5,330 stories from The Independent
Struggling actors who scrape a living working in repertory theatres should get paid a "living wage", Sir Ian McKellen has claimed.
Rupert Everett as Salieri in Amadeus? It's a characteristically canny piece of programming by artistic director Jonathan Church and an eminently fitting conjunction of talents with which to …
British theatre has traditionally been the preserve of those members of the chattering classes willing to shell out for a seat in the stalls at a hushed, dimly lit playhouse. But open-air th…
Australian stage director Benedict Andrews certainly likes to put a new spin on the classics. Working internationally, in opera as well as theatre, he's pitched Caligula into a sports stadiu…
I started to set Samuel Beckett's poetry to music two years ago when I was commissioned to write four songs for the first Happy Days Festival held in Enniskillen. Having written these four s…
It is a little after seven o'clock on a balmy July evening in Covent Garden, a stone's throw from the Strand, London's Theatreland, where right now people are getting ready to enjoy a play, …
We've had a Romeo and Juliet set in a care home with the focus on a pair of star-crossed senior citizens. We've had a Midsummer Night's Dream in which Judi Dench's ageing Elizabeth I got…
A radical new dramatisation of the prosecution of building workers " including the actor Ricky Tomlinson " during a national strike in the 1970s is set to shine new light on one of the darke…
A radical new dramatisation of the prosecution of building workers " including the actor Ricky Tomlinson " during a national strike in the 1970s is set to shine new light on one of the darke…
Elaine Stritch, the acidly funny star of the Broadway stage who also won three Emmys for her television work, has died at her home in Birmingham, Michigan. She was 89. The Detroit-born actre…
Raw sexual energy, and society's need to curb its wilder excrescences, are themes which bubble constantly just below the surface in the myth of the vampire. But in Liz Lochhead's feminist Dr…
Torben Betts's latest work begins as robust social comedy and then shades into something darker and more disturbing.
Long limbed and dreamy eyed, Xander Parish looks like everyone's ideal ballet prince the moment he steps on stage. He is the first British dancer to join the Mariinsky Ballet, the historic p…
A non-biographical musical based on the poetry and music of Tupac is getting the chop just over a month after it opened.
A theatre director has criticised the use of mobile phones during shows after a play was halted because a member of the audience was suspected of filming naked actors on stage.
Dominic Dromgoole's production has vigour and, in the first half, the right risky mood of volatility.
Ochi is a small West Indian joint on the Uxbridge Road, just down from the Bush Theatre in west London. It's here, amid the fumes of fried patties and jerk chicken, rather than in the packed…
Same-sex partners could be banned from taking part in ballroom dancing competitions under new rules being considered by the UK's official governing body.
Tanya Moodie's acting can be relied on for excellence but she is giving the performance of her life in this UK premiere " splendidly directed by Laurence Boswell and now transferred to Londo…
In this age of high-profile celebrity trials we shouldn't forget that one of the very first opened at the Old Bailey on 3 April 1895. It promised to be one of the most sensational of the dec…
Director Jamie Lloyd is playing a smart and enlightened game with his Trafalgar Transformed seasons. His aim is to change the demographic of the theatre audience and last year he wooed young…
Tickets for Monty Python's "sold out" reunion shows are now being offered at discount rates on Groupon.
There's an Arthur Miller-like feel to the set-up in Oliver Cotton's play: two estranged brothers; the moral and emotional fall-out of the Holocaust; the corrosive consequences of denying one…
Hell, as Sartre pointed out after a particularly trying evening at the theatre, is other people. Audiences are truly the bane of live performance. They talk through the Entr'acte, display a …
Invincible is a new play about a young, middle-class family who move to the North of England because they can no longer afford to live in the "hideous capitalistic gangbang" that is London. …
