London
Graham Fuller
A visually dazzling, fiercely acted psychological drama with a manic comic edge, Hoard channels an 18-year-old South Londoner’s quest to lay the ghost – or reclaim the spirit – of her long dead mentally ill mother through her sexual pursuit of the 30-ish man she’s infatuated with. If the premise sounds like a recipe for a clichéd coming-of-age story, the film’s taboo imagery – magical but malodorous refuse, food muckily splattered on flesh during bouts of prolonged foreplay – imparts Freudian meanings to Luna Carmoon’s debut as writer-director. Originating in a story Carmoon wrote Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We open on one of those grim, grim training rooms that all offices have – the apologetic sofa, the single electric kettle, the instant coffee. The lighting is too harsh, the chairs too hard, the atmosphere already post-lunch on Wednesday and it’s only 10am on Monday. We’ve all been there – designer, Rosie Elnile certainly has. Where we haven’t been is a war zone which is where our keen, but wary trio, marshalled by a slightly on-edge facilitator are heading. It’s a Médecins Sans Frontières type NGO doing good work within a White Saviour framework, somewhere in the Arabic- Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Legions of Ghibli fanatics may love the heartwarming My Neighbour Totoro and the heartbreaking Grave of the Fireflies, but they revere Spirited Away, their, our, The Godfather and The Wizard of Oz rolled into one. Totoro has been magnificently staged in London, setting the bar high, but it’s a simpler story, a simpler aesthetic and it’s obviously an easier gig to adapt a great film rather than an all-time great film, first winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Waiting for the curtain, I gulped back contradictory thoughts: I was so excited about them getting it right and Read more ...
David Nice
While the Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra were performing Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie – weirdly, despite its size and difficulty, a repertoire staple – over at the Royal Festival Hall, their Guildhall School counterparts presented a programme of stunning originality.It was, in effect, the final of student instrumentalists’ competition for the coveted Gold Medal, alternating with singers (their turn again in 2025). The draw for collectors of the rich and rare were Argentinian top composer Ginastera’s Harp Concerto and the Divertimento concertante for double bass and orchestra by Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Cricket has always been a lens through which to examine the legacy of the British Empire. In the 1930s, the infamous Bodyline series saw the new nation, Australia, stand up to its big brother’s bullying tactics. In the 1970s, the all-conquering West Indies team gave pride to the Windrush generation when they vanquished an England whose captain had promised to make them grovel. In the 2010s, the brash and bold Indian Premier League saw the world’s largest democracy flex its financial muscle as global power shifted eastwards. Kate Attwell’s 2019 play, Testmatch (receiving its UK Read more ...
joe.muggs
This album came with an absolutely enormous promo campaign. As well as actual advertising there were “Audience With…” events, and specials on BBC radio and TV – the latter an Imagine special with Alan Yentob really going in with sledgehammer subtlety to set the Pet Shop Boys up as National Treasures as they approach the 40th anniversary of their first single “West End Girls”. The thing is, though, they deserve it: not just the career retrospective but the free boost for their new work. For many acts, this kind of documentary, packed with friends and colleagues Read more ...
aleks.sierz
“He do the police in different voices.” If ever one phrase summed up a work of fiction, and the art of its writer, then surely it is this description, by Charles Dickens in his 1865 novel, Our Mutual Friend, of his character Sloppy’s ability to read aloud from a newspaper. Ironically enough the book itself is one of Dickens’s least exuberant performances, written in his maturity, and with enormous and unnecessary detail (800 pages worth).Its complex plot has now been adapted for the National Theatre by Ben Power, with music by PJ Harvey. But is this the best way to tell this story? Dickens’s Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Richard Gadd won an Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2016 with material about being sexually abused by a man, in a set called Monkey See, Monkey Do that he performed on a treadmill with a gorilla at his back. He followed that with another piece of writing about abuse, this time meted out by a female stalker, Baby Reindeer, which he performed at the Fringe and then at the Bush Theatre in 2019. Spliced together, these two traumatic experiences now form his bleak Netflix seven-parter of that same name. "Baby Reindeer" is the nickname given to the object of her obsession by a middle-aged woman Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Yinka Shonibare’s Serpentine Gallery exhibition opens with a piece of cloth twirling in the breeze; except that it’s a bronze sculpture probably weighing a ton or more – such is the power of art (pictured below right: detail of Wind Sculpture IV, 2024 with African Bird Magic, 2023).And metaphorically speaking, this is the airiest piece on show. Other works address weighty and contested subject matter, but with such beauty and lightness of touch that you never feel preached at or pulverised with guilt.Take The War Library 2024, for instance (pictured below: detail). Gallery Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Lockdown feels more like a dream now: empty streets; bright, scarless skies; pan-banging at 8pm. Did it all happen? One part of our brains insists that it did; another resists such an overthrowing of what it means to be human. Try recalling events of 2019, 2020 and 2021, and you’ll find them hazy, ill-defined and you reach for a phrase I say more often than I ought, “I don’t know whether it was before or after the pandemic…”Spencer Jones didn’t find it easy and upped sticks for The Sticks, moving home and family to Devon for those oft-cited reasons - nearer to Mum, better for the kids and a Read more ...
Gary Naylor
"In care". It’s a phrase that, if it penetrates our minds at all, usually leads to distressing tabloid stories of children losing their lives at the hands of abusive parents (“Why oh why wasn’t this child in care?”) or of loving parents separated from their sons and daughters by over-zealous bureaucrats (“Social workers tore our family apart”). It’s a difficult subject to address, which is one reason why it’s more often done in the abstract, the language administrative, quasi-legal or covered a radio phone-in in which we’re invited to sum anecdotes in order to produce data. Well meant Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
What with the interminable Harry and Meghan saga, the death of the Queen and the recent health scares for Kate and King Chuck, this is just what the Royal Family needed – the exhumation of Prince Andrew’s catastrophic 2019 Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis which probed his alarm-bell-jangling relationship with serial sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein. And it doesn’t end there, since looming over the horizon is Amazon Prime’s three-part dramatisation of the same story, A Very Royal Scandal (starring Michael Sheen and Ruth Wilson).Be all that as it may, Netflix got there first, with a Read more ...