London
kate.bassett
This is a strange one. Precious little happens and, in some ways, little is said in David Storey's muted chamber play from 1970. Two men named Harry and Jack – getting on in years, but keeping up appearances in jackets and ties – linger on a patio that's skirted by grass and strewn with autumn leaves. The sun is shining softly. Low-level birdsong is just audible in Amelia Sears's strongly cast production, staged in-the-round in the Arcola's intimate studio space.The men make disconnected small talk that is mildly comical and unsettling. Speaking of the passing clouds, the duo drift Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Proof that the BBC’s love of gritty realism is not solely the province of Luther and similar modern-day urban crime dramas comes just minutes into the second series of Ripper Street, before the credits even roll. In the East End of London a police officer is thrown from a window, only missing a little boy playing recorder for the amusement of the street below when his leg is gruesomely impaled on a railing.The writers allowed their leading man a bit of social commentarySo far so Ripper Street of course, given the criticism that the first series of the Victorian crime thriller collected for Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Most children's theatre productions are usually either heavily branded (think Peppa Pig's roadshow) or - particularly with dance - saccharine to the point of patronising (think My First Cinderella). It is refreshing then, to see a kid's company that brings contemporary dance in its most organic form, to children. And reassuring to see that they can totally handle it.The story is very simple - a girl enters the woods alone and is by turns excited, frightened, lonely, brave, overjoyed, calm and happy. This is all conveyed through playful physical language made up of a little bit of mime and a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Grand claims and superlatives were not lacking in this examination of The Who's fabled rock opera. "This is a quintessentially important creation," said Des McAnuff, the man who staged Tommy on Broadway and in London's West End. "This might just be the first pop masterpiece," wrote pop critic (and Pete Townshend's pinball-playing buddy) Nik Cohn in his review in 1969.But Townshend himself was not blind to the dangers of Tommy's mystical pretensions. When Cohn, who'd loved The Who's early and frantically wired-up singles, complained that the Tommy concept was too po-faced and quasi-religious, Read more ...
Claudia Pritchard
How irksome in some ways for the National Theatre that both the glamour and the accessibility of cinema have bookended its first 50 years, when the company and, latterly, its Southbank home, are essentially driven by and dedicated to live performance. But it was Laurence Olivier’s film career, making him a household name, which helped secure for him the job as first director of the National Theatre in 1963. And it is cinema relays that have taken NT productions to places and people who might never step into Denys Lasdun’s building, despite the company’s national ambitions.The Olivier years Read more ...
Nick Hasted
We have plenty to be paranoid about in the most surveilled country in the world. British contributions to the conspiracy thrillers that bloomed so fruitfully in the US around Watergate have, though, stayed slim. Maybe that’s one reason Closed Circuit’s extreme Secret Service behaviour in the aftermath of a bomb atrocity at London’s Borough market feels so fake.CIA agents snuffing out inconvenient people on city streets is cinematic second nature. MI5 hunting Eric Bana and Rebecca Hall’s high-powered barristers through Dalston back-alleys takes more swallowing. So does some of the dialogue in Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Still only a year out of college, the diversely gifted trumpeter, composer and bandleader Laura Jurd has risen rapidly to prominence, enterprisingly bypassing the ritual of hanging around to be noticed by creating her own scene and ensembles. One of these, the Chaos Collective, this week curated a small festival in which another, the Chaos Orchestra, last night performed a range of new work. Most hotly anticipated were the arrangements of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, celebrating the centenary of its first performance. Django Bates tells the story of Charlie Parker’s spontaneous Read more ...
Katie Colombus
After a busy year, moving their headquarters from Chiswick to new premises on the South Bank, Rambert dance company have managed to keep momentum working with stalwarts such as Ashley Page and Mark Baldwin as well as branching out with exciting new choreography by Barak Marshall.Opening the evening with a world premiere by Ashley Page - his first work for a UK company since leaving the Scottish Ballet last year - Subterrain is a plotless piece that serves to showcase the supreme talents of this vibrant company. The movement is strong and mesmerizing although not particularly moving Read more ...
James Williams
Walking into London’s cavernous O2 Arena for Peter Gabriel’s So 25 show last night felt like stumbling onto the set of some David Lean epic: Peter of Surrey, if you will. With a number of imposing lighting and camera rigs framing the already roomy stage, the show’s chroniclers sat perched perilously in suspended chairs with their equipment focused on the band setting up before us.If it was not already clear, last night’s concert was filmed for posterity, or more likely a DVD. To explain the situation the film’s director appeared onstage to guide the audience through the night’s proceedings. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Madness: Take it or Leave itIn 1981, Madness followed The Beatles, Slade and The Sex Pistols by playing versions of themselves in a film. Take it or Leave it is no masterpiece, but it is hugely entertaining. At the time, surprisingly, a soundtrack album wasn’t issued and its belated appearance on CD plugs a gap in the story of Madness.This smart, two-disc set teams a DVD of the film with the shelved album, for which a master tape was assembled. The CD is not a live set though, collecting the rough-and-ready performances seen in the film, but assembles familiar studio recordings and Fats Read more ...
judith.flanders
Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. Sometimes, of course, it’s even better to be both. And Birmingham Royal Ballet, in their all-too-brief London season, have been both lucky and good. Lucky, because they have Peter Wright’s little jewel of a production to dance; and good because, well, they’re good in it.The first night cast of Jenna Roberts (right, in a previous performance, as the Lilac Fairy), now happily settled back at full health after a long injury break, and Iain Mackay (below left) is as sleek and smooth and elegant as the production. Roberts’s Aurora is gracious Read more ...
judith.flanders
Is David Bintley the one that got away, the wrong turning the Royal Ballet took in the early 1990s? I have long thought so, and watching their current triple bill, the feeling only grows. Bintley trained at the Royal Ballet School, graduated into Sadler’s Wells (now Birmingham Royal Ballet), and became house choreographer for the Royal in 1985.Then, in 1993, he fled. Two years later he took over at BRB, and the man who should, probably, have steered Britain’s premiere classical company for the next quarter-century has instead quietly, and productively, guided their second, sister company in Read more ...