Treading in the footsteps of Roy Marsden and Martin Shaw, Bertie Carvel is a making a decent (albeit soporific) stab at embodying P D James’s introspective detective Adam Dalgliesh, though you have to wonder if he’s getting the help he needs from Channel 5. This current series of three two-part stories over consecutive nights is designed to grab two bites of the audience cherry, but would surely have greater impact and more narrative coherence as three two-hour slots. It never did Poirot or Morse any harm.The problem is the commercial TV hour, which gets you about 47 minutes of programme Read more ...

The resurrection of female voices from ancient Greek myth is so common now that one might imagine a grand panjandrum behind the scenes had set down a long-range mission – rather as they do in the fashion industry – which makers and producers scurried to fulfil.Just a year after the Jermyn Street Theatre’s 15 Heroines put old Ovidian wine into new bottles, many of the same mythical women return in Colin Teevan’s The Seven Pomegranate Seeds, premiered at Kingston’s Rose Theatre, this time germinated from Euripides. (The title refers to the snack eaten by Persephone, abducted by the god of Read more ...

After lockdown, the stage monologue saved British theatre. At venue after venue, cash-strapped companies put single actors into simple playing spaces to deliver good stories for audiences that just wanted to visit playhouses again. But this theatre form, which is relatively inexpensive and often immune against the pingdemic, does have its limitations. If the essence of drama is conflict between two or more characters, the absence of the other people on stage can often defuse the emotional force of the story. In Ifeyinwa Frederick’s new monologue, Sessions, which arrives at the Soho Theatre Read more ...

Sometimes you know the quality of music by the depth of the silence when it ends. Last night at Middle Temple Hall – and thank Mahler’s mystical heavens for it – the final ghostly “Ewig” of Der Abschied faded away into a soundless void that lasted just as long as it had to. No braying dunces shrieking “Brava!” spoiled the stillness that Alice Coote and pianist Julius Drake left in the wake of the supreme rhapsodies of leave-taking that close Das Lied von der Erde. On Remembrance Day, at the finale of this recital devoted to Mahler’s “songs of life and death”, that silence felt more than Read more ...

The colour of a shoe might seem a trivial thing. But when in 2018 the dancewear manufacturer Freed launched the UK’s first range of pointe shoes to match darker skin tones, true equal opportunity in British ballet came a big step closer. The initiative came partly from the African-American dancer Cira Robinson who, during her time in New York with Dance Theatre of Harlem, had long since stopped having to buy standard shell-pink pointes and dye them in cold tea, and was shocked to find the UK ballet shoe market lagging so far behind.Robinson is now a senior artist with Ballet Black, Read more ...

During lockdown most of us were caught in a Groundhog Day existence of sleep, eat, exercise with Joe Wicks, take part in a Zoom quiz, bake banana bread, repeat – or variations on that theme. So a comic doing a show talking about his lockdown experience is taking a risk that it might not be the most scintillating hour – and so it proves with Ahir Shah's Dress.Shah says he chose the title because he saw the pandemic as a dress rehearsal for the apocalypse, or more prosaically, married life, and the show is bookended with him telling us about the end of one relationship at the beginning of Read more ...

30 March 1924. It’s Mothering Sunday – the precursor to the modern Mother’s Day - when domestic servants are given a day off to go home and visit their mothers, leaving their country-house employers with no one to make the veal and ham pie, do the dishes or change the sheets (stained sheets are of particular importance here).Which is why young Berkshire squire and future lawyer Paul Sheringham (Josh O’Connor) is alone in the imposing family house, his parents having gone out to a lunch at a hotel in Henley, and why Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young; Shirley), an orphaned maid at a neighbouring Read more ...

Is Bizet’s Carmen all about Carmen? Or Don José and his obsession with her? Or the society that made her what she is? Or all of the above? Inevitably it’s an opera that almost never escapes some Regietheater treatment these days. Director Edward Dick’s take on it is definitely one of those, and tries to tackle as many of the issues as it can.Change of time, change of place. It’s set in “a small border town”, presumably somewhere in the Americas, and the costuming tells us we’re in the late 1950s or early Sixties. There’s no cigarette factory, though lots of smoking, so at least the references Read more ...

Tuesday, 8 November 2016. Vera is in a New York hospital room giving birth to a son. On anxiously checked phones, the votes are piling up for Hillary, but the states are piling up for Trump. Vera’s world will never be the same again.Mathilde Dratwa’s new play, Milk and Gall (directed by Lisa Spirling, Theatre 503's Artistic Director), takes a searingly unsentimental look at 21st century parenting in the big city, mining plenty of laughs along the way. Speaking from experience, I can vouch that it’s all true – except, perhaps, that the reality is even worse!In her mid-thirties, Vera ( Read more ...

Having been founded only in 2017 by singer/songwriter Eric Burton and guitarist/producer Adrian Quesada, Black Pumas have been rapidly rising to fame, with a Grammy award nomination in 2020 and the majority of their current European tour dates sold out. Though Tuesday’s Birmingham show, in Digbeth’s O2 Institute, was not among that number, the venue was still teaming with an eager and enthusiastic crowd. An impressive frontman, Burton displayed larger than life stage presence from the get go, oozing an infectious energy with punchy dance moves and full fat, no holds barred soulful vocals. Read more ...

Like a previous occupant of this venue, Six, The Choir Of Man started life as a quirky Edinburgh show and has gone on to be staged around the world to adoring audiences, tapping into a vibe that’s as much about participation as viewing, the show as much a gig as a musical. Be warned however - they may not hand out free mead at the start of Six, but they do hand out free beers at the start of this show, so a note of caution: amidst fierce competition, the Arts Theatre has the least hospitable lavatories in the West End!Director and co-creator, Nic Doodson, takes us into a pub, its entirely Read more ...

The Takács Quartet is hard to pin down. The group was founded in 1975 in Budapest, but since 1983 has been based in Boulder, Colorado. Cellist András Fejér is the only remaining founding member, and the violist, Richard O’Neill, only joined in 2020. They also have a British first violin, Edward Dusinberre. So what performing tradition can we expect from them?Well, the sound is impressively unified, but it is not very sonorous or rich, at least on this showing. They have an impressively diverse repertoire, and regularly work with contemporary American composers. This programme was more Read more ...