London
David Nice
So it's been sellouts for half-baked if well-cast productions of The Rake's Progress and now Britten's Paul Bunyan at Wilton's Music Hall, while British Youth Opera's classy Stravinsky in the admittedly larger Peacock Theatre, several hundred yards away from the Hogarth Rake paintings in Sir John Soane's Museum, played to a half-empty house, last night, at least. Why is this, as Auden and Kallman's great creation Baba the Turk, bearded lady of St Giles' Fair, asks of her feckless husband Tom Rakewell? No idea, but I urge you to catch the last performance on Saturday to see what youth and Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Emcee Michael Palin, as William Makepeace Thackeray himself, introduces us to the show: “Yes, this is Vanity Fair; not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very noisy.” All his major characters – or “puppets” – are riding a fairground carousel. They – and very soon, we – are having a great time.Vanity Fair – the title comes from The Pilgrim’s Progress, in which the town of Vanity holds a year-round fair – charts the uncertain progress of a minx called Becky Sharp (Olivia Cooke, pert and pretty in equal measure, main picture). First seen giving lip to her elder and better Miss Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The first significant British film to explore the influence of Jamaican sound systems in London was Babylon. Shot in 1980, its street patois was deemed impenetrable enough to merit subtitles. Times change. Yardie revisits the same world and era – it is bookended by heaving get-togethers in which sound systems pulse and throb. But there are no subtitles and one of the film’s pleasures, alongside the music of the soundtrack, is the music of the dialogue.For his debut behind the camera, Idris Elba has adapted the 1992 novel by Victor Headley about a young man tasked with the age-old choice Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
A break-dancing mini Michael Jackson, a transvestite Neptune, and a hero who wears his hubris as proudly as his gold-tipped trainers, are unconventional even by Shakespeare’s standards, but they all play a key part in this joyful act of subversion. Emily Lim’s bold production – which marks the first time a community cast (of more than 200 everyday Londoners) appears on stage at the National – celebrates multicultural diversity with a zing that makes you want to dance in the aisles.Lim and the play’s adaptor Chris Bush have added to their immense challenge by taking on Pericles, a flawed work Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s It Happened Here surely deserves the acclaim often accorded it as “the most ambitious amateur film ever made”, and the rich supporting extras on this BFI dual-format release make clear why. Best of all is a 65-minute interview with Brownlow, in which he recounts how he set out in 1956, at the age of 18, to make this ambitious “alternative history” of England living under wartime Nazi collaboration.The development of the film – the 17-year-old Mollo came on board the following year as co-director after Brownlow sought his advice on war-time costuming and Read more ...
David Benedict
What’s that? Joan Crawford had no sense of humour? Well, take a look at It's A Great Feeling. It’s a pretty bizarre (and pretty bad) 1949 musical with Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan playing themselves running round the Warner Brothers lot attempting to make a picture. For reasons too daft to explain, they want to turn waitress Judy Adams (Doris Day) into their leading lady and all three wind up at a swanky gown shop. Doris disappears to try on a red gingham number, when who should pop up in a fur stole knitting what looks suspiciously like a baby bootee? Real-life Joan.Appalled by Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto combines the composer’s usual angst and nerviness with a sardonic humour, right from the opening bars, where the cello and orchestra seem to be playing in contradictory keys. At last night’s Prom, cellist Alisa Weilerstein played the opening motto not as a challenge, but as the continuation of a conversation already in progress. It was also very fast, which issued a different kind of challenge to the orchestra.The woodwind of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, heavily featured in this concerto as they so often are in Shostakovich, responded with some sparkling Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is the second Mission: Impossible movie written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, the first time any director has been called back for an encore on the series. He did a smart job on 2015’s Rogue Nation, but this time he has pulled out every stop to deliver an escalating frenzy of action sequences that frequently leave you wondering how the hell they did that.The 56-year-old Tom Cruise continues to defy time and gravity. There's a batteringly physical rooftop chase in London where Cruise's Ethan Hunt has to make his way from the top of St Paul’s cathedral to the pinnacle of the tower Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
"Homeward Bound – the Farewell Tour", they were calling it. But with a show this strong, nobody would complain if that farewell were to turn out at some point not to be absolutely final.Paul Simon is 76, and there is absolutely no doubt that as he sings in "The Boxer", "the fighter still remains". He has just done 10 of these shows across Europe in the last 16 days, each of at least two hours, and yet the voice still sounds strong, and his energy completely intact. This was a performance full of vim, sass and clear intent.Above all it's a show about the power of all those great songs, and a Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Woodfall was the independent film production company responsible more than any other for launching and realising the British New Wave of the early 1960s. The outfit was formed in 1958 by theatre and film director Tony Richardson, playwright John Osborne, and American producer Harry Saltzman to make the film version of Osborne’s Royal Court succès de scandale Look Back in Anger. Directed by Richardson in 1959, the movie – with Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, and Mary Ure – successfully opened up the play but trimmed its Suez Crisis polemic.Woodfall followed up in the next five years with Read more ...
Katherine Waters
It’s not as immersive as New York’s The Gates, 2005, nor as magnificent as Floating Piers, 2016, in Italy’s Lake Iseo – it has also, according to Hyde Park regular Kay, “scared away the ducks,” – but superstar artist Christo’s The London Mastaba looks quite absurdly unreal and is totally free for the public.Constructed with 7,506 brightly painted oil barrels, the 600 tonne sculpture – which is shaped as and named by the bench found outside ancient Mesopotamian houses – floats like a serene 3D gif between bridge, lido and island. The Serpentine Gallery's Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It seems appropriate that an onstage blender features amidst Tom Scutt's sleek, streamlined set for Julie given how many times Strindberg's 1888 play has been put through the artistic magimix. Rarely, however, have the results been less illuminating than in this National Theatre rewrite by Polly Stenham that replaces Strindberg's charged three-hander with a lazy recap of themes and situations Stenham has explored to far more rending effect elsewhere. Running shy of 90 minutes, Carrie Cracknell's production nonetheless feels as if it is struggling to fill time, due in no small measure to Read more ...