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, at its most intense”.Set on a hot day in London in the middle of June in 1923, Mrs Dalloway might at first appear to be about very little – a middle-aged woman and survivor of the 1918 influenza pandemic, Clarissa Dalloway, wife to a conservative MP, is going to give a party. She buys some flowers; she repairs her green silk dress; she has a Read more ...

If you ever wanted to know what a mash up of Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson, stirred (and there’s a lot of stirring in this play) with a soupçon of Chekhov, Ibsen and Williams looks like, The Kiln has your answer.Mark O’Rowe’s feuding family fallouts were a big hit at the Galway International Arts Festival last summer and the play has transferred seamlessly to London, fetching up in a house perfectly suited to its forced intimacy. It’s only after you see scaled up productions lose the run of what sent them on to greater things that you realise how much size matters. We’re on a Read more ...

My final visit to the Proms for this year was a Sunday double-header of the RPO playing Respighi, Milhaud and Vaughan Williams at 11am and an evening concert of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and massed choirs in Gipps, Grieg and Bliss.The matinée (★★★★) was a set of three cityscapes, depicting Rome, Rio and London. Respighi’s The Pines of Rome is a terrific orchestral showpiece, low on memorable musical content but high on vivacity, gorgeous in its Technicolor scoring and performed here with pizzazz by the RPO, especially in the second and fourth movements. After the rumbustious opening Read more ...

You’ll have absorbed key strands of The Sweeney‘s DNA even if you’ve never watched an episode, ITV’s groundbreaking police drama having had an impact and influence far bigger than its creators could ever have imagined. Writer Ian Kennedy Martin had met the young John Thaw in the 1960s and was keen to work with him again, penning a 90-minute script about a maverick detective inspector for Thames Television’s Armchair Cinema slot in 1974.Production company Euston Films saw the idea’s potential, and production on a 13-part Sweeney series began before Regan was even broadcast. That 90-minute Read more ...

Ever wondered if there was one moment when in-yer-face theatre started? Well, yes there was; there was one play that kicked off that whole 1990s sensibility, a drama that had a direct influence on Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill and Jez Butterworth, and an ongoing inspiration for countless others. That moment was January 1991, and the play was Philip Ridley’s The Pitchfork Disney.Now revived in the suitably claustrophobic subterranean space of the King’s Head Theatre, the legendary 90-minute real-time story is set in an East End flat where Presley and Haley Stray, 28-year-old “shut in” twins, are Read more ...

11am concerts do take some getting used to. The BBC Proms season has no fewer than seven of them this year, three on Saturdays and four on Sundays. And yet, strangely, for this programme, mainly consisting of works for concert band, it did genuinely seem like the right time of day.This is open-hearted, maybe even community-minded music, and when it is played with the panache, joy and precision that the London Symphony Orchestra’s wind, brass and percussion brought to it, the feeling of morning freshness is undeniable.That was particularly the case with the opener, Vaughan Williams’s  Read more ...

The more time goes by, the more it seems like Dev Hynes might be the antidote to what Guy Debord called “the society of the spectacle”. As is documented in the fantastic recent book Songs in the Key of MP3, Hynes is representative of a type of modern musician whose relationships to mainstream and underground, art and pop, just don’t make sense in the traditional “star” framework of the post rock’n’roll era. He’s defined not by having the biggest shows or iconic moments, but by his connections, his ability to cover ground, his success best defined not as a “rise” to fame but an expansion Read more ...

Wolf Alice are a band who consistently over-deliver. Their presentation is so staid, their cited influences so safe (The Beatles! Blur!), their politics so “bad things are bad, m’kay?”, that they give every impression they’re going to be bland and generic.Yet over the past decade and a bit, they’ve consistently built a sound that is super distinctive: a kind of supersized shoegaze that allows their relatively straightforward songwriting to grow into something oceanic and dreamlike. It’s no wonder they fill stadiums, and it’s great that it’s not spectacle, personal soap operas Read more ...

I like to think I’m open to most things, but even so I never thought that I’d be getting an education in prog metal in the summer of 2025. Let alone that it would be from groovy young Brit jazz players. But so it goes. Last week I interviewed the Wakefield-via-London trumpeter / singer / composer Emma-Jean Thackray and she revealed a youthful penchant for Dream Theater, Liquid Tension Experiment, King Crimson and even Marillion.This provided a suden “ahhh” moment, illuminating certain tendencies in her music. And now comes South Londoner Mansur Brown’s third album proper, which kicks off Read more ...

After 76 years, you’d have thought they could’ve come up with a better story! Okay, that’s a cheap jibe and, given the elusive nature of really strong books in stage musicals, not quite as straightforward as meets the eye.More of that later and, let’s be honest here, nobody is relaxing back into some of the country’s most comfy theatre seats expecting to attend the tale of Sweeney Todd, are they?No they’re not. Older punters – and there are a few at Chichester, especially at a matinée – will recall Fred and Ginger on the silver screen, spied through plumes of cigarette smoke, he as Read more ...

Following confirmation that he was the owner of the bones found in a Leicester car park in 2012, Richard III has never been a hotter, or cooler, subject. So his fans will welcome a new play, based on an old book, about the misrepresentation of his character. The uninitiated, possibly not so much.The old book in question is Josephine Tey’s much loved The Daughter of Time (1951), in which a bored Scotland Yard type, Alan Grant (Rob Pomfret, pictured below right), bed-bound for six weeks with a broken leg, passes the time teasing out the truth (the “daughter of time”) about Richard: his Read more ...

As the nation basks in the reflected glory of The Lionesses' Euro25 victory, it could hardly be more timely for the Southwark Playhouse to launch a new musical that tells the tale of The Maiden. That was the boat, built and sailed by Tracy Edwards and her crew of resourceful, resilient women, in the Whitbread Round The World Yacht Race 1989, the first such crew to finish the gruelling challenge.It’s hard to credit now, but women, you know, that demographic that do childbirth, were once deemed too fragile for many sports. The first woman allowed to ride the Grand National, Charlotte Brew, only Read more ...