Arts

The one thing I was not expecting from a play about a woman and a child imprisoned in a shed was that it would actually be a musical. For anyone with their head in a bucket, the play Room is the same room as the film Room, which was the same room as the book, Room. Emma Donoghue wrote all of them, and if you haven't read it, watched the film or seen the play, I'd recommend doing one of...

This review contains spoilers Obsession is a work about frustrated sexual expectations and celluloid dreams. It is self-reflexive and caught in the repetitive loop of Luchino Visconti’s 1942 film Ossessione yet feels like a radical comment on our age. Ivo van Hove directs and Simon Stephens gives us an English version translation. This collaboration makes sense: previous work from the two, such as Songs from Far Away, brought multiple layers of meaning and theatrical transcendence to  an experimental level. And...

The Ferryman, set in Derry in the 1981 by Jez Butterworth, comes after his last sell out 2009 show Jerusalem. As with that play the title here is ambiguous. Who is The Ferryman exactly? Is it the actual ferryman who takes hundreds of disillusioned Irish men and women to Liverpool in search of a better life? Is it Mr Muldoon, the IRA hit man who haunts the stage with a terrifying vengefulness? Or is it Quinn Carney, who is caught...

In 2014, West London-based dance teacher Donna Schoenherr conceived of the idea of a dance organisation that would provide weekly top quality dance and movement classes for those living with Parkinson's, as well as with other mobility restrictions. Donna, a former professional dancer, and founder of dance organisation Ballet4life.com®, had supported her father through his struggles with Parkinson’s for three decades. Through these struggles, she had been greatly inspired seeing first-hand the benefits that movement based therapy had for him and...

The programme for this year’s Creativity and Wellbeing Week 2017 has just been announced. The festival, led by London Arts in Health Forum, takes place from 12-18 June and features hundreds of events including talks, discussions, theatre shows, mass sing-a-longs, music performances, dance, film screenings, death cafes, art exhibitions and more. The festival presents opportunities for people to learn more about what creativity can offer health and wellbeing and showcases organisations using the arts to realise this potential. Last year...

The Penguin Essentials 'are essential reads' that include 'some of the most important books from the last 100 years – with covers designed by contemporary artists so that they feel fresh and unexpected, appealing to a new generation of readers.' (Including the super-stylish Dave Eggers cover above!) Titles range through the Classic canon with Brideshead Revisited, The Great Gatsby and A Passage to India, through to modern meta-revisions of Classics with Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea (reimagining Jane Eyre) and J...

There could not be a better time to write a play about revolutionary commitment and individual freedom. Journalist Paul Mason’s piece about working class female communards exiled to New Caledonia on the back of a colonial project for their part in the 1871 Parisian uprising asks hard questions about what happens to personal freedom and culpability when revolutions are defeated. Mason has drawn on three sources for this almost biographical work focused on anarchist, feminist, teacher, ethnographer and revolutionary Louise...

On May 20th and 21st the British Library will be transformed as the ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival animates its iconic spaces for the first time in celebration of this cultural partnership. The British Library will present a sumptuous showcase of South Asia's literary heritage, oral and performing arts, music, cinema and illusion, books and ideas, dialogue and debate, Bollywood and politics in the context of this broader view of India and its relationship to the United Kingdon.2017 marks the fourth...

It breathes many breaths, beats as one heart. Maureen Beattie as the woman appears to be a woman lost. Lost in the circles of people who swirl around her like personified nuclei, lost in her own nuclear reactor and the forces of life it connects her to, but which she can no longer propel or support. Beattie plays a woman who is not named by playwright Simon Stephens. We don’t find out much about her except that she is suffering...