RSC
Matilda the Musical, Cambridge TheatreFriday, 25 November 2011
WC Fields once famously cautioned against working with children or animals. He might very well have gone crazy had he been involved with the RSC’s hit musical production Matilda, which started out in Stratford-upon-Avon last November, garnering... Read more... |
2012 Cultural Olympiad events announcedFriday, 04 November 2011
The 2012 Cultural Olympiad has been announced and events will take place throughout the UK from 21 June until the last day of the Paralympics, 9 September. Ruth Mackenzie, director of the Cultural Olympiad, said that many events would be free, and... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Comedian Tim MinchinSaturday, 08 October 2011
Tim Minchin (b 1975) has had a year in the stratosphere that would arouse envy even in the biggest arena comedians. He has taken an orchestra on the road to play bespoke arrangements of his scabrous attacks on religion, hypocrisy and uncritical... Read more... |
My Summer Reading: Comedian Tim MinchinSunday, 07 August 2011
Tim Minchin, the Australian minstrel comedian, is known by his catweazel hair, thickly kohled eyes and dazzlingly witty songs bashed out at a grand piano about, among other things, the debatable existence of the Almighty. Lately his repertoire of... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Stratford-upon-Avon: A New Stage for ShakespeareWednesday, 08 June 2011
When the Royal Shakespeare Company seemed to be falling apart in the late 1990s, there was genuine cause for concern. The troupe had no automatic monopoly over performances of Shakespeare, nor could it claim a very particular style in its stagings.... Read more... |
Silence, Royal Shakespeare Company/Filter, Hampstead TheatreWednesday, 18 May 2011
If your heart breaks a continent or more away from home, does it make a noise? Very much so in the scintillating Royal Shakespeare Company/Filter collaboration Silence, the second in a series of three RSC premieres at the Hampstead Theatre. Wedding... Read more... |
The Tempest, Little Angel Theatre/ Royal Shakespeare CompanySaturday, 23 April 2011
Puppetry has come a long way in this country. Once considered the domain of children’s theatre only, you’ll now be hard pushed to find a classical production where puppets are not used in some way. For this sea change we have to thank, amongst... Read more... |
Little Eagles, Hampstead TheatreThursday, 21 April 2011
Space is a great subject for theatre. I’m not sure why but it might be something to do with the contrast between the irreducible groundedness of live performance and the imaginary flights of fancy that the audience yearns to take. Whatever the... Read more... |
Rona Munro on writing Little EaglesWednesday, 13 April 2011
My latest play, Little Eagles, marks the 50th anniversary of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s first orbit around the Earth. Gagarin’s place in history is, quite rightly, assured but little is known about Sergei Korolyov, a brilliant engineer and the chief... Read more... |
Interview: Actor James PurefoyThursday, 10 March 2011
A disproportionate number of column inches seem to have been devoted to James Purefoy’s matinee-idol looks, his ability to carry off a pair of breeches and the amount of time he appears on television naked. However, while he has admittedly spent... Read more... |
King Lear, RSC, RoundhouseThursday, 27 January 2011
But this comes at the expense of scale, both in characterisation - Jacobi is also simply too feathery - and in terms of space and time. We don't feel the outdoors at the Donmar, ever see and hear boorish Lear's knights, properly sense the passage of... Read more... |
Kathryn Hunter withdraws from RSC productionsFriday, 21 January 2011
Even at the time it seemed a little strange: the visionary Kathryn Hunter as an oddball Cleopatra in a production that hardly seemed up to the mark either of her performing standards or of her own fabulous Shakespeare staging, a Pericles which was... Read more... |
