London
Gary Naylor
When entering a particular, well-populated region of MusicalTheatreLand, one has to check in a few items at the border. Weary cynicism, the desire for narrative coherence, that nerve that starts to throb when sentimentality oozes across the fourth wall – all need to be left behind. Like pantomime and opera, if you bring those attitudes with you, a dry desert is all you will see, but if you buy in, sometimes, not always, you’ll find oases too.So it is with Bronco Billy The Musical, based on Clint Eastwood’s 1980 film from his somewhat uncomfortable period between flint-eyed gunslinging Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Andrew Haigh’s films come at you like stealth bombers, presenting everyday scenes in a spare narrative style, and then using them to blitz you with unexpected emotions. His latest is no exception. It starts with the familiar sight of a thirtysomething writer, Adam (Andrew Scott), in a modish high-rise flat, staring at his laptop screen, thoughts and typing fingers frozen, with the lights of London spread out below him. Then an alarm sounds, and he wearily makes his way down to the tower block’s designated meeting point outside. Where there is nobody to meet. Eerily, he seems to be the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The End We Start From couldn’t be more timely, opening in cinemas after weeks of heavy rain and flooding dominated UK news. But the film’s release has also coincided with the ITV police drama After the Flood and it’s too tempting to compare the two. Both feature pregnant women dealing with the traumas of delivery for the first time; the waters break both in macro and microcosm. After the Flood has too much plot – it’s one of those crime dramas in a small Yorkshire town where everyone, from the pregnant police officer (Sophie Rundle) to her activist mum ( Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Waiting in the National Theatre’s foyer on press night, a space teeming with people speaking different languages, boasting different heritages – London in other words – news came through that leading members of the government had resigned because the proposed Rwanda bill was not harsh enough. Looking across the Thames, one could not help but imagine what this city would have looked like without its immigrants, its trade, its wealth, the skyscrapers, streets and opportunities they represent built on that 1000 year old continuing story. Thinking of my own Anglo-Swedish sons, for neither the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
British Theatre abounds in forgotten writers. And in ones whose early work is too rarely revived. One such is Michael Hastings, best known for Tom & Viv, his 1984 biographical drama about TS Eliot and his wife Vivienne, so in theory it’s great to see this playwright’s 1956 debut, Don’t Destroy Me, being revived at the Arcola by director Tricia Thorns’ Two’s Company, whose remit is the discovery and resuscitation of long-ignored work.First staged in the same year as John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, the play is an anguished Jewish family story, but is it any good?Set in a Brixton flat in Read more ...
joe.muggs
There are musicians on the UK dance underground who doggedly identify with particular scenes and evolve with them. There are those who adapt stylistically in order to move from scene, or manage to be part of several at the same time. And then there is Londoner Danny Native aka Altered Natives. He is truly the outsider’s outsider.He’s made tracks over the years that have been played by mainstays in scenes like house, broken beat, UK funky, post-dubstep and elsewhere, but by a combination of accident and design is part of none of these things. With a distinctively cantankerous and mordant wit, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It is no surprise that the phrase “Witch Hunt” is Donald Trump’s favoured term to describe his legal travails. Leaving aside its connotations of a malevolent state going after an innocent victim whilst in the throes of a self-serving moral panic, it plays into a founding psychodrama of the USA - the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. Arthur Miller’s play based on those events, The Crucible, is now embedded in the high school curriculum keeping the flame alive, so it makes sense for Talene Monahon to write a prequel from a feminist perspective and, after a run in New York, it has reached the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s not easy to find a new way to package a drama about that perennially popular topic, the dark side of policing, but Criminal Record at least gets its ducks in a row with some strong writing by Paul Rutman and a strength-in-depth cast. Peter Capaldi (pictured below) is in chilling form as the Hackney-based DCI Daniel Hegarty, a veteran detective who evidently knows where a lot of bodies are buried. When he starts getting inquiries about a decade-old murder case from the comparatively junior DS June Lenker (Cush Jumbo), it looks like a mild irritation he can merely brush off.Naturally that Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This week, the makers of Scala!!! threw a party in what remains of its subject – a notorious, beloved repertory cinema in then sleazy King’s Cross, born 1981, dead 1993, and now a dowdier music venue.The auditorium was cut up, shrunk and sanitised, the seats where hundreds got lost in an especially dank darkness long gone. But old shapes were mentally sketched by ageing regulars as a small screen defiantly unspooled copious gore, nudity and energetic depravity in trailers for Reform School Girls, Thundercrack!, Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Pasolini’s Salo, Hal Ashby Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If a week is a long time in politics, what price 44 years? And 3500 miles? Turns out, not much, as Michael Healey’s sparkling play, 1979, proves that events all that time ago and all that way across the Atlantic maintain a remarkable relevance today.We open on a besieged prime minister, Joe Clark, being harangued by his finance minister, John Crosbie, who has Malcolm Tucker’s lexicon on his lips and a budget to force through a hung Parliament. Lose the vote and Clark’s fragile minority government will fall; postpone the vote and his credibility (not least in his own mind) will plummet; win Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There’s no shortage of documentaries about movie stars, film directors and production studios in their heydays, but very little attention has been paid to the cinemas that showed the movies they made or the diverse audiences they attracted.Opening in the UK after a very successful lap around the world’s film festivals, is Scala!!!! Or, the Incredibly Strange Rise and Fall of the World’s Wildest Cinema and How It Influenced a Mixed-up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits. That breathless title itself hints at the unknown pleasures (and breakneck nostalgia) to come from co-directors Jane Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
In 2023 Dave and Central Cee had the longest running number one UK rap song ever with "Sprinter", a song about the logistics of being very rich. The real star of the show, however, was the spritely, luxurious instrumental which was partially produced by South Londoner Jim Legxacy, who also released the best album of 2023: HNPM.This is my album of the year because it feels both like a snapshot of the internet’s genre-blending rap scene as well as of modern day Lewisham. Legxacy is fluent in mixing genres in a way that only an internet native could be, for example on the standout track "old Read more ...