wed 18/06/2025

England

Edward Burra, Tate Britain review - watercolour made mainstream

It’s unusual to leave an exhibition liking an artist’s work less than when you went in, but Tate Britain’s retrospective of Edward Burra manages to achieve just this. I’ve always loved Burra’s limpid late landscapes. Layers of filmy watercolour...

Read more...

Lollipop review - a family torn apart

On leaving prison, Lollipop’s thirtyish single mum Molly discovers that reclaiming her kids from social care is akin to doing lengths in a shark-infested swimming pool teeming with naval mines. Thanks to Posy Sterling’s technically astounding...

Read more...

Jane Austen Wrecked My Life review - persuading us that the French can do you-know-who

Do the French do irony? Well, was Astérix a Gaul? Obviously they do, and do it pretty well to judge by many of their movies down the decades. As we brave the salutes on this side of the Channel to arch irony-spinner Jane Austen’s 250th birth-year –...

Read more...

Big Star: The Nick Skelton Story review - the ways of a man with his mount

If you’re horse mad or merely an every-four-years Olympic fan, you already know Nick Skelton’s story. Equestrianism can favour mature competitors, but Skelton was twice the age of his rivals. He'd survived numerous injuries – including a broken...

Read more...

Mrs Warren's Profession, Garrick Theatre review - mother-daughter showdown keeps it in the family

How do you make Bernard Shaw sear the stage anew? You can trim the text, as the director Dominic Cooke has, bringing this prolix writer's 1893 play in under the two-hour mark, no interval. And you can introduce a non-speaking ensemble of women in...

Read more...

Code of Silence, ITVX review - inventively presented reality of deaf people's experience

In the guided tour of Britain’s cathedral cities that is the primetime TV detective series, the spotlight has now landed on Canterbury. Code of Silence frequently inserts a dramatic aerial shot of the city, its streets radiating out from the...

Read more...

The Deep Blue Sea, Theatre Royal Haymarket review - Tamsin Greig honours Terence Rattigan

The water proves newly inviting in The Deep Blue Sea, Terence Rattigan's mournful 1952 play that some while ago established its status as an English classic. Lindsay Posner's production, first seen in Bath with one major change of cast since then,...

Read more...

Giant, Harold Pinter Theatre review - incendiary Roald Dahl drama with topical bite

When Mark Rosenblatt was preparing his debut play, the miseries of the assault on Gaza were still over the horizon. Now they are here, another terrible moment in human history that resonates all through Giant. Since the play opened at the Royal...

Read more...

All the Happy Things, Soho Theatre review - deep feelings, but little drama

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. Or words to that effect. This quote from Milton’s Paradise Lost seems apt when thinking about the prevalence of mental health issues in current new writing for...

Read more...

Restless review - curse of the noisy neighbours

Horror comes in many forms. In writer-director Jed Hart’s feature debut Restless, it’s visited on middle-aged nurse Nicky (Lyndsey Marshal) by thirtyish Deano (Aston McAuley), the superficially affable toxic male who moves in next door with two...

Read more...

Album: Bryan Ferry and Amelia Barratt - Loose Talk

On the spoken word LP Loose Talk, Amelia Barratt reflects on her or other women’s experiences, real or imagined, over tunes drawn from Bryan Ferry’s demos, some from early in his career. To hear his instantly recognisable sound applied to a female...

Read more...

Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Musical, Theatre Royal Bath review - not a screaming success

In Italy, they did it differently. Their pulp fiction tales of suburban transgression appeared between yellow covers on new stands and spawned the influential Giallo movies of the Sixties and Seventies, gory exercises in an offbeat, highly stylised...

Read more...
Subscribe to England