England
Jasper Rees
We’ve been here before. In the first week of theartsdesk’s existence, the BBC began screening a daily drama by the name of The Cut. Daily drama has never been the BBC’s thing, unless you happen to speak Welsh and follow Pobol y Cwm, and so it proved with this online soap dished out in bite-size five-minute pieces. It was my solemn duty to issue daily reports for the first five days of The Cut's life. And now here comes Five Days, which will run eponymously till the end of the week: five episodes, one a night, till we find out whodunwhat. Will it keep you hanging on? For this second outing of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Over the past decade, much of the energy in new writing has come from black Britons. Homegrown talents such as Roy Williams, debbie tucker green and Kwame Kwei-Armah have sent us updates about the state of hybrid, streetsmart culture, and alerted us to the experiences of minorities. In doing so, they have reinvented punchy dialogue, with stage chat that zips along with dizzy humour and linguistic freshness. Hot on their heels comes Bola Agbaje, whose latest play has just opened on the main stage at the Royal Court.Before the play starts, Agbaje sets out her stall — the curtain has the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Looking at posters outside the Apollo Theatre, where the West End transfer of Jez Butterworth’s award-heavy Royal Court success opened last night, you might be tempted to start humming: “And did those feet in ancient time…” But such nostalgic sentiments are unlikely to survive the opening scene of this phenomenal play. Soon after the curtain, a symbolically faded flag of St George, rises, we see a familiar rural scene: under-aged kids stoned out of their minds, dancing in a thumping rave. It’s a nocturnal bacchanalia of house music, gyrating girls and drug-addled wildness.Yes, we are Chez Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The well-prepared adult accompanying an under-10 to the Royal Ballet’s Tales of Beatrix Potter will take with them a pillow and a potty, the pillow for themselves, the potty to tuck under the seat for the necessary moment during this 70-minute marathon. Should the Stasi at Bag Search at the Opera House entrance insist on the potty being checked into the cloakroom, the canny adult carries a supersized handkerchief as backup, to stuff into the child’s wailing mouth when - 30 minutes in, with infant acuity - it realises that it has seen the best bits and there are another 40 minutes of these Read more ...
aleks.sierz
What’s the appeal of the traditional ghost story? Is it the knowledge that while the victims of the tale quake in their boots, you are perfectly safe and grinning like the Cheshire Cat? Or is it because the supernatural gives us a chance to journey into the weird and fearsome corners of our psyche, all the time kidding ourselves that we are just normal human beings? In Michael Punter’s new ghost story, Darker Shores, which opened last night at the Hampstead Theatre, all the rooms of the haunted house story get an airing.It is Christmas 1875, and the setting is Sea House, a suitably isolated Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is youth wasted on the young? Well, precious few grown-ups who watch Simon Stephens's new drama, Punk Rock, will develop a sudden urge to be a teenager again: his portrait of a group of middle-class youngsters is every parent's nightmare. They are either foul-mouthed and aggressive bullies, or deeply troubled neurotics - and the gradual escalation of their conflicts ends in the kind of mindless violence that stays on the front pages for days.Set in a Stockport grammar school, on the eve of A-level exams, the play starts off with the tender encounter between two 17-year-olds, local fantasist Read more ...