London
Gary Naylor
The phenomenal global success of Six began when two young writers decided to give voices to the wives of a powerful man, bringing them out of their silent tombs and energising them and, by extension, doing the same for the women of today. Its extraordinary popularity is a siren call to find forgotten women and reclaim their personalities, to give a theatrical second life to those to whom the historical record has denied a first. Indeed, Oh! Mary, also about President Lincoln's wife, is proving that point in New York now. Something of that desire lies behind painter, writer, playwright, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In a world tainted with racism and homophobia, the Bush Theatre is something of a refuge from prejudice. As one of the most queer friendly venues in London, it’s no surprise that this theatre is now staging babirye bukilwa’s … Blackbird Hour, a play which explores the experiences of a black queer woman who finds herself on the edge.This is the playwright’s first play, and it was shortlisted for a number of prestigious prizes in 2019 and 2020, so its staging is long overdue. However, perhaps the fact that it’s a tough watch has something to do with this delay. With a running time of about 85 Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If you saw Upstart Crow on television or on stage in the West End, you’ll know the schtick of Sheldon Epps’ dazzling show Play On! Take a Shakespearean play’s underlying plot and characters and relocate them for wit and giggles. “Make it a musical“, you say? Okay, but who’s going to do the score, who’s going to dare to follow in the footsteps of Lenny and Steve, of Cole, of Elton (okay that one came a bit later)? “Duke Ellington!” Right. You’ve sold it.And away we go, the opener suggesting Twelfth Night on 42nd Street as a kid full of moxie and talent pitches up at The Cotton Club in the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In a dingy room with dilapidated furniture on a dismal Sunday evening, two detectives prepare for an interview. The old hand walks out, with just a little too much flattery hanging in the air, leaving the interrogation in the hands of the up-and-coming thruster, a young woman investigating the disappearance of a young woman. Alone, with just a camera for company (we get the video feed also from hidden cameras too) she awaits the suspect for the showdown.A hit at Edinburgh and now expanded to a tense 70 minutes three-hander, Jamie Armitage’s first play as writer as well as director is a wordy Read more ...
Gary Naylor
As something of an immigrant to the capital myself in the long hot summer of 1984, I gobbled up Absolute Beginners, Colin MacInnes’s novel of an outsider embracing the temptations and dangers of London.Written a couple of years earlier and set a couple of miles east, Sam Selvon’s seminal book, The Lonely Londoners, focuses more specifically on Caribbean immigrants’ experience of a metropolis emerging from post-war austerity, of the cold, of the racism, of the possibilities always just out of reach.Roy Williams’ adaptation of Selvon’s dazzling narrative was a big hit at the intimate Jermyn Read more ...
joe.muggs
Of the big UK indie bands of the 00s wave, Bloc Party were always the most austerely art-rockish. Where Arctic Monkeys, Klaxons, Franz Ferdinand all to some degree or other had a dose of the vaudevillian and a bit of party “woohoo!”, BP adhered way more to the seriousness, alienation and introspection of their post-punk inspirations.This certainly didn’t do them any harm in the first instance – they were, frankly, huge – but maybe stopped them having quite so much crossover appeal, and you’re less likely to hear them now on Noughties nostalgia shows on mainstream radio and suchlike.It did, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
This Celine Dion jukebox musical has been a big hit in New York, but crossing The Atlantic can be perilous for any production, so, docked now at the Criterion Theatre, does it sink or float?We open on a framing device, with a group of tourists being shown round a Titanic museum (there’s a whole industry built up around its legend). Any interest/concern that we’re in for a probing analysis of the ethics of monetising the tragic deaths of over 1500 souls due to, at the very least, some element of corporate negligence, is dispelled by a guide who is just aching to go full jazz hands and sing and Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I thought I might never be able to say it’s been a great year for women artists, so forgive me for focusing solely on them.Things were kickstarted with a retrospective of Barbara Kruger (Serpentine Gallery) who uses words and images to illuminate the way language is (mis)used to cajole, bully, manipulate and lie. Having explored similar territory for 50 some years, you’d have thought the American artist would have run out of ideas. Not a bit of it. Dominating the central space was a huge screen showing Untitled (No Comment) (main picture) which explores the Orwellian soup of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
A suitable place to find yourself out for the winter solstice, buttoning up for the longest night of the year, was at the Cadogan Hall off Sloane Square, a former place of worship marking its 20th year as a concert hall.The Unthanks, too, are approaching their 20th anniversary, and their winter tour of 2024 draws from their magical new album, In Winter, a double set that has drawn comparison to that ultimate winter album in British folk music – The Waterson’s Frost & Fire.For their celebration of the season, and of its spirits, they draw on big songs such as The Coventry Carol and The Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The man whose name sounds like a major aviation accident, private detective Cormoran Strike, is back, with his sidekick Robin, for more of the lobster quadrille that is their relationship.This sixth series still uses those classy credits – footage of the leads in faded 1970s browns, with a typeface straight out of movies of that era and overlaid with Beth Rowley’s intense lyrics “You and me, me and you… I’ll walk beside you.” What follows is all too familiar as well: a dark new case that’s long-windedly puzzling and taxing. Ditto the pair’s continuing inability to declare the deep Read more ...
aleks.sierz
I live in Brixton, south London. To get to the tube, I have to cross Windrush Square. Since 2021, I go past the Cherry Groce memorial, which honours the woman who was wrongfully shot by the Met in 1985, an event which sparked the riots I remember so well from 40 years ago. Amazingly enough, I have now seen her sister, Sutara Gayle AKA Lorna Gee, performing a gig theatre piece on the main stage at the Royal Court.The Legends of Them is an autobiographical memory play during the course of which young Lorna grows into Sutara Gayle, told in fragmentary flashbacks which are vivid enough to be Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Those with treasured battered copies of Noel Streatfield’s 1936 story of three young adopted sisters in pre-war London may have thrilled to the idea of a version coming to the National Theatre. But be warned: jolly though it is, it’s not the story of stagestruck pre-war Londoners you know.The bare bones of the book are still visible. Three little babies, brought to London from various points of the globe by a fossil-collecting explorer, Great Uncle Matthew (aka Gum), are left with his late niece’s orphaned daughter, Sylvia, and her nurse, Nana. The youngest, Posy, whose mother had been a Read more ...