London
aleks.sierz
After lockdown, the stage monologue saved British theatre. At venue after venue, cash-strapped companies put single actors into simple playing spaces to deliver good stories for audiences that just wanted to visit playhouses again. But this theatre form, which is relatively inexpensive and often immune against the pingdemic, does have its limitations. If the essence of drama is conflict between two or more characters, the absence of the other people on stage can often defuse the emotional force of the story. In Ifeyinwa Frederick’s new monologue, Sessions, which arrives at the Soho Theatre Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Tuesday, 8 November 2016. Vera is in a New York hospital room giving birth to a son. On anxiously checked phones, the votes are piling up for Hillary, but the states are piling up for Trump. Vera’s world will never be the same again.Mathilde Dratwa’s new play, Milk and Gall (directed by Lisa Spirling, Theatre 503's Artistic Director), takes a searingly unsentimental look at 21st century parenting in the big city, mining plenty of laughs along the way. Speaking from experience, I can vouch that it’s all true – except, perhaps, that the reality is even worse!In her mid-thirties, Vera ( Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Like a previous occupant of this venue, Six, The Choir Of Man started life as a quirky Edinburgh show and has gone on to be staged around the world to adoring audiences, tapping into a vibe that’s as much about participation as viewing, the show as much a gig as a musical. Be warned however - they may not hand out free mead at the start of Six, but they do hand out free beers at the start of this show, so a note of caution: amidst fierce competition, the Arts Theatre has the least hospitable lavatories in the West End!Director and co-creator, Nic Doodson, takes us into a pub, its entirely Read more ...
Mert Dilek
The complex history of capital punishment in Australia may not be familiar to many Londoners, but the Finborough Theatre turns out to be a good place to find one’s bearings around the subject. Set against this historical backdrop, playwright Alana Valentine’s The Sugar House presents a family drama spanning several generations, each haunted by the country’s legal system in different ways.The play opens in Pyrmont, Sydney in 2007, with lawyer Narelle (Jessica Zerlina Leafe) suspiciously checking out a luxury apartment at a site that used to be a sugar refinery. We then plunge, for the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Peter Culshaw’s occasional global music radio show returns with a two-hour conversation with one of the most innovative and enduring post-punk artists.TO LISTEN TO THE SHOW CLICK THIS LINKMatt Johnson, under his nom de guerre The The emerged into the shiny 1980s with some music that has lasted more than most, notably with the album Soul Mining with its classic songs and mix of despair and euphoria.With its warm lyrics and unusual-for-the-time sounds like accordion and melodica, his work was opposite to the ”Cold Wave” of the time with its Numanesque synths and automaton chic. Other Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“We haven’t started yet!” Hannah-Jarrett Scott, dressed in Doc Martens under a 19th-century shift, reassures us as she attempts to dislodge a yellow rubber glove from a chandelier in the middle of the set of Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of). So begins this rollicking all-female adaptation of the timeless Jane Austen romcom, in which the servants recreate their famous mistresses’ and masters’ turbulent love lives.Written by Isobel McArthur, the play originated in Scotland in 2018 and has gone through several versions before pitching up in the heart of the West End. Directed here by Read more ...
joe.muggs
“Flashbacks / driving in your car volume pushed right up to max / all those late nights I’d try to drink them back” These are almost the first words you hear on this record, coming in as South London Afrobeats producer P2J’s bass tones roll in on the opener “Under my Skin”. And they’re a perfect introduction to the theme and mood of the record too. It’s over five years since Katy B’s third album, Honey; back then she was still the unofficial narrator of millennial club culture, her songs perfectly catching the whirl of the dancefloor and hypersociality, locked exactly into the finest dance Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
As a teenager in 1967, I asked for a Mary Quant make-up box for Christmas and my parents reluctantly complied. It was so thrilling to hold that plastic white box with the black daisy in the middle and the big mirror in the lid and to be able, at last, to experiment endlessly with the eye-shadows, the pearly face-lighter, the Starkers foundation (“Forget about colouring, go for shaping” said the instructions, excitingly).I already had her white zip-front PVC mac with a black collar and cuffs, bought from Fenwick or Selfridges, slightly too long but easy to chop off at the hem, and, like Read more ...
aleks.sierz
I’ve lived in Brixton, south London, for about 40 years now, so any play that looks at the gentrification of the area is, for me, definitely a must. Like many other places in the metropolis, the nature of the urban landscape has changed both due to gradual factors — such as migration — and spectacular events — like the Brixton riots of 1981 and 1985. Archie Maddocks’s new play, A Place for We, which is produced by Talawa Theatre Company and the Park Theatre, comes to the stage after being shortlisted for, although not winning, the Bruntwood Prize and the Alfred Fagon Award. Its cast is led by Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Single-composer programmes can be a bit dicey and there was a bit of trepidation approaching this one as Steve Reich is not a composer of massive range: he has been diligently tilling the same patch of soil since the 1970s. But alongside some Reich-being-Reich was a fascinating UK premiere that visits new territory and the revival of an often-overlooked masterpiece from his imperial phase.The Colin Currie Group has had a long association with Reich (pictured below), including commissioning two of Tuesday night’s four pieces. It is at heart a percussion ensemble, expanded here by the addition Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Rufus Wainwright believes opera to be “the greatest art form that has ever existed on the planet” and of course he’s written an opera himself – Prima Donna, which has been described as “the work of a man who loves opera and the sensations it delivers, without understanding how it is paced, or how it generates dramatic tension”.Maybe so, but Wainwright certainly knows how to pace a concert, and the performance he gives borders on the operatic, pushing his voice to highs and lows that seem sometimes to defy the odds. And he knows how to be on stage, using his body to dramatic effect, most Read more ...
David Nice
Neo-Nazis held a Trafalgar Square rally under the banner "Free Britain from Jewish Control" in the year of my birth; I had no idea until I watched Ridley Road. Most of us know about the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, but, until now, next to nothing about the Jewish resistance against fascist Colin Jordan and his gang of thugs, some of them cynically recruited from borstals and children’s homes, 17 years after the end of the Second World War.Sarah Solemani's adaptation of Jo Bloom’s novel plays with the chronology a bit – arsonists did kill a boy in a Jewish theological college, but after Read more ...