London
Laura de Lisle
A lot’s changed since Kiln Theatre boss Indhu Rubasingham directed The Invisible Hand’s first UK outing in 2016, not least the theatre’s name (it was known as the Tricycle back then). But in Rubasingham’s capable hands, American Ayad Akhtar’s taut exploration of greed and blame still hits like a punch to the chest, ratcheting up the tension over two hours to an almost unbearable level.The premise is relatively simple. American banker Nick Bright (Daniel Lapaine, pictured below) has been kidnapped by accident – the unnamed organisation keeping him prisoner in rural Pakistan wanted his boss Read more ...
graham.rickson
The first 10 minutes of West 11 are arresting, with a sweeping crane shot over an ungentrified West London and a zoom in through an attic bedsit window. The credits reveal that the screenplay is by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, from a once-influential novel by Laura Del-Rivo. There’s a catchy, moody score by the great Stanley Black. The titles unfold over location footage that brilliantly establishes a sense of time and place; much of the film looks and feels so authentic.This was the young Michael Winner’s breakthrough feature, released in 1963, and this disc’s bonus interview with film Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
During early lockdown in 2020 Howard Goodall published an article pondering the role of the composer in a pandemic. His answer was that music has throughout history been successful at memorialising people and events, and that it could do so again. On the back of the article, the London Symphony Chorus invited Goodall to create such a piece for the care and health workers who had lost their lives to Covid. The first version of Never to Forget was released online in July 2020, the ‘virtual’ LSC singing the names of the then 122 workers who had died. A year later the piece has been expanded – Read more ...
joe.muggs
Emma-Jean Thackray is not lacking in audaciousness. This is, after all, a white woman from Leeds barely into her thirties, raised on bassline house and indie rock, making music whose most obvious comparisons are with some of the most revered (in the most literal sense) black musicians in modern history: Fela Kuti, Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Stevie Wonder, J Dilla and more. And what’s more, she suggests this album will “simulate a life-changing psychedelic experience, an hour where we see behind the curtain to a hidden dimension”, packs it full of full-bore, third-eye-open omnitheistic Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A welcome West End upgrade is the order of the day at J'Ouvert, the debut play from Yasmin Joseph whose 2019 premiere at South London's Theatre 503 additionally marked the directing debut of the actress Rebekah Murrell. And now here it is, all but prompting spontaneous dance breaks throughout the (socially distanced) Harold Pinter Theatre as the second in the producer Sonia Friedman's audacious RE:EMERGE series, offering highly visible platforms to emerging playwrights: ANNA X completes the trio of commercial premieres next month. For now, J'Ouvert has the buoyant effect prompted by the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
It is an index of the ambition of some venues that they are not only reopening their doors, but also staging plays that remind us of the talents of our best writers and actors. Although the stage monologue has recently been almost as infectious as the Delta variant, and as tiresome, the Lyric Hammersmith offers three for the price of one in its reopening programme. Set in West London, this triple bill of monologues examines the legacy of Empire, the tensions of racism and the pleasures, and pains, of parenthood. Although each playlet is distinct, somehow, lurking underneath the surface, or Read more ...
Sarah Kent
A fun film about finance – really? From the very first frame I was hooked on this can-do documentary; it’s that good. A young family – parents, Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell, two kids and two dogs – gather at the front door of their Victorian terraced house in Walthamstow and grin sheepishly to camera. “This is what acting is”, Dan tells his daughter Esme, “it’s cold, it’s embarrassing… Hello, we’re the Edelstyn family.”Esme might not get the hang of it, but her parents are naturals. Wearing a cricket jumper and deerstalker hat, Dan looks like an ad for the local charity shop. He’s a Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This blistering, fearless play about an 18-year-old black entrepreneur on the King’s Road raises a myriad of uncomfortable questions that resonate profoundly with the Black Lives Matter debate. It’s just one remarkable aspect of The Death of a Black Man that it was written 46 years ago, and another that such a radical work was first staged not at the Royal Court but at the Hampstead Theatre, to which it now makes its return.The playwright Alfred Fagon is currently best known for the award for black writers which bears his name: past winners include Roy Williams and Michaela Coel. Fagon died Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
In the final concert marking the Wigmore Hall’s 120-year anniversary, soprano Gweneth Ann Rand and pianist Simon Lepper gave a programme of songs curated by Rand, titled "An Imperfect Tapestry". Described by Rand as "a personal reflection of black voices and muses, stretching back in time to the Black Venus, who inspired the poetry of Baudelaire", the programme features traditional works made famous by singers such as Nina Simone and Billie Holliday, as well as newer songs by contemporary composers Errolyn Wallen, Adolphus Hailstork and Harry Server. Opening with the traditional spiritual “ Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When Wolf Alice appeared a decade ago, you’d have to have been a soothsayer of Merlin-like proportions to predict the career trajectory they’ve had since. Certainly, prior to their debut album, this writer took them for just another female-fronted London indie guitar band, following the same old formula. Instead, they blossomed into imaginative alt-rock/pop ones-to-watch who can sell out Alexandra Palace, a Mercury Music Prize under their belt, now on the verge of big-festival-headlining proper fame.They deserve it. It’s an overused word (by music journalists, at least) but eclecticism is Read more ...
joe.muggs
Greentea Peng is a south Londoner, heavily tattooed, heavily spiritual, heavily anti-establishment, and very, very heavily into basslines. She cuts a singular figure in many ways, but her rebel dub soul style also makes her a particularly British archetype: the next iteration in a lineage starting with Poly Styrene and Ari Up, and running through Neneh Cherry, Tricky and MIA. (Yes, OK, Ari Up was German and MIA is Sri Lankan, but their sound and their cultural fusions could only have happened on this island.) Like each of those artists, she is unmistakeable in sound. One of the most Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Seventeen years after Ben Whishaw shot to attention playing Hamlet, this terrific actor is again playing someone "mad-north-northwest". Marking TV director Aneil Karia's feature film debut, Surge casts Whishaw as a jittery wreck called Joseph, whose psychic decline is tracked across 100 largely wordless minutes that nonetheless communicate a mounting dread. Possessed of a manic laugh that puts one in mind of Joaquin Phoenix's Joker, Joseph exists at sorrowful odds with himself, and Whishaw pulls you toward the demons of a man from whom you'd distance yourself in real life. When first Read more ...