London
joe.muggs
I like to think I’m open to most things, but even so I never thought that I’d be getting an education in prog metal in the summer of 2025. Let alone that it would be from groovy young Brit jazz players. But so it goes. Last week I interviewed the Wakefield-via-London trumpeter / singer / composer Emma-Jean Thackray and she revealed a youthful penchant for Dream Theater, Liquid Tension Experiment, King Crimson and even Marillion.This provided a suden “ahhh” moment, illuminating certain tendencies in her music. And now comes South Londoner Mansur Brown’s third album proper, which kicks off Read more ...
Gary Naylor
After 76 years, you’d have thought they could’ve come up with a better story! Okay, that’s a cheap jibe and, given the elusive nature of really strong books in stage musicals, not quite as straightforward as meets the eye.More of that later and, let’s be honest here, nobody is relaxing back into some of the country’s most comfy theatre seats expecting to attend the tale of Sweeney Todd, are they?No they’re not. Older punters – and there are a few at Chichester, especially at a matinée – will recall Fred and Ginger on the silver screen, spied through plumes of cigarette smoke, he as Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Following confirmation that he was the owner of the bones found in a Leicester car park in 2012, Richard III has never been a hotter, or cooler, subject. So his fans will welcome a new play, based on an old book, about the misrepresentation of his character. The uninitiated, possibly not so much.The old book in question is Josephine Tey’s much loved The Daughter of Time (1951), in which a bored Scotland Yard type, Alan Grant (Rob Pomfret, pictured below right), bed-bound for six weeks with a broken leg, passes the time teasing out the truth (the “daughter of time”) about Richard: his Read more ...
Gary Naylor
As the nation basks in the reflected glory of The Lionesses' Euro25 victory, it could hardly be more timely for the Southwark Playhouse to launch a new musical that tells the tale of The Maiden. That was the boat, built and sailed by Tracy Edwards and her crew of resourceful, resilient women, in the Whitbread Round The World Yacht Race 1989, the first such crew to finish the gruelling challenge.It’s hard to credit now, but women, you know, that demographic that do childbirth, were once deemed too fragile for many sports. The first woman allowed to ride the Grand National, Charlotte Brew, only Read more ...
Gary Naylor
What a delight it is to see the director, the star, even the marketing manager these days FFS, get out of the way and let a really strong story stand on its own two feet. Like a late one at the Brixton Academy itself, this is a helluva night out.After a transgressive, life changing trip to London from school in Scotland to see Chuck Berry at The Rainbow, Simon Parkes wanted to be a rock’n’roll star. He was soon spitting out the silver spoon (but he never lost the easy charm and ironclad self-confidence that clings to the privately educated, a trait he cheerfully calls upon as and when) and Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Rosamund Pike is back. For her first stage appearance since 2010, when she played Hedda Gabler in Adrian Noble’s production for Bath Theatre Royal, the Hollywood superstar has chosen Inter-Alia, Suzie Miller’s follow up to her smash hit Prima Facie, which starred Jodie Cromer and whose London staging was at the Harold Pinter Theatre in 2022.With the same production team, but now at the National Theatre, Miller returns to her chosen milieu – English legal professionals – but now zooms in on the family scene of top judge Jessica Parks (Pike). As before, this is mainly a monologue, running at Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Having played Sherlock Holmes’s politically involved older brother Mycroft in the BBC’s hit crime series Sherlock, Mark Gatiss may not be an obvious candidate to now follow in the footsteps of the famous detective. But with his new murder mystery series Bookish, set in London in the aftermath of World War Two, the creator, writer and star of the six-part show has finally become a sleuth himself.“The period is very unusual,” he says over Zoom from Rimini, where the historic crime drama had its world premiere at the inaugural edition of the Italian Global Series Festival. “ Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Now 45 years in the past, its dazzling star gone a decade or so, The Long Good Friday is a monument of British cinema. Its extraordinary locations, caught just before London’s Docklands were transformed forever, speaks to a past world. But the wheeler-dealer, Harold Shand, played by Bob Hoskins at the peak of his powers, left many ancestors, from his near contemporary, Arthur Daley, to a few who have ascended to the highest Offices of State.One such, conjured into life by Robin Hawdon in the early 90s, is Arthur Bullhead (of course, Arthur Bullhead) owner of The Bunty, moored on the Thames Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The first rule for brown people, says the main character – played by BAFTA-winner Adeel Akhtar – in this highly entertaining dramedy, is not to let white people know how badly non-whites treat each other. This provocative statement comes towards the end of Shaan Sahota’s debut, The Estate, and with hilarious irony it perfectly describes the main vibe of the family conflict at the heart of the play.Staged in the National Theatre’s Dorfman space, and one of the final productions programmed by former artistic director Rufus Norris, the play tells the story of a British Sikh politician whose Read more ...
mark.kidel
There is a freshness about a show by Youssou N’Dour that never seems to lose its glow. He still has one of the great voices of Africa, a versatile and richly-textured tenor that doesn’t show the sign (at 65) of growing old and tired.At the Roundhouse, he started the show with one of his most well-known songs, “Immigrés”. Youssou and the Super Étoile de Dakar bounced in with the kind of energy that usually emerges gradually through the simmering build-up of a set. Here, it’s the deep end from the get-go, the high-pitched sabar drums clattering away furiously at the back of the stage, djembe, Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The auditorium and arena were packed – and the stage even more so, bursting at the seams with players and singers: the perfect set-up for a First Night of the Proms. This is traditionally an opportunity to programme a large-scale choral work, and last night that was Vaughan Williams’s seldom heard Sancta Civitas. Of course it’s seldom heard, with its huge orchestra expanded to include organ, piano and off-stage trumpet, baritone soloist, massed choir behind the orchestra and children’s choir in the gallery – plus a blink-and-you-miss-it tenor solo at the end that must command the highest Read more ...
Gary Naylor
What am I, a philosophical if not political Marxist whose hero is Antonio Gramsci, doing in Harvey Nichols buying Comme des Garçons linen jackets, Church brogues and Mulberry shades? It’s 1987 and I do wear it well though…Chiara Atik’s comedy crosses the Atlantic bearing prizes and venom and could hardly have fetched up anywhere more suited than leafy Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre. A once Lib-Dem / Conservative marginal seat has swung decisively to the former and seems unlikely to swing back rightwards any time soon. In the programme, the playwright says she wants “to challenge us… to take a Read more ...