Reviews
Veronica Lee
We’ve become so used to Bridget Christie taking on big themes – sexism and the menopause among them – that a show more akin to observational comedy comes as a bit of surprise. Then again, while her friends, dating and the woes of parenting form the solid base of Jacket Potato Pizza, she layers it with some politics too.It’s political comedy – nicely laden with sarcasm – that Christie starts with as she talks about Melania Trump. Does she have no friends, the comic asks, performing a conversation between the First Lady and an imaginary pal, questioning Melania’s life choices.Female friendship Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Fuck Thatcher, fuck neoliberalism.” After these words from the stage, an audience response. “Fuck Thatcher” echoes the approving shout from the darkness.The performer expressing his views is the Sheffield-based folk-rooted stylist Jim Ghedi. What he’s said has not come out of the blue. There is context. He is introducing “Ah Cud Hew,” a song included on his In the Furrows of Common Place album. He learnt it from Ed Pickford, a County Durham singer and songwriter with a family background in coal mining. The song – “I could hew” – is about the decimation of the coal industry during the Read more ...
David Nice
Mahagonny, the spider-web city sucking in men (and they are, even in this 2026 take, mostly men) with cash to burn, is the terminus of human greed and stupidity. It takes the first joint project between Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, the perfect Mahagonny-Songspiel of 1927, only 20 minutes to get to the end, brushing the gloom aside with a shrug. The big operatic version, work on which was interrupted by their greatest hit, The Threepenny Opera, spins it out for oh so much longer, and needs a tight, springy production and conducting as well as a tireless heroic tenor as rebel protagonist Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In our society, old people are everywhere, but they are everywhere ignored. For while culture loves youth, it often scorns maturity. So the first thing to say is that I really welcome Karim Khan’s Sweetmeats, currently at the Bush Theatre, a kind of serious comedy about South-Asian oldies which explores deep feelings in a calmly compelling way. Khan’s other writing credits include Brown Boys Swim and, for television, All Creatures Great and Small. While not perfect, this show – a co-production with Tara Theatre – does have a beguiling mixture of melancholy and meditation.It’s a two-hander set Read more ...
Justine Elias
There's little reason to arrive early at the cinema these days, now that filmgoers are forced to endure as many advertisements as movie trailers. Once upon a time, though, the animated Looney Tunes were essential viewing before the main movie event. Now, 90 years after the first Looney Tunes short appeared, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig star in the franchise's first full-length feature.Surprisingly, The Day the Earth Blew Up is neither an exercise in nostalgia nor a cynical reboot, but an anarchic blast of 2D cartoon mayhem that will please adults and their kids. Even without Looney Tunes' biggest Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
William Nicholson’s drama about the short-lived love between the academic and writer CS Lewis and the American poet who initiated a lengthy correspondence with him in the 1950s, Joy Davidman, can be a devastating tearjerker, especially at close quarters such as a cinema or an intimately scaled auditorium. In the boxy vastness of the Aldwych Theatre, once home to the RSC and Tina: The Musical, its strongest points can struggle to be appreciated, however.Key to the piece is its portrait of the slow dissolution of the writer’s strong Christian certainties. It opens with Lewis (Hugh Bonneville) Read more ...
Sarah Kent
If you stand close to a picture by Georges Seurat, the experience is totally different from being a few feet away. To a certain extent this is true of any painting since, close to, any brush marks and fine details are more apparent; but with Seurat the discrepancy is not only more emphatic, it was factored into his way of working.He devised what came to be known as pointillism (he called it chromoluminarism). Instead of mixing colours on the palette, he applied each hue separately in tiny dots and dashes, thereby allowing them to mix optically between the canvas and your eye.The technique Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In prehistoric Britain, life was full of Hs. It was hard. It was horribly hard. It was hardly happy. And, according to Jack Nicholls, whose debut play has a typically noisy Royal Court title, The Shitheads, it was also hilarious and heartless. Performed in the venue’s upstairs studio space, this tale of life some tens of thousands of years ago is co-directed by David Byrne, the venue’s artistic director, and Aneesha Srinivasan. But although they take the opportunity of the Court’s 70th anniversary to nod to its heritage of horrid horrors by staging a story full of hideous and hateful events, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Akinola Davies Jr.’s semi-autobiographical feature debut plunges two young country brothers into Nineties Lagos’s joyous energy and febrile politics, as they seize a unique chance to bond with their loving but largely absent dad. Often shot at the low angles of a child’s worldview and in intimate close-ups only dimly apprehending the full picture, it is a requiem for both Nigerian hope as the 1993 election is stolen and fleeting paternal ties, and a fervent celebration of Lagos and fatherhood.We first meet 11-year-old Remi (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo) playing with 8-year-old Aki (real brother Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In November 1975, UK music weekly New Musical Express included an article by Charles Shaar Murray titled “Are You Alive To The Jive Of The Sound Of '75.” Recently in New York, he was revealing what he had discovered.The bands looked at – and he saw most saw live – in his prescient round-up were Blondie, The Heartbreakers – “the first N.Y. punk supergroup” – a “new-look” New York Dolls, The Ramones, The Shirts, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Television and Tuff Darts.
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Central to what he covered in this remarkable role call was a venue: the Read more ...
stephen.walsh
I still retain a vivid memory of a concert in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in December 2013 at which Hungarian composer György Kurtág and his wife Márta sat at an upright piano with their backs to the audience and played excerpts from his Játékok collection of progressive teaching pieces, interspersed with arrangements of Bach chorale preludes for piano duet (Pictured below). The audience might have been eavesdropping on an afternoon of private music-making. But what in fact took place was the distillation of the essence of music – its directness and detached spirituality – into a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Jonathan Lynn has resurrected the two characters he and the late Antony Jay created in the 1970s, billing his new play the “final chapter of Yes, Minister”. It’s an amiable workout for the former political allies, both a boost to their old conniving skills and a crash course in modern life. And some of its teeth still bite.We meet Jim Hacker, now over 80 but once the PM, in the handsome but untidy Georgian master’s lodge of the Oxford college named after him, built on the funding he secured from a Russian oligarch. Griff Rhys Jones plays him with a little too much gurning and an over-emphatic Read more ...