Time Gentlemen Please, The Demon Barbers, Theatre Royal Wakefield

Clog hop: contemporary street dance meets English folk

Yorkshire folkies The Demon Barbers have used English dance in their live shows for several years. Time Gentlemen Please takes the idea a step further, integrating  contemporary dance stylings within a cast of more traditional types. Thus three hip-hop dancers barge into a musty pub and you’re immediately aware of their sense of displacement. Their moves are jerky and uncomfortable, their body language hinting at deep unease. Then on come the clog dancers.

theartsdesk Q&A: Theatre Director Dominic Dromgoole

The Globe's leader on loving the Bard and succeeding without subsidy

Dominic Dromgoole (b. Oct.1963) had directed professionally precisely one Shakespeare play - Troilus and Cressida for the Oxford Stage Company, with a then little-known Matt Lucas as Thersites - when he was appointed artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe, the Thames-side playhouse that has defied nay-sayers to become a London theatrical fixture since opening to the public in 1997. Could the amiably scruffy one-time leader of west London's tiny Bush, a space given over exclusively to new work, gather in the groundlings, and more, across a landscape inevitably defined by the Bard, notwithstanding the presence of original writing from Howard Brenton, Che Walker, or, still to come, Nell Leyshon? As Dromgoole's fifth season gathers pace with the opening 24 May of Henry VIII, directed by Mark Rosenblatt, it made sense to check in with Dromgoole early in his own rehearsals for Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, with Roger Allam as Falstaff and Jamie Parker as Hal.

RPS Awards audience thumbs nose at new Government

The announcement by the Royal Philharmonic Society's keynote speaker Grayson Perry that the Queen had sent for David Cameron last night was met with audible groans from the great and the good of the classical music world at their Awards ceremony. Speaker after speaker made it perfectly clear that the Lib Dems (though almost certainly not the economically liberal, pro-nuclear, immigration-capping, Tory-serving Lib Dems that they have now woken up to) were the choice of the majority here and one after the other they pleaded that the Government ring-fence arts funding.

theartsdesk Q&A: Artist Douglas Gordon

The Glaswegian artist explains how the city made him

Since winning the Turner Prize in 1996 with Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Douglas Gordon (b. 1966) has lived in Germany, France, New York and Germany again. But in accent and attitude, he remains a Glaswegian. Those roots are being reaffirmed at the moment: as part of this year's Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, one of Gordon's most celebrated works is back on display in the city where it was first shown.

theartsdesk Q&A: Playwright David Greig

Leading light of the Scottish playwriting boom on revisiting Macbeth

A new play by David Greig opens at the Hampstead Theatre for the Royal Shakespeare Company next week. A theatre director as well as playwright, Greig (b. 1969) is one of the most prolific and artistically ambitious playwrights of his generation and a key figure in the current burgeoning of Scottish theatre. In addition to an extraordinarily diverse range of plays such as Europe (Traverse Theatre, 1994), The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union (Tron Theatre, 1999) and Damascus (Edinburgh International Festival, 2009), his work includes adaptations such as his version of Euripides’ The Bacchae, starring Alan Cumming (National Theatre of Scotland, 2007), translations and plays for young people.

Is it too late to save the Cultural Olympiad?

A new committee, a new chief, a new salary, but still no one knows what it means

We’d almost blown the so-called Cultural Olympiad, and if the appointment of Ruth Mackenzie as artistic director had come a moment later than the turn of this year, we would have done. Not my opinion: this from Tony Hall of the Royal Opera House, and he chairs the board that appointed her. More than that, on Friday Hall was given a cross-bench seat in the House of Lords to thump the tub for the arts in 2012, and we’ll take notice then. Won’t we?

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