Ahead of a reissue of her band’s classic Beautiful Garbage, the Scottish frontwoman remembers her teenage passions, from the fiction that terrified her to the Edinburgh nightclub that set her freeAround 1980 this book was in the window of every booksho…
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof review – Big Daddy’s birthday party still blazes
Curve, LeicesterAn imaginative staging of Tennessee Williams’ classic foregrounds the southern drama’s roots in Greek tragedyOne of the catchiest titles in the theatrical canon will always draw audiences to Tennessee Williams’ 1955 play set during a ca…
Romeo + Juliet review – an intense rush of love and hate
Birmingham HippodromeTaking elements of contemporary, hip-hop, classical Indian and streetdance, Rosie Kay’s version of Shakespeare has a clamour of activity and ideasThis autumn brings a veritable harvest of Romeo and Juliets. Ben Duke’s witty reimagi…
London’s Royal Docks ‘just keeps changing’ – as a new outdoor show reveals
Arrival, co-created with the local community, will take audiences on a journey around the historic industrial area set to welcome City Hall When the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, completes the relocation of City Hall HQ from Southwark to the Crystal bui…
Frozen review – stunning musical extravaganza creates its own magic
Theatre Royal Drury Lane, LondonBeyond the visual thrills and powerful ballads, this adaptation brings an unexpected depth to the relationship between two tortured sisters This musical extravaganza about estranged sisters, an icy kingdom and unharnesse…
Judgment day for Afghanistan: the ‘raw’ legal drama trying Britain for war crimes
The conflict lasted two brutal decades. Now a people’s tribunal – of actors, human rights experts, witnesses and citizen judges – is staging a trial of the invasion. Tony Blair has been invitedTwenty years after the start of the coalition invasion of A…
Disabled and clinically vulnerable shut out from return of live music and theatre
As social distancing disappears at UK arts venues, artists and audiences who need to shield are uncertain of the futurePerformers and audiences who are clinically extremely vulnerable (CEV) are being shut out of the arts due to a lack of ongoing safety…
‘This is still here’: Bess Wohl’s story of seduction in a Nazi summer camp
The US playwright’s new drama, at the Old Vic in London, is a tragicomic romance amid swastika-shaped flowerbeds. She talks about finding a dark past on a trip to Long IslandIn May 2020, the playwright Bess Wohl rented a house in Bellport, Long Island,…
Muse and model or painter-poet? Elizabeth Siddal given fresh portrait
RashDash’s new theatre production honours the pre-Raphaelite by focusing on her own art and poetry – and shifting from tragedy into comedyWan, pale, tragic. Elizabeth “Lizzie” Siddal is remembered for how she was portrayed by the 19th-century men who s…
Punchdrunk to stage epic ‘future noir’ drama in old London arms factory
Dystopian Trojan war play The Burnt City at site of Royal Arsenal will be company’s costliest and most ambitious immersive pieceThe immersive theatre company Punchdrunk, celebrated for creating labyrinthine adventures in atmospheric locations, is to un…