extreme Blake

Outwardly the Morgan Library & Museum is a citadel of sedateness - inside it may be the locus of turbulence. Thirteen years ago I walked around one of the rooms with the actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, on whom I was writing a profile. She was then...

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