“One pure sonofabitch 45. The record to put them high in the national charts. Top five at least.” In October 1976, the weekly music paper Sounds was unequivocal about Eddie and the Hot Rods’ “Teenage Depression” single.Over at Melody Maker, the tone was similarly frothing: “Everything about the single [released 29 October] works – the explosive power, the convincing presence and the intense sound. They are the first of the new-wave punk bands to trail blaze into the national chart.” Image Depending on how their music was defined, this was so Read more ...

There is nothing to compare with the visceral experience of hearing a massed choir – in this case the 230-strong combined forces of the Crouch End Festival Chorus and the Hertfordshire Chorus – in full-throated fortissimo. Add in a team of stellar soloists and an inspirational conductor and the result was a very enjoyable musical evening at the Royal Festival Hall. My only reservation was the piece itself, Elgar’s lesser-known oratorio The Kingdom, with which conductor David Temple “can find no fault” but by which I was less convinced.The same forces as in this concert performance recorded Read more ...

Tim Crouch is one of our great theatrical alchemists. Most famously – in his conceptual show An Oak Tree – he creates a portrait of grief in which each night an actor who’s never seen the script before plays a grieving father who believes that his daughter has metamorphosed into an oak tree. What’s so extraordinary about the piece is the way that Crouch breaks down any factor that might seem to contribute to authentic emotion, carefully pointing up the show’s anomalies until the story itself grabs by us the throat. In his directorial debut at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, he does something Read more ...

Spanning centuries, cultures and an ocean, Finn Anderson and Tania Azevedo’s new musical, Ballad Lines (say it fast and it sounds like Blood Lines) has the epic scope a big show demands. It also has an intimacy, a specificity, that may prove, for some, an issue and for others, a liberation, a chance to be seen on stage for once. One thing is for sure – it’s not like any other show I’ve reviewed.Sarah and Alix are thirtysomething New Yorkers, career women - now there’s a gendered phrase – setting up home together in their new apartment. There’s a bit of bantz early on joking about the fact Read more ...

It’s more than a decade since Opera North had a new production of The Marriage of Figaro, and 30 years since the one before that had its premiere, so it’s certainly time for a fresh look at it. And bringing the story into the present day (or something near it), and locating it in an English country house (or something like one) was no doubt too good an idea to ignore. It’s not Downton Abbey, as American director Louisa Muller sees it – rather something a bit lower down the financial scale – but still a place where the old-fashioned ways have some clout left in them.Think about Beaumarchais’ Read more ...

Location, location, location... a tangible sense of place and local identity can make or break a TV drama, and Under Salt Marsh exploits this to the full. It’s a haunting murder mystery, triggered by the discovery of the body of eight-year-schoolboy Cefin in a drainage ditch near the small town of Morfa Halen (that’s Welsh for “salt marsh”). Its aura of foreboding and sadness is infinitely enhanced by being set amid beautiful but austere Welsh countryside and coastline, particularly the marshy flatlands which give it its title. Cefin’s death takes on extra layers of significance Read more ...

We are bowled over! We knew that theartsdesk.com had plenty of supporters out there – we’ve always had a loyal readership of arts lovers and professionals alike – but the response to our appeal to help us relaunch and reboot has been something else.Our fundraiser is rolling towards hitting the halfway mark, and it’s already raised enough to repair our ageing site and ensure its survival. But just as important to all of us have been the messages of love and support from our readership. It’s not just the morale boost of being praised either – though let’s be honest, the warm glow is pretty Read more ...

From his sickbed, after a nervous breakdown during basic training for the army, the 18-year-old Noel Coward started churning out plays, many of which were never staged. The Rat Trap, finished in 1918, had a 12-night run in 1926 at the Everyman in Hampstead, but Coward was in the US at the time and never saw the production. You wonder what his older self would have made of it.This is Coward gnawing with his baby teeth on a topic that clearly preoccupied him from the outset and would become a prime target of his sharper-toothed dramas: how to sustain a serious relationship, especially a Read more ...

New writing takes many forms: this is one of the glories of contemporary British performance. One of these is the shared narrative, a style pioneered decades ago by Irish playwrights such as Brian Friel and Conor McPherson, which involves several straight-to-the-audience narrators telling a story directly. Unlike the naturalism of mainstream theatre, this method allows for a rapid delivery of events and feelings. In Maggots, an exceptionally humane 65-minute piece by Farah Najib, who won the Tony Craze Award for her Dirty Dogs, the shared narrative also achieves a profound emotional Read more ...

On a dank January evening in St Albans, there seemed little sign of life or excitement on the streets. To reach my destination – St Peter’s Church – I first had to walk through an ancient graveyard where the yew trees loomed like sentinels. It was quite a contrast to enter the church itself, where the sudden blaze of light and warmth and packed aisles made it clear that this, for tonight at least, was the heartbeat of St Alban’s. In an otherwise straightforward programme, the Amadeus Chamber Orchestra was about to tackle that Everest of concertos – Brahms Piano Concerto 2 – performed by a Read more ...

When news first filtered through that the Scouse comedian John Bishop’s marital woes were going to be turned into a film, my brain lazily filed its director’s name under the wrong Bradley: Whitford, not Cooper. Having seen Cooper’s Is This Thing On?, I almost wish my brain had got it right first time.The brittle wit of The West Wing hasn’t yet made a film, alas, but Cooper has directed three. As in the first two, here he is a one-man band: co-writer, producer, director, performer. He could have added “scene-stealing space-cadet stalker of his own movie”, too. As delusional actor Balls (titter Read more ...

In 2016, when Richard Jones's production of Musorgsky's original 1869 Boris Godunov first amazed us, Putin had invaded Crimea but not the rest of Ukraine, and tens of thousands protested election results in August. A decade on, totalitarian Russia is almost a closed book to us and it had begun to feel as if Musorgsky, and the Pushkin history play on which he based his two versions, had nothing more to forecast about Russian times of change. That was to reckon without this stunning revival, where Mark Wigglesworth's vivid correspondence with Jones's taut vision, revived here by Ben Mills, goes Read more ...