obituary
Brian Friel, the private playwright of BallybegWednesday, 25 July 2018
Brian Friel, who died in 2015 at the age of 86, was a shy man who shunned interviews, keeping his powder dry for the work and shrouding his personal life in mystique. Not that he never opened his mouth at all. When Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) was... Read more... |
Milos Forman: 'The less you know about yourself, the happier you are'Tuesday, 17 April 2018
The second thing I noticed about Miloš Forman, who has died at the age of 86, was the spectacular imperfection of his English. All those decades in America could not muffle his foghorn of a Bohemian accent, nor assimilate the refugees from Czech... Read more... |
Sir Matthew Bourne remembers Scott Ambler 1960-2018 – 'A prince among men'Thursday, 22 March 2018
Nobody deserves the title of New Adventures “legend” more than Scott Ambler; nobody is remembered more affectionately – the generosity of spirit, the many kindnesses, the fierce loyalty, the tears of pride in company notes sessions, the endearing... Read more... |
John Mahoney: 'I wanted to be like everybody else'Tuesday, 06 February 2018
In 11 seasons of Frasier, John Mahoney played Marty Crane, a cussed blue-collar ex-cop who couldn’t quite understand how his loins came to produce two prissily cultured psychiatrists. His ally in straight-talking was his physiotherapist Daphne,... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Musician Mark E SmithWednesday, 24 January 2018
Since releasing their first record, Bingo Masters Breakout, Mark E Smith (b 1957) has led The Fall through some of rock music’s most extreme and enthralling terrain, cutting a lyrical and musical swathe that few other artists can match. An outsider... Read more... |
Remembering Dmitri Hvorostovsky (1962-2017)Friday, 24 November 2017
A certain online scandalmonger and coffin-chaser likes to preface news of deaths in the musical world with "sadness" or "tragedy", usually when neither he nor we have heard of the person in question. But the end of Dmitri Hvorostovsky's two-and-a-... Read more... |
Peter Hall: A ReminiscenceTuesday, 12 September 2017
Theatre artist, political agitator, cultural advocate: Sir Peter Hall was all these and more in a career that defies easy encapsulation beyond stating the obvious: we won’t see his like again any time soon. He helped shape my experience and... Read more... |
Sue Steward 1946-2017: She came, she saw, she salsa'dMonday, 28 August 2017
Sue Steward, who died suddenly last week from a brain haemorrhage, was one of theartsdesk’s most loved members, her free spirit and her double specialism in world music and photography making her an intrinsic asset to this pioneering critics’ site... Read more... |
When Sam Shepard was a LondonerMonday, 31 July 2017
Sam Shepard came to live in London in 1971, nursing ambitions to be a rock musician. When he went home three years later, he was soon to be found on the drumstool of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder tour. But in between, not long after he arrived in... Read more... |
Sergei Vikharev, master ballet-reconstructor, 1962-2017Tuesday, 06 June 2017
Just as the 200th anniversary is about to be celebrated of the great genius of 19th-century classical ballets, Marius Petipa, the creator of The Sleeping Beauty, Don Quixote, La Bayadère, half of Swan Lake, and many other masterpieces, his oeuvre's... Read more... |
Tim Pigott-Smith: from The Jewel in the Crown to King Charles IIISaturday, 08 April 2017
It is the fate of a certain type of well-spoken classically trained actor to wear the livery of the English Establishment. Tim Pigott-Smith, double-barrelled and tall with a high forehead, was one such. But the full arc of his career encompassed... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Writer David Storey, pt 1Monday, 27 March 2017
David Storey, who has died at the age of 83, was the last of the Angry Young Men who, in fiction and drama, made a hero of the working-class Northerner. His father spent his life down a Yorkshire pit, and out of guilt that he belonged to an educated... Read more... |
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