It’s always a pleasure to flag up new work by someone you trust to deliver the goods. For us, Danú Theatre is an ever-reliable source of interesting theatre, always well directed and cleverly staged; and it may not be a [ … ]
NYU Abu Dhabi has secured something of a coup with the appointment of Wole Soyinka as Arts Professor of Theater. The 1986 winner of the Nobel prize for literature, Soyinka is a towering figure in culture, human rights activism and [ … ]
Dubai is getting a brand new three-day festival of theatre under the name Theme 8, with performances at the Theatre at Mall of the Emirates at the end of the month. The festival is for original short plays (8 to [ … ]
What’s the most personal form of theatre, the one that seizes your attention, engages your emptions, and leaves you nowhere to hide? The one that forces you to be actually part of the experience, even though you’re the audience and [ … ]
We know we live in one of the world’s most geographically diverse places. The UAE is home to over 200 nationalities, and people born somewhere else make up around 88 percent of the total population. What’s more, those incomers aren’t [ … ]
Al Raheel | Departure, which premieres on 24 and 25 January at NYUAD in The Arts Center’s Black Box theatre space, isn’t the first play to use more than one language. It isn’t the first play by an Emirati, it [ … ]
Sharjah is getting a fringe festival, with more than 600 shows – mostly (but not all) aimed at families – running in the second half of this month. You’d expect a fringe to be an add-on or ornament to an [ … ]
The magpie team is once again putting together its annual list of the 50 most exciting, innovative and stimulating people in the UAE who are making a difference to the cultural and creative life of the Emirates. And we want [ … ]
Here it is: the 2019 edition of magpie’s 50 To Follow. Like most retrospective lists, it’s intended as a conversation piece. We fully expect you to disagree with our inclusions, and with the (admittedly pretty arbitrary) ranking that we’ve given [ … ]
“No more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that” wrote HL Mencken, doyen of 1920s literary critics, in his slightly sniffy 1925 review of The Great Gatsby. True, he liked the book’s “careful and brilliant finish”; but [ … ]
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