CMAT knows how to make an entrance. The opening of this show, in common with the rest of her tour, featured her band assembling onstage before a spotlight was suddenly shone on the back of the room – and there was Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, in a vivid green outfit and snazzy spectacles, standing on a raised section usually home to seats.It was a fitting entrance that could have nestled on the silver screen alongside the varied tunes from films played over the PA before the gig started. Thompson is an undoubted star these days, a charismatic and energetic mega watt performer. This gig, part of Read more ...

It’s that time of year again. The 2026 Formula 1 season kicks off in Melbourne this coming Sunday, and as night follows day, here’s the latest series of Drive to Survive to pump up the global appetite for ridiculously fast cars, backstage dramas, grumpy team bosses and nakedly ambitious drivers.This is also the last time we’ll see the “old” generation of cars before they’re replaced by this year’s models, powered by ultra-evolved, even more eco-friendly hybrid engines. Max Verstappen, for one, doesn’t like them much.Drive to Survive has been instrumental in turning F1 into a vast global Read more ...

Birgitta Trotzig’s Queen is a strikingly poetic, persistently grim semi-fairy tale set at one of the edges of Europe: a strange, windswept shore where pregnant women fall through the ice, family farms are barricaded in the winter to keep out the destitute, and their “great barn doors face the coastal wetlands”. This agrarian community ekes out its existence in a merciless, flat land by the Baltic Sea, and the novel focusses on a family of such farmers: Judit (the titular Queen), her brothers Albert and Viktor, Viktor’s widow, and Judit’s troubled parents. The landscape they inhabit is bleak Read more ...

Scream’s commentary on and sly revival of the slasher genre was a phenomenon in the ironic Nineties. If any franchise is alive to the absurdity of six sequels it’s this one, where self-aware characters eagerly annotate evolving horror cliché. The latest “meta-slasher whodunnit”, though, as Scream (2022) handily had it, hasn’t put the requisite thought into justifying its existence.Wes Craven's original trilogy boasted bravura comic-horrific opening scenes in Scream (1996) and Scream 2 (1997) and confidently opened out a sleazy Hollywood back-story in the Weinstein-produced Scream 3 (2000), Read more ...

I’ll never forget watching Tracey Emin reduce an audience to tears at the Royal Festival Hall. About 25 people were expected, but some 500 turned up even though she wasn’t well known. It was 1995, four years before she was propelled into the limelight by entering My Bed into the Turner Prize. (The dishevelled bed where she’d spent four days in a state of catatonic despair after a break-up caused a furore. How could such a squalid installation be considered art?)I’d written a feature on her in Time Out, though, and mentioned Whispering Women, the exhibition I’d invited her to take part in. And Read more ...

The indomitable Nicolas Kent has devised a new theatre piece to prick our consciences and refocus our minds, after his sterling work on the ugly underbelly of the Afghan wars and the Grenfell inquiry, inter alia. This one is less polished though not lacking in grit.Originally a project much like Kent’s The Great Game, a loose assemblage of full-length plays from leading writers about invasions of Afghanistan over the centuries, this has emerged as five much shorter plays about different aspects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The series has a chronological sweep, starting with Jonathan Read more ...

Pretty much any performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony is a special occasion, but this one perhaps more so than most. For one thing, it was a landmark event in the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s 90th anniversary year - the only concert this season that saw the return of Sir Donald Runnicles, their Conductor Emeritus. Runnicles’ Mahler performances were always highlights during his time in charge of the orchestra, and this is a special work for him, not only one of the pieces that persuaded him to become a conductor, but also one in which he sang as a young member of the Read more ...

Mark Simmons is, in the nicest possible way, an old-fashioned comic, in that he tells jokes. Puns, one-liners, slow-burners, delayed payoffs as well as visual and physical gags, he’s got them all, lots of them, and they’re all rather good.His craftsmanship has been recognised by colleagues and audiences alike; he  was voted UK comics’ comic in 2022 and in 2024 won Dave’s best joke of the Edinburgh Fringe for "I was going to sail around the globe in the world’s smallest ship, but I bottled it.” Now he’s on his debut UK tour, which I saw at Winchester Theatre Royal.As he comes on stage Read more ...

The brainchild of Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee, this is a strange and tortuous tale which defies easy categorisation. There’s plenty of humour in it but it isn’t a comedy, and it also lays out a long trail of tragedy and pain spanning generations. You might argue that there’s a bit of redemption on offer, but then again you might not.Anyway, the narrative revolves around three women in their late thirties, Saoirse (Roisin Gallagher), Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne) and Robyn (Sinead Keenan), close friends from childhood and now living in Belfast. Their old bonds are rekindled when they’re invited Read more ...

The title comes from the August 1965 Paul Revere & the Raiders single “Steppin' Out,” a paint-peeling stomp which just missed the US Top 40. While it wasn’t a massive hit – a UK release made no mark at all – the track can be taken as helping to define a strand of American pop which is, well, identifiably American. It didn’t matter that “Steppin' Out” was released by a major label: it’s directness, heft, reductiveness, snotiness, unbridled pep and lack of sophistication positioned it as garage rock.“Steppin' Out” is one of the great Sixties singles. So are The Beach Boys’ “I Get Around,” Read more ...

Almost everything about Piotr Anderszewski's Wigmore Hall recital pleased, intrigued and even thrilled – except, perhaps, the order of the works. The Polish-born pianist opened with his selection of a dozen of Brahms’s late solo pieces, from the Op. 116 to 119 sets, and returned after the interval with the thunderous heavy cavalry of Beethoven’s final sonata, Op. 111. Compare, and contrast, the supreme leave-takings of both poets of the piano.Now, Anderszewski’s arrangement and performance of the Brahms works – several of them far from “miniatures” – lends them a dramatic and architectural Read more ...

The BBC NOW called this concert Echoes of France, which was both an understatement and a partial misnomer. Cardiff’s St David’s Hall being currently out of action, the orchestra is playing its regular concerts in the much smaller Hoddinott Hall, but with no concession to the acoustical trivia of decibels, balance and blend. Misnomer? We heard Ravel and Chausson - French certainly - but Sibelius’s Pelleas and Melisande incidental music is French only in the language of the play, which is by the Belgian Maeterlinck. It’s strange how that play captivated composers on either side of the year Read more ...