Reviews
Markie Robson-Scott
“He’s got a brother who’s a brotha!” exclaims an ecstatic Anna (Halle Bailey; The Little Mermaid; The Colour Purple) to her bestie (Aziza Scott) back in New York. She’s just arrived in Tuscany, where she’s trying to pass herself off as the fiancée of Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor), who she’s only met once, briefly.Matteo has a British-accented cousin, Michael (not his brother, and maybe he’s adopted, but never mind) who’s played by Regé-Jean Page (Bridgerton). Cue shirts off in a vineyard, swoon, screams of excitement from the audience.This rom-com, directed by Kat Coiro (Marry Me; Matlock) and Read more ...
James Saynor
Communication devices have long been taken over by unwelcome entities in scary movies. Maybe it was the bedevilled TVs in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) that started it. It’s not so much that we believe our phones and gadgets and media might actually be haunted – more that we hate them so much that we want them to be.We’re still waiting for the first great haunted-chatbot movie, but in the meantime this tidy Canadian chiller offers a bit of a throwback, courtesy of a possessed podcast. A woman called Evy (Nina Kiri) is staying in her mother’s dowdy antique home to nurse this comatose Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It feels fitting that this latest revival of Copenhagen should open so soon after Arcadia at the Old Vic. These masterworks by, respectively, Michael Frayn and Tom Stoppard have much in common, as highly sophisticated marriages of ideas, moral inquiry and human drama, wrapped in mystery.With wars currently waging around the globe, and the threat of greater escalation, this production of the nuclear-themed Copenhagen, which plays around the decisions and tricks of the mind that can determine mass destruction, or not, is an apt reminder of the play’s calibre and resonance. It really is a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
James McAvoy’s directing debut has a plot that’s so implausible, it would probably be laughed out of pitch meetings. But the story is essentially true, as recounted in the 2013 documentary The Great Hip Hop Hoax. “Based on a true lie”, the opening credits announce.This mad storyline’s two protagonists really were ridiculed when they took time out of their call centre jobs and boarded a bus from Arbroath to London for a record label’s open auditions, only to be dismissed as “rapping Proclaimers”. Their authenticity and nationality derided, they decided to prank the “Scottishist” music industry Read more ...
David Nice
Good Friday and the days before it are times to contemplate Bach's great passions - the St Matthew was performed at the Baden-Baden Easter Festival before I arrived with Klaus Mäkelä conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra - but not so much another powerful ritual. Britten's War Requiem seared the soul again this Good Friday with the profoundly impressive Joana Mallwitz conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and it seemed like a masterpiece equal to Bach's. Not quite so much could be said of Wagner's Lohengrin, which I heard on Easter Sunday, though it has stretches of greatness and was Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It’s not often I feel guilty about making an assessment of a set almost instantly after making it. The support act for the first full-band live show in the UK by NYC alt-pop sensation Jamie Krasner aka James K, was Ryley Walker. Singer/guitarist Walker is well established in US alternative circles to say the least – he’s made a dozen-odd albums, and collaborated with everyone from experimental/improv mainstays (Bill McKay, David Grubbs) to straight-up musical royalty (he toured as a duo with the former Pentangle bassist Danny Thompson). We’d kind of expected, given that the headliner’s Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Stories about slavery tend to be simplistic: white perpetrators are bad, black victims good. One of the more striking features of Winsome Pinnock’s new play, The Authenticator, is her insistence that reality is always more complicated. Staged in the Dorfman space of the National Theatre, this production signals the playwright’s return here after her success with Rockets and Blue Lights in 2021, and reunites her with its director Miranda Cromwell. But does the complexity of real life undermine the inherent drama of this fictional tale?Well, the situation is simple: Fenella Harford is an Read more ...
Nick Hasted
David Mackenzie’s second superbly marshalled thriller in a year makes an unexploded bomb the backdrop for a London heist and its chaotic aftermath. Like his Riz Ahmed/Lily James crime film Relay, Fuze’s multi-faceted narrative roots outrageous twists in character and professional process, found here in feuding squaddies, cops and thieves. An opening swoop towards London’s gleaming high-rise skyline ends at the building site where a Luftwaffe bomb is unearthed, snub nose shark-like in the soil. Initially disorienting, parallel tales follow. Police Superintendent Zuzana (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sarah Millican is at an age where she is pausing to reflect and in Late Bloomer, her most recent show – shown as a special on Channel 4 and Netflix outside the UK and Ireland – she ruminates on what the teenage Sarah would have thought of middle-aged Sarah.The former was shy and bullied, the latter is super confident and a hugely successful comic. How did she get from there to here?To set the scene, Millican divides children into two categories: late bloomers and eager beavers, and she has a handy list that explains the differences so we can see where we are along the spectrum. Among her Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The opening track is Hoyt Axton’s “Evangelina.” After first appearing on the 1976 album Fearless it was re-recorded and issued as a flop UK single in July 1980. The new version had also been an OK-selling US single in 1980. The reason this deeply atmospheric, velvety, yearning country marvel had UK sales potential after it came out on minor-league British imprint Young Blood was due to radio play: radio play on the BBC’s Radio 2.“Evangelina” illustrates exactly what Wednesday Morning 6AM - Radio Hits From The Small Hours 1970-1983 is about: the musical continuum defined by a maverick aspect Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Time is a terrifying force in Romeo & Juliet, and Robert Icke's headlong production never lets playgoers forget that fact. Returning to a tragedy he first directed for Headlong touring company 14 years ago, Icke reprises many of the conceits deployed first time round, this time wedded to a starry company headed by Sadie Sink and Noah Jupe that, in the first act at least, gives pride of place to his supporting players.Some may resist the apparent tricksiness of devices that include repetitions or reprises of scenes, as often as not accompanied by searing flashes of light separating out Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Just a year after the first series, Your Friends & Neighbours returns to titillate and amuse us with the escapades of the moneyed but never satisfied burghers of Westmont Village. This mythical community somewhere in New York’s Hudson Valley has everything that money can buy, and probably a bit more, but does this make the locals happy and well-adjusted? Well obviously not.Jon Hamm returns to reprise his role of Andrew “Coop” Cooper, the former Manhattan financier who was axed from his job and is now pursuing an imaginative new career in burglary, while trying to be a responsible father Read more ...