5,330 stories from The Independent
Tommy Steele is not the first performer that you'd associate
with Dickens's misanthropic old tight-wad - a man described in A Christmas Carol as "hard and sharp as flint...secret,
and self-c…
In Alan Bennett's 1980 play Enjoy, the last back-to-back house in Leeds is demolished and reconstructed brick by brick in a museum " with Mam still living in it as a part of the exhibit. Awk…
When Shelagh Delaney died last year aged 72 she was hailed as one of towering figures of post war British culture having seared the authentic voice of northern working class life into the co…
The coincidence looks as if it might have been contrived by some ironic wag. A mere three days after the opening of Lindsay Posner's revival of Uncle Vanya at the Vaudeville, the West End no…
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's En Atendant is a dance fading into the dark. The performance of her company Rosas emerge from deep shadows at the back of the stage, and vanish into darkness aga…
Sir Peter Hall has apologised to Downton Abbey actress Laura Carmichael for "unintentionally" disrupting her West End debut on Friday.
This has certainly been the year of Uncle Vanya. We've already been treated to a couple of high-profile revivals of Chekhov's great tragicomedy of wasted lives " a very funny and mercurial a…
Liam Scarlett is the Royal Ballet's next big thing. The young choreographer has just been appointed the company's artist in residence, giving up dancing to focus on making ballets.
Thousands of children are to be given the chance to stage a Shakespeare play in a theatre to mark the 450th anniversary of the Bard's birth in 2014.
As the new production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya came to an end and the audience filed out of the Vaudeville Theatre, the post-play chit-chat was dominated by one question: who was that rude m…
There are not many professions in which you expect to be working at 95. There are even fewer where you might suddenly become famous at 95. But that's what has happened to Russian actress Gal…
On a shelf in the editor's office sits a "Do not disturb" sign, seemingly forgotten. Julian Barratt's Aidan hasn't thought to hang it on his door in Lucy Kirkwood's edgy new satire NSFW (acr…
Sculpture and dance. As mergers go, it's a no-brainer, and the surprise is that no one has brokered it before. Rodin's sculpture in particular, with its knotty muscularity and ecstatic, reac…
What are we talking about? A cabaret show inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's tragic tale of a hungry little girl selling matches on the frozen streets one New Year's Eve. This is no maudl…
Rupert Goold is making a name in Hollywood as he prepares to direct his first film, True Story, with James Franco, but he's losing a few London friends in the process. This week the Enro…
The enterprising Warwick Arts Centre is staging a leftfield Bond @ 50
celebration this weekend.
This week's edition of my local free newspaper, the Camden New Journal, has a picture of Alan Bennett on the front page drawing attention to his public stand on two significant events: the r…
It's hard to see what Jez Butterworth could have done to equal the impact of Jerusalem, so it's perhaps no surprise to find him working at the opposite end of the scale in his follow-up.
Desmond Barrit was a magnificent Falstaff for the RSC back in 2000 when Michael Attenborough staged the two parts of Henry IV and he garnered yet more rapturous raves when he reprised the ro…
Robert Hardy will play Winston Churchill for the eighth time in his career after it was announced he will line up opposite Helen Mirren's Queen Elizabeth II in the West End.
For his London lap of honour, this year's Foster's Edinburgh Comedy Award winner, Doctor Brown, is letting his inner child run free for the benefit of all the family, with both an adult and …
NSFW stands for "not safe for work" - ie online material (predominantly porn) that a viewer might not want to be seen accessing in a public space.
Mamba means crocodile in Swahili. It strikes first, with speed and without warning. It is not a nickname many would apply to Barack Obama, though Osma bin Laden might have disagreed about th…
I still can't believe this, but my play A Walk Through the End of Time is being performed at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, starring Henry Goodman and Harriet Walter. An estranged coup…
Proposed changes to the curriculum are a "serious threat" to the future of dance in the UK, according to the man in charge of Sadler's Wells theatre.
