London
Sam Marlowe
One look at Tom Scutt’s meticulous design for Jeremy Herrin’s production of this savage Alan Ayckbourn comedy, and you know you’re in the 1970s. Wood veneer and faux leather lend a shiny, wipe-clean surface to this desolately unhappy home, where everything is in shades of brown: beige carpets, beige walls, beige lives. When laughter comes, it is often choking; Herrin’s direction is so mercilessly precise, and the acting so acute, that though it is undeniably funny, the play leaves you bruised and punchdrunk.It begins, with quiet, cruel deliberation, with two women in that ugly, expensive room Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Science rocks. In the theatre, this is a subject that offers to provide powerful experiments in metaphor. Most recently, in Nick Payne’s Constellations - and most classically in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen and Charlotte Jones’s Humble Boy - the world of quantum mechanics, cosmology and chaos theory suggests ideas about the randomness of our daily lives. And there is nothing quite so random as love.In the appealingly titled Mathematics of the Heart, Dr Paul MacMillan – a bearded boffin from Middlesex University – has a problem. He is a professor of chaos theory, and his Read more ...
peter.quinn
Naturally 7 represent the point where close-harmony singing, beatboxing and spookily accurate instrumental imitation meet. The US septet call it "vocal play" - the voice as instrument - and last night they sent dopamine levels soaring in the Barbican. The group conveys the beat-driven swagger of hip hop, the freewheeling improv of jazz and the trenchant emotion of soul, often within the confines of a single song. Their arrangements, courtesy of MD Roger Thomas, possess such textural imagination and technical finesse that they're able to traverse genres seemingly without artifice.Part of the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Twentysomething emotional confusion is fertile ground for drama. In this new play, Stefan Golaszewski - writer of the BBC Three sitcom Him & Her and star of BBC Four’s Cowards - explores the situation of a young man who doesn’t really know what he wants. Well, except for lots of sex of course. With lots of different women. Or so it might seem. But does he really?The plot is as bare as a binge-drinker’s arse. Twentysomething Adam, who works in sales but has a really good idea for a new website, goes clubbing with his mates. During an evening of drinking and dancing, he manages to pick up Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The BBC's updated Upstairs Downstairs is not a lucky show. Its three-night debut in December 2010 brought unflattering comparisons to Downton Abbey, a fate also likely to greet the imminent series two thanks to Downton's booming national-treasure status. Worse, Upstairs... is reeling from the double blow of losing Eileen Atkins's Lady Maud and Jean Marsh as Rose Buck.Marsh, who suffered a stroke last October, was eventually able to appear in two of the six new episodes, but Atkins apparently wasn't happy with the direction the series was taking and baled out altogether. Screenwriter Heidi Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Billed as an exploration of the contribution made by immigrants to British art, Migrations is ridiculously ambitious. Starting with the sixteenth century, it hops and skips through to the present day, inevitably leaving out a lot of people on the way. Hans Holbein who settled here in 1532 and, as the King’s Painter, produced that splendidly iconic portrait of Henry VIII, which establishes the monarch’s authority by making him look as square and solid as a rock, is not included.Instead, the exhibition starts with a delightful portrait of Lady Harington (1592) by Marcus Gheeraerts, court Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The murder drama is a staple of television schedules. And for every Miss Marple or Rosemary and Thyme there are many more trickling from the Lynda La Plante vein, whose currency of gore, horror and perversion seem to suffer permanently from inflation. Yet there’s little even in the grim likes of Messiah to equal the Jacobean capacity for horror, for incestuous, libidinous, blood-lusting violence and moral decay – T.S. Eliot’s “skull beneath the skin”. Middleton’s The Changeling spreads its fleshy veneer thinly indeed, and in Joe Hill-Gibbins’ new production the grinning death-mask beneath is Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although focusing on London’s Tube network, Confessions From the Underground brought up issues that aren’t unique to Britain’s infrastructure. Increasing usage versus declining levels of staff. Employees working against targets while being pushed to cut corners. It could have been the NHS or schools, but last night's documentary about the tube allowed the staff of London Underground to raise their concerns.This could have been an eyebrow-raising selection of accidents and near misses that've been hushed up. Instead – apart from a looking into the questionable response to a dust cloud at Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The roar with which Leonidas Kavakos and Emanuel Ax dispatched Beethoven’s mighty Op. 30 C minor Violin Sonata – flinging off the writhing semiquaver coils of the Finale with desperate vigour – was enough to remind anyone in the Wigmore Hall last night of the serious talent of this Greek violinist. It was not however quite enough to banish the memory of the evening’s whimpering start – the ragged gesture in the general direction of the Violin Sonata in A Op. 12 No. 2 – with which we opened.From the flurry of competition wins that launched his career, Kavakos has built a mature performing Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This adaptation of Jennifer Worth's memoirs about life as a midwife in 1950s east London has been a spectacular and instant hit, though it's difficult to believe its success can be solely due to its graphic scenes of screaming, blood-drenched childbirth. And at 8pm on a Sunday, too.Nor is the show's milieu of poverty-stricken tenements in London's unreformed Docklands, with the funnels of huge liners looming up at the end of the street, especially conducive to jollity and good cheer. The stories woven through the ongoing depiction of the lives of a group of young midwives, and the nuns of Read more ...
peter.quinn
Soweto Kinch's set last night as part of the eXplorations mini-series featured gluttony, envy and a host of other vices. No, not A Life in the Day of an Investment Banker, but a tantalising glimpse of Kinch's take on the Seven Deadly Sins.Presenting material from Kinch's most recent release (The New Emancipation) in the first half, “Trying to be a Star” set the mood for the entire evening: a riotous mix of sax, bass, drums, pre-recorded material and spoken/sung elements, with Kinch flexing his singing voice on the chorus hook. From the outset, his rhythm section of bassist Karl Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Write what you know, the cliché goes, and in his new drama the playwright Chris Lee draws on his day job as a social worker to create a tense two-hander about a middle-class social worker and her client, a working-class single mother who kills her baby. Inspired by the notorious case of Baby P, the piece adopts an intriguing form in order to examine the realities behind the tabloid headlines about evil mums and monstrous sinners.Moira, the social worker, visits Dawn, the single mother, and discovers to her horror that she has abused her baby. As a consequence of the case, Dawn is imprisoned Read more ...