London
'We wanted to make a record we really love': The Rolling Stones at Hackney EmpireFriday, 08 September 2023
One day, someone will compile a full illustrated history of Rolling Stones press conferences, going right back to Mick and Keith in 1964 buying a couple of pints in a pub in Denmark Street for journalists from the NME and Melody Maker – both now in... Read more... |
Zadie Smith: The Fraud review - the trials we inheritFriday, 01 September 2023
Zadie Smith’s latest novel, The Fraud, is her first venture into historical fiction – a fiction based on a factual trial and a real, forgotten Victorian author. While the premise is interesting and the story is engaging in itself, this book perhaps... Read more... |
Scrapper review - home alone, but then Dad turns upFriday, 25 August 2023
It’s the summer holidays, and though Georgie (Lola Campbell) is only 12, she’s managing to keep her council house looking just the way her mum liked it. There may be a few spiders hanging around but they have names and personalities and there’s food... Read more... |
Makeshifts and Realities, Finborough Theatre review - Edwardian dramas with a pinch of ChekhovFriday, 18 August 2023
We’re in (pretty much literally so in this most intimate of venues) an Edwardian sitting room, time hanging heavily in the air, gentility almost visibly fading before our eyes. Two sisters (young, educated, attractive) bicker with each other. But... Read more... |
Prom 43: Endgame, BBC Scottish SO, Ryan Wigglesworth review - beautiful sounds but slow, slow dramaFriday, 18 August 2023
György Kurtág is 97 and the last man standing of the post-war generation of avant-garde composers. Last night the Proms staged the UK premiere of his first opera, started in his eighties and premiered in 2018, a setting of Samuel Beckett’s typically... Read more... |
Macbeth, Shakespeare's Globe review - uneven production of intermittent powerFriday, 11 August 2023
That Shakespeare speaks to his audiences anew with every production is a cliché, but, like so many such, the glib blandness of the assertion conceals an insistent truth. The Thane of Glamis has had some success in life, gains preferment from those... Read more... |
Prom 27: Wang, Hampson, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Mäkelä review - glittering night with music’s golden coupleSaturday, 05 August 2023
Yuja Wang and Klaus Mäkelä, two of the classical world’s biggest hitters, have recently united to make that even more powerful item, the “power couple”. But much as they are both photogenic and charismatic, their reputations are also based on... Read more... |
Prom 17: CBSO, CBSO Chorus, Yamada review - Carmina Burana presses all the right buttonsFriday, 28 July 2023
It stunned me to discover that last night was only the sixth time Carmina Burana had been heard at the Proms. It seems tailor-made for the festival: large-scale and bombastic in a way that fits the proportions of the Albert Hall, familiar to... Read more... |
The Crown Jewels, Garrick Theatre review - star laden comedy fails to sparkleFriday, 28 July 2023
At first, it’s hard to believe that the true story of Colonel Blood’s audacious attempt to steal The Crown Jewels from the Tower of London in 1671 has not provided the basis for a play before. After two hours of Simon Nye’s pedestrian telling of the... Read more... |
Annie Get Your Gun, Lavender Theatre review - new production in new venue has some work to doMonday, 24 July 2023
A new theatre? In 2023? Now there’s a shot in the arm for the post-pandemic gloom. But there’s no business like show business – not for Mayfield Lavender anyway, who have found a corner of one of their beautiful purple fields and built an... Read more... |
Grenfell: In the Words of Survivors, National Theatre review - verbatim theatre delivered to wrenching effectSaturday, 22 July 2023
The shadow of Grenfell Tower has already produced Nick Kent and Richard Norton-Taylor’s dispassionately forensic but devastating documentary plays based on transcripts from the Grenfell Inquiry. Now comes a companion piece, the National’s Grenfell,... Read more... |
Anselm Kiefer: Finnegans Wake, White Cube Bermondsey review - an awe-inspiring showFriday, 21 July 2023
As a child, Anselm Kiefer tells us, in a bombed out German city, he would play in the rubble, creating life out of ruin and destruction. As an artist who is remarkably consistent, without being predictable, he continues to play in the ruins,... Read more... |
