theatre design
The Marriage of Figaro, English Touring Opera review - vanilla Mozart still tastes sweetThursday, 26 April 2018
The Fates did not want theartsdesk to review English Touring Opera’s new production of The Marriage of Figaro. The Beast from the East intervened to prevent a colleague from covering it at the Hackney Empire at the start of its tour in February: now... Read more... |
The Prudes, Royal Court review - hilarious but frustrating sex showWednesday, 25 April 2018
Playwright Anthony Neilson has always been fascinated by sex. I mean, who isn’t? But he has made it a central part of his career. In his bad-boy in-yer-face phase, from the early 1990s to about the mid-2000s, he pioneered a type of theatre that... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: An Actor's RevengeSaturday, 07 April 2018
Japanese director Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge is something of a one-off. Even in the context of the prolific director’s career variety, it’s an unusually stylised and visually captivating story of high artifice – there’s rich melodrama in its... Read more... |
The Inheritance, Young Vic review - a long day’s journey into lightThursday, 29 March 2018
About a decade ago, theatre-makers started routinely describing themselves as being in the business of storytelling. And “storytelling” is most certainly the term that best describes Matthew Lopez’s two-part, seven-hour epic The Inheritance.... Read more... |
Macbeth, National Theatre - Rufus Norris goes for drab, gory and tricksyThursday, 08 March 2018
Fair is foul and foul is drab, gory and tricksy in Rufus Norris’s first stab at Shakespeare direction at the National Theatre, Macbeth. It embodies the play's most clichéd quotation (the one about sound, fury, and nada), though whether that's... Read more... |
Summer and Smoke, Almeida Theatre - exquisite renaissance of Tennessee Williams's neglected playThursday, 08 March 2018
That this 1948 Tennessee Williams play is rarely performed seems nothing short of a travesty, thanks to the awe-inspiring case made for it by Rebecca Frecknall’s exquisite Almeida production. Aided by the skyrocketing Patsy Ferran, it also makes a... Read more... |
10 Questions for sound designer Adam CorkTuesday, 09 May 2017
No one ever went to the theatre for the sound design. Indeed, only the nerdiest theatregoers could name a single practitioner of the art. But imagine attending a production by Katie Mitchell or Robert Icke or Ivo van Hove – or any less overtly... Read more... |
An Inspector Calls, Playhouse TheatreThursday, 17 November 2016
So, the Inspector has come calling yet again. Twenty-four years have passed since Stephen Daldry’s graphic revision of JB Priestley’s moral tub-thumper opened at the National, followed by a tour of duty in the West End that seemed to go on forever.... Read more... |
Yolanda Sonnabend: designer of MacMillan's 'neurotic' balletsMonday, 16 November 2015
Ever since Diaghilev’s day the relationship of dance movement to its visual design has been a lively, sometimes combative affair. Sometimes people leave whistling the set, saying shame about the dance; other times they hate the set, love the dance.... Read more... |
Imagine... My Curious Documentary, BBC OneWednesday, 11 November 2015
This "mockumentary" concerning the play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was incredibly well-intentioned and unintentionally baffling. It operated on so many levels at once that the viewer could all too easily keep falling through... Read more... |
Death of a Salesman, Noël Coward TheatreThursday, 14 May 2015
We’ve not been short of memorable London productions of Arthur Miller’s best known works. Ivo van Hove’s triple Olivier award-winning A View from the Bridge, which transferred to the Wyndham’s Theatre from the Young Vic earlier this year, and the... Read more... |
DVD: Cycling with MoliereThursday, 21 August 2014
The sheer joy of making theatre provides the central attraction of Cycling with Moliere (Alceste à bicyclette), but Philippe Le Guay’s film is also rich in the comedy of fractious interaction between old friends whose worlds have moved apart. It’s... Read more... |
