London
aleks.sierz
Rikki Beadle-Blair is a high-energy polymath. He’s a real phenomenon. Raised by his lesbian mum in sarf London, he wrote his first play at the age of seven and was, he claims, already directing four years later. Nowadays he creates challenging entertainment in film, education and theatre (18 new plays in six years). He also writes self-help books. His heart’s clearly in the right place. There’s only one problem — he’s not a very good playwright.Gutted, his latest trip down to the council estates of South-East London, is a family drama. It’s a grim tale of an Irish cockney matriarch, Bridie, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
With two chart-topping singles under their belt, Rudimental have arrived. The unassuming, feel-good quartet from Hackney have chopped through mainstream radio’s mug-step cheese and post-Guetta club pop with an efficient hatchet of drum & bass soul-funk. Their debut album makes them sound like a great, energized festival act too, with lots of beats’n’bass to make feet shuffle, laced with a musicality attractive to casual listeners. What’s more, much of it doesn’t come across as calculated. When the trumpet arrives on the number one hit “Feel the Love”, it has an easy swing, and the guitar Read more ...
peter.quinn
Some vocal jazz can be so anodyne that it barely registers on your consciousness, as anyone who's ever heard a jazz wannabe dusting down “My Funny Valentine” will know. A Liane Carroll gig, on the other hand, offers a roller coaster ride of emotions: joy, pain, hope, loss. With the ability to make every song sound like a personal experience, Carroll is one of the few singers who can make your spine tingle for an entire set.Launching her exceptional new album Ballads last night in a newly refurbed Pizza Express Jazz Club, a luxuriant first set featured the singer with exquisite string Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It may not be Scorsese and De Niro, but the partnership between Michael Winterbottom and Steve Coogan has been extremely fruitful. It has given us Coogan’s sublime portrayal of legendary music promoter Tony Wilson in 24 Hour Party People, a triple role as that great literary waffler Tristram Shandy, Tristram’s dad, and as himself playing them in the dazzlingly post-modern A Cock and Bull Story, and again as the worst public image of himself in the television series The Trip.Real, fictional, autobiographical, there’s a certain pattern here, of grandiosity, self-delusion and prattishness. So Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
It’s apt that a drama set among soldiers should be presented with military precision; but corruption, cruelty and perversion can lurk amid the human innards of the machine of war, and in Nicholas Hytner’s well-oiled, impeccably paced production of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the chainlink and concrete of an army base house scenes of cruel humiliation.Hytner's inaugural 2003 season as artistic director of the National included his staging of Henry V, coinciding with the Iraq War and starring Adrian Lester. Now Lester takes on the titular Moor, opposite Rory Kinnear, whom Hytner directed as Hamlet Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It feels a little as if BBC journalists are getting themselves into trouble every other week at the moment. As news emerges that new BBC chief Tony Hall will appear before MPs to discuss why they allowed a Panorama journalist to use a university field trip as cover for an exposé on North Korea, it's little wonder that the broadcaster's flagship investigative journalism programme has stuck with a far easier target this week.Shari'a law, and the enforcement thereof, is a headline-writer's dream, playing as it does into our fears of the "other". Broadly meaning "the way", Shari'a is the body of Read more ...
Julian White
“The best times I've ever had were in prison,” says Crystal, aged 23, one of the three inmates being followed in The Prisoners (this was originally planned as episode one, but was bounced from the schedules by the death of Baroness Thatcher). On the brink of being released after serving a 12-week stint for drink-related crimes, she's waxing nostalgic, while her girlfriend Toni – also due out very soon – is in tears. “I'm dreadin' getting out,” she quavers.We also get to meet Jayde, 18, a prolific offender prone to self-harm, and Emma, 23, a well-spoken middle-class girl whose drug habit has Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Bringing some much needed sunshine streaming into what has, so far, been a hit and miss spring is this year's Sundance London, which takes place from 25 - 28 April at The O2. Sundance is, of course, a name most associated with Robert Redford, President and Founder of the Sundance Institute which supports fledgling filmmakers and runs the Utah-based festival. This will be the second year the festival has headed on over to bring us the pinnacle of American independent cinema, and this year its US indie gems are accompanied by several sterling UK efforts.Music-themed offerings include live Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
A severed toe, a shotgun, copious blood, vomit and snot, and a live snake. Sprinkle them liberally with Shake’n’Vac masquerading as cocaine, douse in booze, piss and petrol, set the whole lot alight and you have something of the loud, lurid volatility of this drama by the Scots writer Simon Donald.First seen at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, it transferred to the Donmar Warehouse in 1993 in a production by Matthew Warchus, garnering its author that year’s Evening Standard award for Most Promising Playwright. A forerunner of what came to be known as the In-Yer-Face wave of drama Read more ...
peter.quinn
OK, so you've given your copies of Rod's It Had To Be You and Robbie's Swing When You're Winning a few listens (released many, many years ago, the latter is still top of the iTunes jazz albums chart in a gazillion countries). You've memorised the words and now you quite fancy giving “Summertime” a bit of a go. A touch of rubato here, a judicious tweak of the melody line there and, hey, you're singing jazz! Er, not quite.As shown in last night's masterclass by the inimitable Kurt Elling, "singing jazz" requires a number of things: the desiderata would include developing your own approach to Read more ...
Sarah Kent
When I visited Rachel Whiteread two years ago, there were two old sheds gathering dust in her basement as though waiting to be loved and put to use. Why was she cluttering up her studio with such large and intrusive objects, I wondered? “Things fester,” she told me by way of explanation. “I like to mull things over, so they might lie about for years. It’s to do with me noticing them; they need to relate to my train of thought and investigation. I’m drawn to things that are not too considered or self conscious like bathtubs, wardrobes and windows that are taken for granted as part of everyday Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Sigh: here's not much of anything for anyone, actually, to indulge a self-evident riff on the title of yet another in a seemingly ceaseless parade of subpar Brit-gangster films, this one from first-time writer/director George Isaac, who produced the Kidulthood/Adulthood celluloid duo. Notable largely for casting some rather rarefied actors deliberately violently against type, the film is best seen as the pay cheque that has helped allow at least two of its three leads to take on less lucrative theatre work of late. For that largesse, after a fashion: one star. Otherwise, well, you stand Read more ...