London
Gary Naylor
As something of an immigrant to the capital myself in the long hot summer of 1984, I gobbled up Absolute Beginners, Colin MacInnes’s novel of an outsider embracing the temptations and dangers of London.Written a couple of years earlier and set a couple of miles east, Sam Selvon’s seminal book, The Lonely Londoners, focuses more specifically on Caribbean immigrants’ experience of a metropolis emerging from post-war austerity, of the cold, of the racism, of the possibilities always just out of reach.Roy Williams’ adaptation of Selvon’s dazzling narrative was a big hit at the intimate Jermyn Read more ...
joe.muggs
Of the big UK indie bands of the 00s wave, Bloc Party were always the most austerely art-rockish. Where Arctic Monkeys, Klaxons, Franz Ferdinand all to some degree or other had a dose of the vaudevillian and a bit of party “woohoo!”, BP adhered way more to the seriousness, alienation and introspection of their post-punk inspirations.This certainly didn’t do them any harm in the first instance – they were, frankly, huge – but maybe stopped them having quite so much crossover appeal, and you’re less likely to hear them now on Noughties nostalgia shows on mainstream radio and suchlike.It did, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
This Celine Dion jukebox musical has been a big hit in New York, but crossing The Atlantic can be perilous for any production, so, docked now at the Criterion Theatre, does it sink or float?We open on a framing device, with a group of tourists being shown round a Titanic museum (there’s a whole industry built up around its legend). Any interest/concern that we’re in for a probing analysis of the ethics of monetising the tragic deaths of over 1500 souls due to, at the very least, some element of corporate negligence, is dispelled by a guide who is just aching to go full jazz hands and sing and Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I thought I might never be able to say it’s been a great year for women artists, so forgive me for focusing solely on them.Things were kickstarted with a retrospective of Barbara Kruger (Serpentine Gallery) who uses words and images to illuminate the way language is (mis)used to cajole, bully, manipulate and lie. Having explored similar territory for 50 some years, you’d have thought the American artist would have run out of ideas. Not a bit of it. Dominating the central space was a huge screen showing Untitled (No Comment) (main picture) which explores the Orwellian soup of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
A suitable place to find yourself out for the winter solstice, buttoning up for the longest night of the year, was at the Cadogan Hall off Sloane Square, a former place of worship marking its 20th year as a concert hall.The Unthanks, too, are approaching their 20th anniversary, and their winter tour of 2024 draws from their magical new album, In Winter, a double set that has drawn comparison to that ultimate winter album in British folk music – The Waterson’s Frost & Fire.For their celebration of the season, and of its spirits, they draw on big songs such as The Coventry Carol and The Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The man whose name sounds like a major aviation accident, private detective Cormoran Strike, is back, with his sidekick Robin, for more of the lobster quadrille that is their relationship.This sixth series still uses those classy credits – footage of the leads in faded 1970s browns, with a typeface straight out of movies of that era and overlaid with Beth Rowley’s intense lyrics “You and me, me and you… I’ll walk beside you.” What follows is all too familiar as well: a dark new case that’s long-windedly puzzling and taxing. Ditto the pair’s continuing inability to declare the deep Read more ...
aleks.sierz
I live in Brixton, south London. To get to the tube, I have to cross Windrush Square. Since 2021, I go past the Cherry Groce memorial, which honours the woman who was wrongfully shot by the Met in 1985, an event which sparked the riots I remember so well from 40 years ago. Amazingly enough, I have now seen her sister, Sutara Gayle AKA Lorna Gee, performing a gig theatre piece on the main stage at the Royal Court.The Legends of Them is an autobiographical memory play during the course of which young Lorna grows into Sutara Gayle, told in fragmentary flashbacks which are vivid enough to be Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Those with treasured battered copies of Noel Streatfield’s 1936 story of three young adopted sisters in pre-war London may have thrilled to the idea of a version coming to the National Theatre. But be warned: jolly though it is, it’s not the story of stagestruck pre-war Londoners you know.The bare bones of the book are still visible. Three little babies, brought to London from various points of the globe by a fossil-collecting explorer, Great Uncle Matthew (aka Gum), are left with his late niece’s orphaned daughter, Sylvia, and her nurse, Nana. The youngest, Posy, whose mother had been a Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Connaught Brass is a quintet of twenty-something players rapidly establishing an enviable reputation, and on the evidence of what I heard yesterday that reputation is fully deserved: they really are superbly good. A well-stuffed Milton Court spoke to their pulling power even in the face of terrible weather, and their easy stage manner and mostly successful repertoire choices made for an enjoyable evening hiding from the elements.Although billed as a Christmas show, there was a minority of seasonal items, even if you stretch a point and include Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé. But there was a Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Growing up within a few hundred yards of a major dock, I hardly knew darkness or quiet – the first time I properly felt their terrible beauty was on the Isle of Man ferry in the middle of the Irish Sea, its voids still vivid half a century on. Only a couple of years or so later, I was alone (friends must have left early) and had miscalculated the time required to walk back from the sandhills of Freshfield Beach to the railway station, 20 minutes or so away. Within the briefest of windows, the familiar woods – friendly with the smell of pine and the cuddly toy-like red squirrels Read more ...
graham.rickson
That Juggernaut is as good as it is seems in hindsight to have been a happy accident. Inspired by a bomb hoax on the QE2 in 1972, the producers fired two directors (Bryan Forbes and Don Taylor) in succession before hiring Richard Lester in desperation. His quest to salvage Juggernaut in a just a few weeks mirrors events in the film, its protagonists attempting to defuse a set of bombs planted in the bowels of a transatlantic liner.Lester’s masterstroke was to call in Alan Plater to help him rewrite the original script, the end result as much a political thriller as a disaster movie, following Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Percy Jackson is neither the missing one from Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael, nor an Australian Test cricketer of the 1920s, but a New York teenager with dyslexia and ADHD who keeps getting expelled from school. He’s a bit of a loner, too intense to huddle with the geeks, too stubborn to avoid the fights with the jocks, and his mother won’t tell him anything about his absent father. Who turns out to be a Greek god. Could happen to any kid. It’s that blend of familiar anxieties and fantastical backstory that propelled Rick Riordan’s bedtime stories into novels, films, Read more ...