London
Liz Thomson
Mary Chapin Carpenter lives these days in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where she sits at the kitchen table in her farmhouse and writes songs. “I have a couple of cats and dogs and I’m the hermit who lives down the road,” she explained to a capacity audience at the Barbican as she returned alone, just her and a guitar, for a final encore of “I Have a Need for Solitude”.Her songs – wonderful narratives, intimate, minutely observed – suggest a self-contained woman in touch with both her emotions and the world. Her voice – warm, low, a hint of vibrato, very distinctive – draws you in, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels have been admired for their prose style, scathing wit and pitiless depiction of a rotting aristocracy. Benedict Cumberbatch claims that Hamlet and Melrose were the two roles he was desperate to play, and now (via his own production company SunnyMarch) his portrayal of Melrose lands on Sky Atlantic.Each of the five-part series will dramatise one of St Aubyn’s books. This opener, Bad News (actually the second book in the series) found our drug-addled, psychologically shattered and disdainfully posh anti-hero taking a trip to New York to bring back the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I’m not sure what exactly this event was – orchestral concert, electronic dance music gig or multimedia extravaganza – but however you define it, I loved every mad minute. Anna Meredith (b 1978) is one of the most successful contemporary classical composers of her generation but revels in crossing genre divides, and this event delighted in smashing boundaries with breathtaking confidence.Meredith, whose starry classical CV includes pieces in the 2008 Last Night of the Proms and the recently announced First Night of the 2018 Proms, has a taste for the unusual or technically challenging, not Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Back in the early Sixties Lucian Freud was living in Clarendon Crescent, a condemned row of houses in Paddington which were gradually being demolished around him. The neighbourhood was uncompromisingly working class and to his glee his neighbours included characters from the seamier side of the criminal world. It was around the time of his fortieth birthday when the wrecking balls drew near and, Bentley-owning but broke and generally neglected by the art world, his work began to develop into what is now known as late Freud. In relative obscurity eking out extravagance from precarity and Read more ...
Katherine Waters
When doctors told Doreen Lawrence her son had died she thought, "That’s not true." Spending time with his body in the hospital, aside from a cut on his cheek, it seemed to her he was sleeping. The death of a child will always be strange, and in the aftermath Neville, his father and her husband, even wondered if he might have been struck by the Biblical curse of the loss of his first-born.Quarter of a century after Stephen Lawrence was killed in an unprovoked racist attack on Well Hall Road in Eltham, a pall of unreality still hangs over his murder. Doreen and Neville’s pain remains raw and Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Chicago has been on, in one form or another, for a very long time. The original Broadway production in the Seventies ran for 936 performances; the 1997 London revival was the longest-running American musical in West End history; and it feels like Cuba Gooding Jr’s face has been grinning out from escalator video screens on the tube for an age. This revival at the Phoenix Theatre is uneven, but eventually finds its groove and packs a real punch of a finale.The story, as usual with this kind of musical, is somewhat thin: wannabe vaudeville star Roxie Hart (Sarah Soetart) shoots her lover dead Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fox is very keen to stress that Deep State is the first original production by its Europe & Africa division, the most obvious sign of which is that none of it was shot in New York or LA. But it has clearly been designed as a sleek international thriller with bags of export potential (it’s already being sold in the US and Europe, and series two is in the works), a kind of Jason Bourne-meets-The Night Manager.It may not be the most original show to have walked the face of the earth, but it packs a heavyweight cast and oozes cinematic gravitas with its luxurious photography and atmospheric Read more ...
Michael Rakowitz: The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, Fourth Plinth review - London's new guardian
Katherine Waters
Fifteen years ago on a cold grey Saturday in mid-February, Trafalgar Square was filled with people marching to Hyde Park in opposition to the proposed invasion of Iraq. A million people gathered in London. Three times that number turned out in Rome. That day, across Europe and the rest of the world, between six to eleven million people participated in the largest coordinated anti-war rally in history. The scale of the movement was unprecedented. Protest globalised. Just over a month later air strikes took out Iraqi observation posts and troops crossed over the borders. The invasion of Iraq Read more ...
Ruby Hughes
Who was Giulia Frasi? This is so often the response I get when I mention the name of this Italian singer who came to London and became Handel’s last prima donna during the final decade of his life and, consequently, the supreme soprano of English music in the mid-18th century. Over the last five years or so, as I explored the music she inspired and performed, Frasi has become my own muse in a way. Music of the Baroque defines where my musical roots lie and has always been central to my repertoire. Some of my happiest memories are of performing music from this era.It was when I was researching Read more ...
graham.rickson
Lūcija Garūta: Music for Piano Reinis Zariņš (piano), Liepāja Symphony Orchestra/Atvars Lakstīgala (LMIC/SKANI)The Latvian composer Lūcija Garūta (1902-1977) reached maturity in the early days of Latvian independence, a supremely talented pianist, composer and polymath. Garūta was among the first Latvian women to drive a car, besides sailing a private yacht and pursuing an interest in science. She travelled to Paris and studied, briefly, with Alfred Cortot and Paul Dukas, identifying with Latvia’s musical “new romanticism”, a movement which sought to look forward rather than idealise Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
One year to Brexit, a seemingly endless winter chill and Londoners need soul food, badly. I prescribe an evening of total immersion in The Marriage of Figaro. ENO’s second revival of Fiona Shaw’s sassy, probing production (with revival director Peter Relton) is splendidly cast, warmly performed and chock-full of delights.It’s finely paced, varied, and sound of dramatic judgment, as well as full of detail – the character vignettes in the chorus are a treat. The palace’s many walls in Peter McKintosh’s set often whirl (we’ve got a revolve and we’re gonna use it!), yet never too much. It’s fresh Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s quite bold to create a multiracial comedy set in Hackney in the early Eighties, a not especially amusing period of riots, the Falklands War and Thatcherism. Happily, Hackney boy Idris Elba has managed it with a wry eye and a light comic touch.This Hackney isn’t the lethal drug-saturated combat zone portrayed in Top Boy, but an altogether more genial place where black, white and Asian residents rub along fairly comfortably, and manage to find ways to cope with non-PC attitudes. “We were thicker-skinned back then,” Elba has commented.Naturally, it’s Elba’s character Walter Easmon who’s at Read more ...