Theatre
Ismene Brown
The Royal Shakespeare Company celebrates its 50th birthday season with the grand reopening of its transformed Royal Shakespeare Theatre at a cost of £112.8 million. The temporary Courtyard Theatre folds curtains on the sold-out smash hit that is Matilda, awaiting one last flourish in the Olympics Shakespeare Festival next year before its intended demolition. New productions of Macbeth, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet inaugurate the revamped RST, while London operations transfer from the Roundhouse to Hampstead Theatre for the premieres of three new plays. The season is capped with a six-week Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Donmar Warehouse's 2011 season listings take audiences, as so often, in unpredictable directions, from the farcical tensions of American competitive spelling to the high tragedy of 18th-century Schiller. Full season guide below.King Lear, William Shakespeare, 3 Dec-5 Feb, 2011Derek Jacobi has long had his eye on the title role of King Lear and finally gets to play it under the direction of Michael Grandage, with whom he has worked profitably in Don Carlos and Twelfth Night. Read theartsdesk's Q&A with actor Derek Jacobi.The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, William Finn/Rachel Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The National Theatre's 2011 season listings offer double Shakespeare rations in an eclectic schedule: as Nicholas Hytner's unfussy, modern Hamlet goes on tour round the UK with an authoritative Rory Kinnear as the Prince, a new Twelfth Night by octogenarian Sir Peter Hall stars his daughter. Two scientific men go astray - Mary Shelley's monster creator Dr Frankenstein, who hits the boards under the direction of Danny Boyle, a stage talent poached for film stardom, and the drab dentist in Clifford Odets's 1938 drama, Rocket to the Moon. New plays about Israel and its effect on London Jews (by Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The 2011 season at Sadler’s Wells features attractions including horses and mass nudity on stage, the Pet Shop Boys' first ballet, William Forsythe, New York's American Ballet Theatre, the usual hip hop, flamenco and tango seasons, and generous helpings of Belgian and Catalan contemporary dance. Full listings guide below. Winter-Spring 2011Matthew Bourne's Cinderella, 30 Nov-23 Jan 2011, Sadler's Wells TheatreSet in London during the Second World War, Bourne's 1997 interpretation of Prokofiev's haunting score has, at its heart, a true wartime romance. Completely revised, this brand-new Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The world of the media offers plenty of opportunities for satire, but the idea of a comedy about sub-editors at first glance seems odd. After all, the sub-editors, or subs, are hardly journalism’s most glamorous beings: these office-bound nerds spend their working days correcting the spellings of journalists and cutting their copy, while penning pun-heavy headlines and writing captions to pictures. Yet, as R J Purdey’s play - which was a sellout hit at this venue last year and now returns for another run - makes clear, there is some comic juice to be squeezed out of the dreams and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Pete Postlethwaite, who has died from cancer at the age of 64, was an extremely amicable man whom Hollywood had down as a lugubrious baddie. It happened in Aliens 3, in The Usual Suspects, in The Lost World: Jurassic Park.You could see Hollywood's point. His greying itinerant preacher's hair flailed behind him wildly. His green irises blazed bright around pupils the size of pinpricks. And then there were the cheekbones jutting beneath them. "They are quite whopping, aren't they?" volunteered their owner when I met him. "Who was it said, 'He looks like he's got a clavicle stuck in his mouth Read more ...
Matt Wolf
One expects Shakespeare to be rediscovered afresh on the British stage (if not here, where?), and it was gratifying during 2010 to find the Royal Court - a venue all about the new - raising the authorial bar ever higher via an (almost) unbroken series of triumphs culminating, for me, with E V Crowe's Kin. So there's something both remarkable and endearing about a theatre year that was book-ended by musicals putting two astonishing females centre stage: a Harvard hopeful by the name of Elle Woods in Legally Blonde and a brainy wee tyke, Roald Dahl's Matilda, for whom one feels the Ivy League Read more ...
David Nice
Vienna has its New Year's Day concert, conducted this year with some style but not quite enough sensuousness by Franz Welser-Möst. London could do worse for a more modest equivalent than let the Wooden O play host to a well-spiced small package of carols, seasonal songs and readings from Chaucer's times to Thomas Hardy's. But sing and play it lustily, ye Gabrieli ladies and gentlemen, or not at all. And it's sad to report that the proceedings got off to a start as soggy as the winter's afternoon they were supposed to keep at bay.Were those well-muffled chorenes at sixes and sevens really the Read more ...
David Nice
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive," trilled critic Harold Hobson in Wordsworthian mood about a musical which even in 1954 must have made Gilbert and Sullivan look like Ingmar Bergman. Over half a century on, can Salad Days's sweetly silly paradise be regained? The fact that my eyes pricked as the two lovers launched into the dance-song celebrating their magic piano may partly be ascribed to nostalgia for teenage am-dram - late Seventies, not early Fifties - but much more to the airy lack of irony in Tête à Tête's deliciously classical production.Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds, Read more ...
theartsdesk
Yesterday was yesterday. Today there's the rest of the week. What are the options? You could go to the shops and exchange all your presents, or you could pursue something more in the cultural line. To which end, theartsdesk is delighted to propose some suggestions. Our writers strongly recommend that you do one or more of the following while opportunity knocks. ENGLAND LondonVisit a Georgian medicine cabinet. London is full of treasures which fail to register on the public radar. One such gem is The Symons Collection at the Royal College of Physicians in Regent's Park. The display Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Eileen Atkins (b 1934) acquired long-overdue fame with her performance in the BBC adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford. Her desiccated spinster was the indisputed star turn until death did us part. It’s taken a while. Aside from half a century’s commitment to the classics and new plays, unlike the other more celebrated DBEs she has had a parallel career as a writer. There have been two plays about Virginia Woolf, as well as a screenplay of Mrs Dalloway. With Jean Marsh she also created Upstairs, Downstairs which is returning to British television in an updated revival. This time round Read more ...
carole.woddis
Seems we’re living through a silly season. There are rumours afoot that our PM’s Big Society is nothing other than a fig leaf for a chaos theory of how to run society, ie let the devil take the hindmost. And in the arts we’ve got theatre’s esteemed trade paper declaring, in a much-publicised puff - organised through a star-studded panel of the Great and the Good and “hundreds of readers voting from a list of 10 actors” - that Dame Judi Dench is The Greatest Stage Actor of all time.Well, good on The Stage. Nothing like stirring up debate to draw attention to yourself, and heaven knows Read more ...