London
Bernard Hughes
Until 2022, the lovely 18th century church of St Mary-le-Strand was a traffic island, ignored and unloved and rarely visited. Then came the pedestrianisation of the section of the Strand outside Somerset House, transforming the area from somewhere polluted and dangerous, to a walkable piazza, and transforming the church into what is now dubbed “The Jewel in the Strand”. In recent times its musical offering has been similarly revived, both liturgically (there is now a regular Choral Evensong) and as a concert venue, under the auspices of Warren Mailley-Smith, as both impresario and pianist. Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Among the many things that make the folk community such a warm and welcoming “family” is that you know which side you’re all on, to paraphrase the title of the song written by Florence Reece, wife of a United Mineworkers official during the bitter struggle known as “the Harlan County War”, almost a century ago. Collected by Pete Seeger and sung by the Almanac Singers, it is kept alive by Billy Bragg any many others.I doubt it’s in the repertoire of Le Vent du Nord though there’s surely a French-Canadian equivalent, but the same feeling of camaraderie and solidarity prevailed at Cecil Sharp Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The latest true-crime adaptation about a murderous man and his female victims turns its star into a bloody mess on a hospital table, her vital signs flatlining. And that’s just halfway through, with two episodes to go. At least the second half of Until I Kill You offers less gruesome generic territory (spoilers ahead): the bungled police investigation of the assault; the sympathetic WPC assigned to the surviving woman, Delia Balmer (Anna Maxwell Martin, pictured below, left); the dangerously clumsy twists and turns of the justice system; the eventual resolution of this sorry saga. But Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
In Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming Pool Library (1988), set during the summer of 1983, the young gay narrator, William Beckwith, lives in Holland Park. That same year and location furnish the setting of the first part of Hollinghurst’s third novel, his masterpiece, The Line of Beauty (2004), in which the young gay hero, Nick Guest, becomes a lodger – a guest – in the house of a recently elected Tory MP, Gerald Fedden, whose son Toby he’d fancied at Oxford.Nick loses his virginity with a young black man called Leo in the bushes of a communal garden behind the Feddens’ house, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Blitz, set on a vast CGI canvas in September 1941, is an improbable boy’s adventure tale that depicts the misery and terror that was inflicted on East Londoners by Germany’s eight-month bombardment. The enemy in the movie is not airborne, however. Writer-director Steve McQueen made it to educate audiences about contemporaneous white racism in Britain – proof that not all the British pulled together during the time of total war.It's a timely film given the race riots and hate crimes stoked by far-right agitators this summer – when would it not be timely? It gets its vital message across, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Hanif Kureishi’s 1990 novel The Buddha of Suburbia begins like this: “My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost”. Almost. Yes, that's good. We are in 1970s south-east London, and this immediately introduces, despite its tentative tone, the protagonist as a young man trying to define his identity.Like the original book, this stage adaptation — by director Emma Rice with help from Kureishi — explores the tensions between East and West, Buddhism and Islam, suburb and city, glam rock and punk, gay and straight, with some of the characters adopting fake identities as well Read more ...
How To Survive Your Mother, King's Head Theatre review - mummy issues drive autobiographical dramedy
Gary Naylor
It is unsurprising to learn in the post-show Q&A that each audience receives Jonathan Maitland’s new play based on his 2006 memoir differently. My house laughed a lot (me especially) but some see the tragic overwhelming the comic, and the laughs dry up. When it comes to humour, as is the case with mothers, it’s each to their own.It’s an unusual production right from the off when the playwright, who is also a main character, is also acting himself too – but not entirely, as there’s a pre-teen and post-teen version of him too, played by different actors. Got all that? When you add his Read more ...
Jim Bob
For a few months a couple of years ago, when you googled the name Jim Bob, although you’d get a lot of information about me, Jim Bob, the lead singer from 1990s UK indie punk heroes Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine, the main image would be a picture of Donald Trump. I never fully understood why. I think it had something to do with the name "Jim Bob" being a thesaurus entry for "redneck".Anyway, here’s a chapter from my new book Where Songs Come From – The Lyrics and Origin Stories of 150 Solo and Carter USM Songs. It’s my first ever book of lyrics. I like to think of it as a memoir or Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
What’s it like to be in the middle of an orchestra, hugger-mugger with the violas, looking directly over the flautist’s shoulder? Last night’s immersive concert by Sinfonia Smith Square gave the us the chance to find out, the players spread around Smith Square Hall on podiums, with the audience encouraged to wander round as the performance unfolded. It was at once a revealing but also somewhat frustrating experience.The hour-long programme explored the plight of the UK’s temperate rainforest. You may not (I didn’t) realise the UK had any temperate rainforest, but it does – and centuries ago Read more ...
Saskia Baron
One of the many pleasures of the London Film Festival is the chance to see high-quality documentaries on the big screen. If lucky, these films might get a brief, specialist cinema release, but all too often non-fiction features are destined for TV. Seeing them projected full-size in the dark with a live audience sharing the experience is a far better way of gauging their impact than watching them alone in a living room. Victoria Mapplebeck’s Motherboard (pictured above) got the warmest reception: its sold-out screenings were greeted with laughter and a standing ovation. It’s a Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The misadventures and misbehaviours of the English upper-middle class is catnip for TV executives. All those posh types on which us hoi polloi can sit in delicious self-righteous judgement, as we marvel at their cut glass accents, well-tailored clothes and ostentatious wealth. Meanwhile their worlds are always collapsing due to villainy, venality or misconceived virtue. Lovely stuff! While such tales are seldom far from a screen, they are often far from a stage, the challenge of scaling down just too intimidating for most adaptors. Not so Shaun McKenna and Lion Couglan who took on the Read more ...
mark.kidel
Purveyors of extraordinary energy and euphoria, Underworld never miss a beat. The new album – 30 years on from their debut, and their exposure in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting – once again features music that will always be better live, in the midst of a bouncing throng, ablaze with smiles of joy, than on the best stereo at home, or state-of-the-heart cordless headphones.Karl Hyde and Rick Smith recommend that listeners avoid shuffle mode, as this new offering is programmed as a sequence, raising a storm, driven by the electronic bass drum, pulsating synths and Underworld’s trademark Read more ...