London
LPO, Canellakis, Royal Festival Hall review - ecstatic sonorities at full peltMonday, 24 January 2022
This remarkable evening should really have been more remarkable still. The unfortunate pianist Cédric Tiberghien took an official pre-travel Covid test that obliged him to drop out at 5pm – even though, as he tweeted in frustration, three subsequent... Read more... |
David Suchet - Poirot And More, A Retrospective, Harold Pinter Theatre review - the much-loved actor looks backWednesday, 12 January 2022
In the 80s, An Audience With... gave a television studio to an actor who then recounted stories culled from a life in entertainment. The best subjects were the natural raconteurs with plenty to say - Billy Connolly, Barry Humphries, the incomparable... Read more... |
First Person: young composer Nicola Perikhanyan on a new immersive reality experience at London WallWednesday, 22 December 2021
There's something really moving about standing in the centre of London Wall's Roman ruins and looking up at the city that has grown around it. Thinking about our past, present and future simultaneously. More than 2000 years have passed since the... Read more... |
Peggy For You, Hampstead Theatre review - comedic gold, and a splinter of ice, from Tamsin GreigTuesday, 21 December 2021
Was Peggy Ramsay a “woman out of time”? The celebrated London literary agent, who nurtured the talents of at least one generation of British playwrights, surely counted as a legend in her own lifetime (she died in 1991). Has she lasted beyond it?... Read more... |
The Tiger Lillies' Christmas Carol: A Victorian Gutter, Southbank Centre review - cult band get inside Scrooge's headSaturday, 18 December 2021
Charles Dickens and Martyn Jacques is a marriage made in heaven (well, hell I suppose): the Victorian novelist touring the rookeries of Clerkenwell the better to fire his imagination and, 150 years or so later, the post-punk maestro mining London's... Read more... |
The Sixteen, Christophers, Cadogan Hall review - polished and impeccable but slightly sedateThursday, 16 December 2021
The Sixteen are one of the jewels of the choral world. For over 40 years they have led the way in singing excellence and programming that brings together old and new. This Christmas concert combined some traditional favourites with Renaissance and... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Bleak MomentsSunday, 12 December 2021
That Bleak Moments exists at all is largely due to Albert Finney; the BFI funded Mike Leigh’s 1971 debut to the tune of £100, as an "experimental film", and Finney’s production company supplied the rest of the £18,000 budget. Shot on location in... Read more... |
Blu-ray: NakedSaturday, 11 December 2021
Naked (1993), the fifth and finest feature film written and directed by Mike Leigh, remains a searing, eerily prescient look at Britain on the verge of a social and economic breakdown.Maybe even a verbal breakdown, too, for Leigh, unlike any... Read more... |
You Don't Know Me, BBC One review - true love meets inner-city crime waveTuesday, 07 December 2021
I sympathised with the prosecuting barrister when she put it to the court that the accused, a man called Hero (Samuel Adewunmi), was “using his closing speech to construct a work of fiction”.This was a crafty meta-joke. You Don’t Know Me itself is a... Read more... |
Measure for Measure, Sam Wanamaker Theatre review - this problem play is a delightMonday, 06 December 2021
Measure for Measure may be the quintessential Shakespeare “problem” play, but just what has earned it that epithet remains a puzzle. Each generation approaches the matter from its own perspective. The developments of recent years, #MeToo most of all... Read more... |
The Good Life, Richmond Theatre review - popular sitcom gets its own origin storyMonday, 29 November 2021
"Off-grid" wasn't a thing in the mid-'70s. Sure, people planted a few potatoes in the garden and pottered about a bit in an allotment, but nobody went the whole hog. The rat race was certainly a thing though, a fertile seam for comedies like The... Read more... |
A Christmas Carol, The Old Vic review - not quite a festive-season crackerFriday, 26 November 2021
Four years and a Broadway run on from its Old Vic debut, director Matthew Warchus and writer,Jack Thorne are still throwing everything they can at one of the most familiar stories, and characters, in English literature. That may be to address the... Read more... |
