Akinola Davies Jr.’s semi-autobiographical feature debut plunges two young country brothers into Nineties Lagos’s joyous energy and febrile politics, as they seize a unique chance to bond with their loving but largely absent dad. Often shot at the low angles of a child’s worldview and in intimate close-ups only dimly apprehending the full picture, it is a requiem for both Nigerian hope as the 1993 election is stolen and fleeting paternal ties, and a fervent celebration of Lagos and fatherhood.We first meet 11-year-old Remi (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo) playing with 8-year-old Aki (real brother Read more ...

In November 1975, UK music weekly New Musical Express included an article by Charles Shaar Murray titled “Are You Alive To The Jive Of The Sound Of '75.” Recently in New York, he was revealing what he had discovered.The bands looked at – and he saw most saw live – in his prescient round-up were Blondie, The Heartbreakers – “the first N.Y. punk supergroup” – a “new-look” New York Dolls, The Ramones, The Shirts, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Television and Tuff Darts. Image Central to what he covered in this remarkable role call was a venue: the Read more ...

I still retain a vivid memory of a concert in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in December 2013 at which Hungarian composer György Kurtág and his wife Márta sat at an upright piano with their backs to the audience and played excerpts from his Játékok collection of progressive teaching pieces, interspersed with arrangements of Bach chorale preludes for piano duet (Pictured below). The audience might have been eavesdropping on an afternoon of private music-making. But what in fact took place was the distillation of the essence of music – its directness and detached spirituality – into a Read more ...

Jonathan Lynn has resurrected the two characters he and the late Antony Jay created in the 1970s, billing his new play the “final chapter of Yes, Minister”. It’s an amiable workout for the former political allies, both a boost to their old conniving skills and a crash course in modern life. And some of its teeth still bite.We meet Jim Hacker, now over 80 but once the PM, in the handsome but untidy Georgian master’s lodge of the Oxford college named after him, built on the funding he secured from a Russian oligarch. Griff Rhys Jones plays him with a little too much gurning and an over-emphatic Read more ...

Phyllida Lloyd’s production of Peter Grimes, first seen 20 years ago, is still one of the jewels in Opera North’s treasury. It was revived in 2013 for their “Festival of Britten”, and now is back with a fresh top music team and a cast of (mainly) young British singers, several in company debuts, which bodes extremely well for them and for us. Chief of this new generation is John Findon in the title role. I admired Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts’ quality as Grimes in the original and the first revival, but Findon’s performance equals and in some respects excels it.The revival is co-directed by Read more ...

Visual artists gave up on titles long ago, resorting to neutral labels such as Untitled. Choreographers still feel bound to tag their works descriptively, which can be a challenge if the dance is about everything or nothing. The Irish director-choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan found a neat solution in MÁM , the 80-minute piece he made when he first arrived in West Kerry in 2019, choosing an Irish word that means so many things, and so many different things, that as a title it can only suggest everything and nothing all at once. A mountain pass, a burden or obligation, a handful of Read more ...

In 2007, Pina Bausch was preparing her company’s latest “city piece”, this one based on a visit to Kolkotta. But she was also brewing up something special, a work for six of her long-serving women dancers, created separately from the city piece but out of the same set of questions.Even if Bausch hadn’t somehow sensed the need to do something for her female troupers while she could (she died suddenly in 2009), the piece is inherently like a memorial, a call for the dancers to be remembered. Indeed, they insist on it. These are regular self-exposers, anyway – a line of beauty queen contestants Read more ...

“Lincoln, you have not been a Monday night crowd, they can be a bit funny,“ says Suede frontman Brett Anderson just before then band exit the stage for the final time. “You’re more than just watchers, you got involved.”It’s doubly true. For multiple obvious reasons, Monday can be an underwhelming gig experience for both bands and audiences (I’ve come to almost resent it when bands I like hit town that day). But within this giant, red brick, converted 19th century steam engine shed, the capacity 1500 crowd respond fervently from the very start.It says something about Suede’s partial rejection Read more ...

We are bowled over! We knew that theartsdesk.com had plenty of supporters out there – we’ve always had a loyal readership of arts lovers and professionals alike – but the response to our appeal to help us relaunch and reboot has been something else.Our fundraiser is rolling towards hitting the halfway mark, and it’s already raised enough to repair our ageing site and ensure its survival. But just as important to all of us have been the messages of love and support from our readership. It’s not just the morale boost of being praised either – though let’s be honest, the warm glow is pretty Read more ...

Some exhibitions make you feel inspired, others perplexed. Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting at the National Portrait Gallery left me feeling battered and bruised –as if I’d been hit by a wrecking ball.The show doesn’t start out that way. In the early 1940s, Freud spent several years perfecting his drawing technique. At first, he used a mapping pen, which produces clear, sharp lines perfect for detailed observation.In a luminous self-portrait from 1947 intended as a book illustration, he uses a variety of marks to create the impression of a three-dimensional head. A shock of wiry hair Read more ...

“Fuck Thatcher, fuck neoliberalism.” After these words from the stage, an audience response. “Fuck Thatcher” echoes the approving shout from the darkness.The performer expressing his views is the Sheffield-based folk-rooted stylist Jim Ghedi. What he’s said has not come out of the blue. There is context. He is introducing “Ah Cud Hew,” a song included on his In the Furrows of Common Place album. He learnt it from Ed Pickford, a County Durham singer and songwriter with a family background in coal mining. The song – “I could hew” – is about the decimation of the coal industry during the Read more ...

Mahagonny, the spider-web city sucking in men (and they are, even in this 2026 take, mostly men) with cash to burn, is the terminus of human greed and stupidity. It takes the first joint project between Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, the perfect Mahagonny-Songspiel of 1927, only 20 minutes to get to the end, brushing the gloom aside with a shrug. The big operatic version, work on which was interrupted by their greatest hit, The Threepenny Opera, spins it out for oh so much longer, and needs a tight, springy production and conducting as well as a tireless heroic tenor as rebel protagonist Read more ...