1920s
Like Water for Chocolate, Royal Ballet review - splendid dancing and sets, but there's too much plotSaturday, 04 October 2025
Christopher Wheeldon has mined a new seam of narrative pieces for the Royal Ballet, having started out as a supreme practitioner of the abstract. After The Winter’s Tale and Alice in Wonderland, he landed in 2022 on the magical realist novel Like... Read more... |
Lee Miller, Tate Britain review - an extraordinary career that remains an enigmaSaturday, 04 October 2025
Tate Britain’s Lee Miller retrospective begins with a soft focus picture of her by New York photographer Arnold Genthe dated 1927, when she was working as a fashion model. The image is so hazy that she appears as dreamlike and insubstantial as a... Read more... |
Mark Hussey: Mrs Dalloway - Biography of a Novel review - echoes across crisesTuesday, 23 September 2025
Writing in her diary just over 100 years ago on 19th June 1923, Virginia Woolf wrote: “In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Laurel & Hardy - The Silent Years (1928)Tuesday, 06 May 2025
Eureka’s second volume of Laurel and Hardy shorts catches the pair in 1928 on the cusp of their successful transition to the sound era, two of the 10 films originally released with synchronised sound effects and music.This works especially well in... Read more... |
LSO, Noseda, Barbican review - Half Six shake-upThursday, 10 April 2025
Tired after a hard day at the office? You might think you need a Classic FM-style warm bath, but the blast of Prokofiev’s Second Symphony, one of the noisiest in the repertoire, is the real ticket to recharging the batteries. Gianandrea Noseda, on... Read more... |
Chamayou, BBC Philharmonic, Wigglesworth, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - Boulez with bonbonsMonday, 13 January 2025
Top Brownie points for the BBC Philharmonic for being one of the first (maybe the first?) to celebrate the birth centenary of Pierre Boulez this year. His Rituel – in memoriam Bruno Maderna was paired somewhat uneasily with a second half of bonbons... Read more... |
The Forsyte Saga Parts 1 and 2, Park Theatre review - if Chekhov did soap operasSaturday, 26 October 2024
The misadventures and misbehaviours of the English upper-middle class is catnip for TV executives. All those posh types on which us hoi polloi can sit in delicious self-righteous judgement, as we marvel at their cut glass accents, well-tailored... Read more... |
Juno and the Paycock, Gielgud Theatre review - a shockingly original centenary revival of O'Casey's tragi-comedyMonday, 07 October 2024
"Captain" Jack Boyle is a fantasist, a mythmaker, a storyteller. He relishes an audience – usually his sidekick, Joxer. There is a theatricality in his part as written by O'Casey, but in Matthew Warchus's hands this is made an explicit element of... Read more... |
The Silver Cord, Finborough Theatre review - Sophie Ward is compellingly repellentSaturday, 07 September 2024
One of the Finborough Theatre’s Artistic Director, Neil McPherson’s, gifts is an uncanny ability to find long-forgotten plays that work, right here, right now. He’s struck gold again with The Silver Cord, presenting its first London production for... Read more... |
The Fabulist, Charing Cross Theatre review - fine singing cannot rescue an incoherent productionWednesday, 21 August 2024
On opening night, there’s always a little tension in the air. Tech rehearsals and previews can only go so far – this is the moment when an audience, some wielding pens like scalpels, sit in judgement. Having attended thousands on the critics’ side... Read more... |
The Baker's Wife, Menier Chocolate Factory review - loving reappraisal doesn't entirely, well, riseFriday, 19 July 2024
The Baker's Wife closed on the way to Broadway in 1976, since which time Stephen Schwartz's stubbornly resistent if sweetly scored musical has been revived and reworked all over the map, not least by Gordon Greenberg. The American director has... Read more... |
Machinal, The Old Vic review - note-perfect pity and terrorFriday, 19 April 2024
Virtuosity and a wildly beating heart are compatible in Richard Jones’s finely calibrated production of Renaissance woman Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal. It hits hard as a 1920s mechanical symphony with a lyrical slow movement and words/cliches used... Read more... |
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