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Stage

  • Jade Chan as Jim, Tim Dalling as Ben Gunn, Dylan Read as Pew, Itxaso Moreno as Billy Bones, Amy Conachan as Lean Jean Silver and TJ Holmes as the Laird.

    Treasure Island review – with a yo-ho-ho and the spirit of adventure

    Duncan McLean’s riotous adaptation begins in a care home for retired pirates, from which the resourceful heroes set sail in a washtub buoyed by imagination
  • Dylan Collymore as Pinocchio and Tok Morakinyo as Geppetto at Theatre Royal Stratford East.

    Pinocchio review – colourful kids’ entertainment with no strings

  • Clockwise from top left … blank canvas T-shirt, anxiety toy, Moonclock, X-Ray Spex skirt, Zaha Hadid candle holder, Beetlejuice sunglasses, Great Mughals tiffin set, Swan Lake headdress and Stormtrooper beer glass.

    Taylor Swift soap, saucy socks and Pet Shop Boys tea sets: it’s the culture Christmas gift guide 2024

  • (L to R) Shaina Taub, Elton John and David Furnish

    Elton John reveals he is unable to watch his own musical after losing eyesight

  • Yasmin Twomey and Tatenda Naomi Matsvai in Hot Orange at Half Moon theatre, London.

    The best theatre to stream this month: Hot Orange, The Warriors and Macbeth

  • Michael Billington

    Rupert Goold is an audacious innovator. He will make waves at the Old Vic

    Michael Billington

Reviews

  • Emma at Abbey theatre, Dublin.

    Emma review – a Regency comedy as light as a pillow fight

    Set in a nonspecific Austenland inspired more by Hollywood than history, this is an energetic, puppyish production that is easy to like
  • Jane Asher as Maria, with Clive Francis as Sir Toby Belch and actor-piannist Stefan Bednarczyk as the fool.

    Twelfth Night review – a classy, musical and seasonal feast. Play on

  • Charlotte Price as Milady and Lemar Moller as D’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers.

    The Three Musketeers review – a swashbuckler without a dramatic cutting edge

  • Rapunzel review – needs a trim and a tidy up

  • The week in theatre: Tender; Expendable review – small provocations

  • Nobodaddy review – a wild, Blake-inspired meditation on death from Michael Keegan-Dolan

  • Expendable review – stories of women caught up in grooming scandal told too briefly

  • Spend Spend Spend review – punchy revival of a rags to riches to rags tale

  • The Importance of Being Earnest review – Ncuti Gatwa leads a Wilde party of irresistible anarchic charm

Loads more stories and moves focus to first new story.

Dance

  • Upbeat and convivial … Nobodaddy.

    Michael Keegan-Dolan’s house of dance: ‘I was so caught up with where I’m from – not any more’

    After root-and-branch reworkings of Giselle and Swan Lake, the celebrated Irish choreographer is back with Nobodaddy, a trip ‘through the bottomless pit’
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Comedy

  • Chris McCausland sitting on a chair.

    ‘Strictly terrified me!’ Chris McCausland on self-belief, shame and becoming the star of the show

  • Flashback: Chris & Rosie Ramsey: Now pic: Pål Hansen. Andie Redman. HMU/Grooming: Carol Sullivan at Arlington Talent.

    Chris and Rosie Ramsey look back: ‘The minute our marriage feels like it’s failing because of the strain of the podcast, it stops’

  • Suzi Ruffell

    Suzi Ruffell: ‘If a story is good enough for the pub, I’ll give it a go on stage’

  • Frankie Monroe (Joe Kent-Walters)

    Alternative comedian Joe Kent-Walters: ‘I used to do a strip tease with carrier bags’

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Theatre

  • ‘I could do better than that!’ … La Función Que Sale Mal, AKA The Play That Goes Wrong, in Madrid.

    A very British omnishambles: how The Play That Goes Wrong conquered the world

  • Fabian Hinrichs as Dominik Arndt in A Citizen of the People by Maximilian Steinbeis.

    ‘The constitutional court is easy to crack’: the threats to German democracy go on stage

  • rehearsals for The Three Musketeers

    ‘If you get it wrong, people get badly hurt’: the cut-throat world of theatre fight directors

  • Chris Wiegand

    It’s the best show of the year – but Christmas performances shouldn’t be the only theatre at school

    Chris Wiegand
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From the archive

  • ‘I knew I wasn’t going to get fired!’ … Idina Menzel as Elphaba in Wicked.

    ‘They changed my ending, I felt aghast’: how we made Wicked

    ‘I once performed Defying Gravity at the White House within spitting distance of the Obamas,’ says Idina Menzel. ‘In fact, I might actually have spat on them’

Pictures & video

  • A scene from Maddaddam

    Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam morphs into a Wayne McGregor ballet

  • Shklyarov joined Mariinsky Theatre in 2003, became its principal dancer in 2011 and went on to perform all over the world

    2:01

    Vladimir Shklyarov: a look back at the career of the acclaimed Russian ballet dancer – video

    Shklyarov joined Mariinsky Theatre in 2003, became its principal dancer in 2011 and went on to perform all over the world
  • 'We did not consent,' a Guardian documentary by filmmaker Dorothy Allen-Pickard

    We Did Not Consent: a restaging of Britain’s undercover police scandal

    Undercover police officers have infiltrated activist networks and forged relationships with individual women for over 50 years, some fathering children with them. Now, three women – disguised by theatrical masks – who were targeted by ‘spy cops’ seek to take charge of their own stories, restaging emblematic scenes from their lives and reclaiming the narrative
  • Timothy West at the launch of Talking Statues in London, 2014.

    Timothy West – a life in pictures

  • A wisdom mask, monkey mask and okina mask

    Face value: the masterly theatrical masks of Kitazawa Hideta

  • Ensemble cast members apply their make-up in 'the bunker' mid-show

    Behind the scenes with The Lion King in London at 25

  • Hadewych van Gent, one of the academy's students, plays her cello for the first time after a repair.

    In the workshop with the Royal Academy of Music’s luthiers

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You may have missed

  • Michael Sheen as Welsh political hero Aneurin Bevan in the play Nye

    ‘It’s an outrage’: stars join fight against cuts as Welsh arts go into meltdown

  • ‘I was absolutely petrified of the man’ … Samuel Beckett in 1973.

    Samuel Beckett smoking a French cigarette: John Haynes’s best photograph

    ‘One day, I was summoned to a pub near the Royal Court theatre where Samuel Beckett was looking at my work. “These are wonderful pictures,” he said’
  • Acrobats practice outside in a desert in front of a circular metal structure.

    The circus that bought a tiny California town: ‘We’re creating our own Disneyland’

    Nipton sat neglected for years until Las Vegas’s Spiegelworld turned it into a circus haven
  • The Shakespeare Portraits

    Lend me your ears: great Shakespearean actors given hi-tech talking portraits

  • Clockwise from top left: Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor in Moulin Rouge!, John Turturro, George Clooney and Tim Blake Nelson in O Brother, Where Art Thou?; Danny Sapani as Jason and Helen McCrory as Medea: poet CP Cavafy; Joseph Fiennes as Troilus at the National Theatre.

    ‘We recognise it in this very primal way’: Stephen Fry, Brie Larson, Chris Ofili and more on why we can’t get enough of Greek mythology

  • Treasure Island at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh

    Deck the stalls! 20 of the UK’s best festive theatre shows

  • Who sent the wrong flowers to Donatella? … Vanessa Williams, centre, as the legendary editor.

    ‘Every minute at Vogue felt like an emergency’: Devil Wears Prada author Lauren Weisberger on igniting a scandal

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