fri 29/03/2024

England

First Person: author-turned-actor Lydia Higman on a play that foregrounds a slice of forgotten history

I first read Anne Gunter’s story about five years ago, when I was in my first year of university at Oxford, little knowing it would over time lead to our play Gunter [seen first in Edinburgh and transferring 3-25 April to the Royal Court]. The...

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Death In Venice, Welsh National Opera review - breathtaking Britten

Benjamin Britten’s last opera Death in Venice (1973), adapted from Thomas Mann’s novella of the same name (1912) and the subject of one of Visconti’s later, most celebrated films, explores homoerotic attraction, the nature of beauty and the...

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Standing at the Sky's Edge, Gillian Lynne Theatre review - heartwarming Sheffield musical arrives in the West End

Can there be anyone from Sheffield who has not seen Standing at the Sky’s Edge, possibly several times? This is the once local show, opening at the Sheffield Crucible in 2019, playing at the National Theatre's Olivier in 2023, and now bringing a...

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The Human Body, Donmar Warehouse review - Keeley Hawes and Jack Davenport excel in an intriguing staging

Keeley Hawes onstage is something to look forward to, so rare are her appearances there. In Lucy Kirkwood’s new play, The Human Body, we are given a double treat: Hawes, plus her black and white screen image, projected all over the Donmar’s back...

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Wicked Little Letters review - sweary, starry film is mostly strange

A splendid cast struggle to make something coherent out of Wicked Little Letters, the latest film from Thea Sharrock who not that long ago was one of the hottest theatre directors in town.Sharrock's proven skill onstage with thesps ranging from...

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An Enemy of the People, Duke of York's Theatre - performative and predictable

Real life is a helluva lot scarier right now than you might guess from the performative theatrics on display in the new West End version of An Enemy of the People, which updates Ibsen's 1882 play to our vexatious modern day.Matt Smith is in...

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Album: Laetitia Sadier - Rooting for Love

It must be kind of unreal living in the Stereolab universe.A band of geeky introverts, beloved of the type of hairclip-and-satchel indie ultras a friend of mine used to call “the Scooby Gang” for their tendency to resemble Shaggy and Velma, over the...

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The Hills of California, Harold Pinter Theatre - ladies' night for Jez Butterworth

Art makes for unexpected bedfellows, and so it proves in Jez Butterworth's moving if meandering The Hills of California. Butterworth's first play in seven years owes a lot more to as unexpected a source as the musical Gypsy than it does to such...

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Dear Octopus, National Theatre - period rarity is a real pleasure

Sisters are doing it for themselves, just as families as a whole are, too, on the London stage these days. Dear Octopus follows Till the Stars Come Down and The Hills of California as the third domestic drama I've seen in the last 10 days and...

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This Blessed Plot review - a right old English carry on

The hefty Essex builder Keith Martin, who plays a version of himself, as do most of the non-professional actors in Mark Isaacs' comic docufiction This Blessed Plot, is no Olivier or Branagh. But he puts brio and a touch of bombast into the dying...

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Northanger Abbey, Orange Tree Theatre review - larky retelling of Austen’s satire with a poignant core

What Zoe Cooper has concocted in her loving rewiring of Jane Austen’s first completed novel looks at first sight like a knockabout satire of a satire. But her aim is more sober than that: a queer rereading of this text as she first experienced it as...

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Album: The Smile - Wall of Eyes

Since The Smile drummer Tom Skinner’s bandmates Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood are two-fifths of Radiohead, the trio is often designated a “side project”, or satellite, as if its music pales beside the mothership’s. On the strength of its second...

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