Reviews
Jonathan Geddes
There are always a few drawbacks to being a support act. For Allie X, the biggest issue was simply finding space to stand onstage, with so much ground already filled with covered up props for the night’s headliners. Still, she made a good effort with what she had, working the crowd well, and the clattering electro-pop of “Super Duper Party People” and a wickedly noisy “Off With Her Tits” carried enough verve by themselves that no stage craft was needed.Magdalena Bay had plenty of those songs too, but accompanied them with a stage décor that appeared to be aiming for the stars, or the moons. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
An evening in the company of the smiley Russell Howard always lifts one’s spirits and his latest show, Don’t Tell the Algorithm, proves no exception.But first he’s going to get a few things off his chest as he bounces around the stage – namely, the state of the world. “What a wonderful time to be alive,” he says drily, as in just the first 10 minutes he manages to mention Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, Bonnie Blue, ICE agents, Iran and Brooklyn Beckham. It’s a breathless performance and gag-heavy, and sets the tone for the evening – silliness laced with seriousness in a trademark Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I was not a bad man. Nowhere near it. But they said I was anyway.”Makenna Goodman’s second novel (her first, The Shame, a brilliant exploration of motherhood, came out in 2020) is, on the surface, an account of a cancellation, though there’s nothing straightforwardly black or white about any of it. In fact Goodman seems to shy away from binary thought, which is refreshing, if sometimes confusing.It’s also about love, class, nature and the way we relate to it. It is structured like a six-act play, with monologues by four rather abstract protagonists: Man, Realtor, Helen and Wife. Its Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Before the lacerating spats of Albee’s Martha and George, and the circular kvetching of Beckett’s characters, there were August Strindberg’s pioneering excursions into dark psychological truths. Only a handful of his 60 plays are staged here regularly, but thankfully Dance of Death (1900) is one of them.This rendition of a moribund marriage can be a gift to its male lead, as Laurence Olivier and Ian McKellen have shown. Edgar, a pugnacious army captain, is a prototype of the bullied child who matures into a bully, as he himself recognises. He can also be scathingly funny, a trait that Will Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Sexual abuse and violence, self-harm and sadomasochism, piss and postpartum blood – Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water doesn’t flinch from showing the indignities, the messiness, and the trauma-induced choices made by its everywoman protagonist during her rocky journey.A rewarding experimental art house indie adapted from the novelist Lidia Yuknavich’s transgressively visceral non-linear memoir, Stewart's first full-length feature as writer-director is filtered through the stream-of-consciousness of Imogen Poots’s Lidia.The mosaicked narrative moves forward from an unfixed perspective Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For Richard Hawley, a “little banger” is a top-notch single, one condensing everything about the performance and performer into what can he held on one side of a seven-incher. A flab-free, power-packed record. And it’s a mark of his discrimination that anything fitting the bill is a grade-A killer.Little Bangers From Richard Hawley's Jukebox Volume Two follows-up a correspondingly styled comp issued in 2023. As before, 28 tracks are selected: indeed, the first collection was titled 28 Little Bangers From Richard Hawley's Jukebox. For a second time, Link Wray crops up. This time, well-known Read more ...
David Nice
Star attractions for this revival of ENO/Improbable's Coney-Island-in-the-1950s Così were sopranos Lucy Crowe and Ailish Tynan, and conductor Dinis Sousa. All three excelled, but so did the other four principals. More fool me for having stayed away previously out of concern that the usual six characters in search of real feelings would be swamped by fairground business. Once or twice, perhaps, they did (start of the Act One finale especially) but the singing and acted projected perfectly from downstage and, let's face it, the "skills ensemble" of circus people were fun, a good idea as it Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A right wing populist, a master manipulator of the media, he appears to be immune to the long accepted norms of professional behaviour. Foul-mouthed and a bully, but backed by an oligarch, he rides roughshod over those who play by the old rules, truth, like everything else, merely transactional. “What’s in it for me?” is the only question worth the breath.Stop me if you’ve heard this before…Not the Oval Office now, but The Sun’s editor’s office in Wapping nearly 40 years ago, where Kelvin McKenzie, high on his own supply of circulation figures and the reluctant professional admiration of even Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It’s a story being repeated the world over – apex predators such as lynx, wolves and bears hunted to extinction, followed by the gradual realisation that a healthy ecosystem requires their presence.Attempts to reintroduce them have met with varying degrees of success. In Yellowstone National Park, the grey wolves released 20 years ago have proved hugely beneficial, but whenever livestock are in the picture things get messy.Two years ago in Colorado, people voted to reintroduce wolves, but local ranchers were still angered by the loss of their cattle to the predators. And plans to reintroduce Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fabled for (among other things) The Evil Dead, Darkman and Spider-Man, Sam Raimi made his last appearance as a director on 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which was one of the biggest hits of his career. Designed on a slightly smaller scale, Send Help may not overtake it commercially, but it mixes horror and black comedy with a castaway-survival theme to devastatingly entertaining effect. The twin leads, Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien, squeeze maximum mileage from their contrasting roles.Our story centres on Linda Liddle (McAdams), who works in the Strategy and Planning Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"How can we sleep for grief?", asks the brilliant and agitated Thomasina Coverly (the dazzling Isis Hainsworth) during the first act of Arcadia, a question that will come to haunt this magisterial play as it moves towards its simultaneously ravishing, and emotionally ravaging, end. Many of us asked ourselves that very question last November when the author died in the run-up to the Hampstead Theatre opening of Indian Ink, the play of his whose 1995 premiere followed Arcadia by two years. A sensible reply to the query is given by Thomasina's doting tutor, Septimus Hodge (the expert Seamus Read more ...
David Nice
Two concerts packed with thorny repertoire playing to large and enthusiastic audiences of all ages: the London Philharmonic Orchestra is cresting a tricky wave right now. A fortnight ago Conductor Emeritus Vladimir Jurowski held us spellbound with mechanistic Mosolov and Prokofiev (the insanely difficult Second Symphony); last night Principal Conductor Edward Gardner served up Czech and Polish rarities, drawing equal fire from the players. Proof indeed that the successor was the right choice.There were canny links in the programming, not that you'd know it from the notes. The exultant cadence Read more ...