If it were true, as Timothée Chalamet has said, that ballet as an art form has become a museum, the job of running a national ballet company would be easy. Ballet never ceases to evolve, and to prove the point I’d be happy to offer the actor my plus-one on any night of his choosing, if only he’d return my calls.English National Ballet has been as front-footed as any in the business of supporting new work, new talents, new directions. This takes an appetite for risk and above all money. After seeing the company’s latest double bill, which included a world premiere by an untried choreographer, Read more ...

Tom Misch’s Full Circle is an easy, pleasant listen, but it tends to drift by without leaving much of a lasting impression. He leans into a softer, more reflective sound throughout, which suits his style, though it also makes the album feel a little too safe and one-paced.Tracks like “Red Moon” and “Slow Tonight” highlight what works best. “Slow Tonight” carries a relaxed, unhurried groove, with clean guitar lines and carefully layered instrumentation. The production across the album is consistently strong, with everything sounding polished and well-balanced. It is smooth and cohesive, and Read more ...

Years have passed since the early days of Gorillaz, when the real musicians behind the cartoon band remained hidden from view onstage. Yet some things never change, and while there was plenty of cheering for the arrival of Damon Albarn onstage, it was dwarfed by the roars for the first appearances of 2-D, Murdock, Russel and Noodle on giant video screens overlooking the stage.Those cheers came from a wildly diverse crowd, from kids with their parents to Britpop stalwarts who have presumably followed Albarn ever since. Perhaps some of the younger fans were drawn by the anime style of the band Read more ...

Tamerlano, tyrannical Emperor of the Tartars, is a burger-munching boor with a golf-habit, a bulbous belly and a crashing disdain for other people’s sensitivities. In Orpha Phelan’s dynamic, gleefully idiosyncratic production of Handel’s 1724 opera, Trump’s shadow looms large, as Tamerlano tries to force Bajazet, Emperor of the Turks, to haggle for his freedom by offering up his daughter, Asteria, for Tamerlano’s sexual delight.The opera is one of many that Handel wrote as part of London’s craze for the Italian opera seria form – which featured multiple arias for its virtuoso singers – and Read more ...

Playwright David Hare is on a West End roll. Not only is his new play, Grace Pervades, about super thespians Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, making its way from Bath’s Theatre Royal to the Theatre Royal Haymarket next month, but his 1976 play with songs, Teeth ’N’ Smiles, now arrives at the Duke of York’s. Both are star-laden accounts of performance, with Ralph Fiennes and Miranda Raison as the Victorians, and Rebecca Lucy Taylor as Maggie the 1970s rocker. Also known as Self Esteem, she’s an Ivor-Novello Award winner last seen as Sally Bowles in Cabaret a couple of years ago. She also Read more ...

The Channel 5 drama Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards does what it says on the tin. We watch the fêted newsreader from initial online contact with a 17-year-old from Cardiff - called “Ryan Davies“ here - to his arrest three years later, his sense of omnipotence shattered. Edwards’s family are noises off, and his work is represented by one BBC producer; only Ryan’s life is explored in any depth.This partial view is understandable given that Mark Burt’s screenplay is based on exclusive chats with the real Ryan, his family and friends, but not on material provided by Edwards and his family. ( Read more ...

Are Seán O'Casey's Dublin plays good for theatre today, or just for the history of Irish drama? My limited recent experience makes it hard to be sure: Juno and the Paycock in London was a liberty-taking mess, and when everyone in a large cast needs to be top-notch - as they are, for instance, in the new production of Gorky's Summerfolk at the National Theatre - any weak performances in The Plough and the Stars scotch O'Casey's experimental ambition as he drops characters for whole acts, introduces others and takes us in unexpected directions, from late 1915 to the Easter Uprising of 1916. Read more ...

Phil Ellis has been plying his trade for a while and is an established performer at the Edinburgh Fringe, where he has won awards – including the Edinburgh Comedy Award Panel Prize in 2014. And now happily he has come to a wider audience through his appearance on series 20 of Taskmaster.He makes a wry reference to the Channel 4 show during his mock bigging-up introduction by DJ sidekick (played by comic Tom Short) – who points out “loser” Ellis didn’t win. It’s typical of the self-mockery in Bath Mat, his touring show which I saw at the Leicester Square Theatre, in which Ellis paints a Read more ...

Rory Carroll’s previous book, Killing Thatcher, was terrific, and widely praised. It followed the IRA plot to murder the Prime Minister in 1984 and the subsequent police manhunt, telling the story with a journalistic degree of research and a novelistic eye for pacing and drama. For his follow-up Carroll’s gone back further into history to tell the story of the inciting event that ultimately led, along a winding path, to the Brighton bombing: the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. A Rebel and a Traitor: A Fugitive, the Manhunt and the Birth of the IRA is, in a different way, as gripping as its Read more ...

The title is, of course, typically British understatement. This Music May Contain Hope has not just irresistible confidence and optimism but also real originality about it. All the way from a spoken film noir-ish intro, right through to the final track, in which everyone, yes everyone involved in the album is thanked, including every single member of the London Symphony Orchestra, with all of its section members individually named from front to back.Raye’s moment has definitely arrived, and the future looks very bright indeed. “Where is My Husband?”, her co-write with Mike Sabath, first Read more ...

Nowhere welcomes Ukrainians (and Palestinians too, for that matter) more warmly than Ireland, and especially Dublin. A standing ovation twice over was guaranteed, and well deserved after their perfect performance of Beethoven's Third, "Eroica" Symphony. Otherwise, no special case needed to be made for these distinguished visitors beyond the perception and beauty of their playing under no-nonsense Artistic Director and Chief Conductor Volodymyr Sirenko.Robert Beale reviewed their programme culminating in Beethoven's Seventh in Manchester. Here the two Delius nature-pictures they so cannily Read more ...

Harry Fehr’s directorial take on The Cunning Little Vixen is a sound one: keep it simple. Together with set and costume designer Nicky Shaw (with whom he worked on a memorable Buxton International Festival production of La Sonnambula in 2023), lighting designer Mark Jonathan and movement director Ewan Jones, he brings Janáček’s everyday story of country life to the stage with a clarity and innocence that reflect the story’s origins as a newspaper cartoon strip.Of course, as with all good strips, the implications are what really counts: the animals, in the tale of a half-domesticated vixen who Read more ...