London
Bernard Hughes
The Venezuelan pianist and composer Gabriela Montero is an outspoken advocate for political change in her country, using her musical standing as a platform from which to highlight Venezuela’s "hijacking" by "forces of criminality, barbarism and nihilism". She also seeks to express this struggle through her own music and indeed, in this case, through the programming and staging of a whole concert. In this, she was broadly successful, although not unreservedly so.This concert, with the strings of the Scottish Ensemble, was centred around Montero’s 2018 quasi-piano concerto Babel, surrounded by Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Imagine for a moment that you are at, say, the Derby. It’s pretty good. But then in flies Pegasus, the mythical winged horse. What happens?We need to talk about these rare moments of almost inexplicable magic in concerts, because unless I’m massively mistaken, that is one crucial factor that keeps us going to them. Perhaps you’ve witnessed one. Something happens. Some might say that a spirit descends. An atmosphere comes to surround us and we all sense it, musicians and audience alike, and we lose ourselves in it together. Welcome to Milton Court’s evening with the Doric String Quartet and Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“No one wants a pervert for a daughter,” thinks Marnie (delightful TV newcomer Charly Clive), a 24-year-old from the Scottish Borders, who has intrusive thoughts. Don’t we all? But relentless graphic images about “fucked-up sex” have been messing with Marnie’s head since the age of 14, most recently featuring her mum (Arabella Weir) and dad, which rather puts her off her stride when she’s trying to give a nice speech at their anniversary party.It’s like The Sixth Sense, she says, but instead of seeing dead people she sees naked ones, usually having sex, occasionally involving animals. This Read more ...
Katherine Waters
The heart of the V&A’s sumptuous Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams is a room dedicated to the workmanship of the fashion house’s ateliers. A mirrored ceiling reflects dazzling strip-lit cases which hold the ghosts of ballgowns, slips and jackets — adjusted prototypes, haute couture maquettes — made in white toile by the seamstresses of Dior’s Paris studios before they begin work on the final garment. The pieces tower overhead, stacked in an apparently infinite iteration of shoulders, waists and necklines, cuffs. Over here’s a grouping with jester fastenings, over there, jerkin Read more ...
Ellie Porter
“Don’t love me yet,” replies Patti Smith to the first of tonight’s many excitable shout-outs. “Who knows, after 20 minutes you might be gone!” An unlikely scenario, given that this show – part of the Roundhouse’s annual “In the Round” series, which also features Ronnie Spector and Shirley Collins – sold out in nanoseconds and is packed with rapt fans. It’s billed as “An Evening of Words and Music”, but if you’ve ever seen Patti Smith before you’ll know that this combination is pretty much a given (I don’t think I’ll ever forget Smith's furious performance of Allen Ginsberg's “Footnote to Howl Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The title comes from a slogan used in a 1920s newspaper ad for Weinberg’s, a gramophone, record and sheet music shop in Brick Lane. Readers saw the words in Yiddish though. Brick Lane was central to London’s Jewish East End and those who lived in the area after the escaping the eastern European pogroms of the late 19th century brought their popular culture with them – a popular culture which, like any other arriving here, evolved and enriched Britain.Music is the Most Beautiful Language in the World: Yiddisher Jazz in London's East End 1920s–1950s collects British Jewish-themed jazz and dance Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
On Drums was inhabited by a parade of fine-looking young and middle aged multi-ethnic anglophone drummers, all introduced by Stewart Copeland, the American drummer of the Police. In vintage film and contemporary interviews his chosen musicians seemed almost invariably fit and trim whatever the substances ingested in the past. Presumably touring schedules and the sheer physical effort (only temporarily supplanted, it turns out, by Roger Linn’s 1980s invention of drum machines) of banging the instruments kept our musicians in good nick.Copeland suggested that percussionists, sitting behind Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fired by the spirit of the MR James ghost stories which used to be a Christmas staple on the BBC, Mark Gatiss conceived this amusing bonne bouche as both a seasonal chiller and a nod to the ghost of broadcasting past. In passing, he also managed to shoehorn in a survey of changes in social and sexual mores which have occurred over the last 40 years.His vehicle for this was the venerable thespian Aubrey Judd, host of the long-running radio show The Dead Room when he's not picking up TV bit-parts as "dementia man 2". As he described it himself, in his fulsome and fruity and r-rolling baritone Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Postcards from London is a surprise. You will certainly come away from Steve McLean’s highly stylised film with a new concept of what being an “art lover” can involve, while his subject matter is considerably more specialised, not least in the sexual sense, than its seemingly innocent title might suggest. Mischievously self-conscious in tone, its niche approach to certain established themes – principally gay culture and art history – leavens any pretension with generous humour.Harris Dickinson plays Jim, an 18-year-old naif (pictured below) who leaves behind the restrictions of his Essex home Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Lesbian love in a closeted Orthodox Jewish North London community suggests a place of barriers and secrets. In adapting Naomi Alderman’s novel Disobedience for producer-star Rachel Weisz, the Chilean-Argentine director Sebastián Lelio might as well have landed on the moon. But, as he showed in his Oscar-winning study of an indomitable transsexual, A Fantastic Woman, he has no fear of others' worlds. From our first minutes watching the final, gently humane words of a revered Rabbi, the Rav Krushna, to brief immersion in the bohemian Brooklyn of Ronet (Weisz, pictured below with Alessandro Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Dramatic Exchanges is a dazzling array of correspondence, stretching over more than a century, between National Theatre people. It’s a chronologically arranged anthology that acts as a history of the institution, from its appearance as an idea around 1906, through its first incarnation at the Old Vic from 1963, then on to its continuing life as a three-theatre powerhouse on the South Bank today.We witness its remarkable talents hard at work, but also happily finding time to snipe, grumble, feud – and carry on; they do hurt feelings, paranoia and betrayed promises with élan, too. As editor Read more ...
aleks.sierz
You can see why artistic director Indhu Rubasingham chose to stage this version of Zadie Smith's classic White Teeth as part of the Kiln's opening season. The bestselling 2000 debut novel is set in Willesden, Kilburn and thereabouts so it's a good fit for what is essentially a play that pays tribute to the area's multicultural character. Ironically, of course, the Kiln's previous incarnation, the Tricycle Theatre is mentioned in the book, and Canute-like protestors outside the venue continue to campaign in vain for the old name to be reinstated. But how does Stephen Sharkey's adaptation cope Read more ...