Reviews
Adam Sweeting
What with the interminable Harry and Meghan saga, the death of the Queen and the recent health scares for Kate and King Chuck, this is just what the Royal Family needed – the exhumation of Prince Andrew’s catastrophic 2019 Newsnight interview with Emily Maitlis which probed his alarm-bell-jangling relationship with serial sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein. And it doesn’t end there, since looming over the horizon is Amazon Prime’s three-part dramatisation of the same story, A Very Royal Scandal (starring Michael Sheen and Ruth Wilson).Be all that as it may, Netflix got there first, with a Read more ...
Heather Neill
The Brontë sisters and their ne'er-do-well brother will always make good copy. The brilliance of the women constrained by life in a Yorkshire parsonage contrasts dramatically with the wild moors around their home, while their early deaths lend romance and tragedy to their life stories. Mythologised they may be, but their strength and determination are indisputable; to be successfully published novelists, albeit to begin with under men's names, was a notable feat. Charlotte, Emily and Anne cannot but be feminist heroines.In her new play, which won the Nick Darke Award in 2020, Sarah Gordon Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Before moving house, Sarah (Shirley Henderson) and Tom (Alan Tudyk) are throwing a final dinner for their best and oldest friends. Sarah wants it to be special. It turns out to be very special. Disastrous, in fact.Director Matt Winn’s black comedy of middle class manners, set in a north London house (looks like Muswell Hill, and there are shots of Alexandra Park at night) ticks lots of property porn boxes and features fine, sparky performances from its glossy cast, but it’s more like a silly, mildly amusing West End farce than anything else. Lots of bandying around of the F word, but the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The joy of The Hives on record is encapsulated by their 2012 micro-song “Come On”. Despite being one-minute long and consisting solely of the title phrase, it fizzes with righteous, effervescent buzzsaw euphoria. They open their encore with it, showcasing with ease that, whatever the pleasures of their studio output, live in concert is where The Hives truly explode.Clad in regulation black’n’white suits covered in zigzags, they first appear to Chopin’s funeral march and dive straight into “Bogus Operandi” from their most recent album, last year’s The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons, from which Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Memory is a confounding thing. By way of proof, just ask the Mary Tyrone who is being given unforgettable life by Patricia Clarkson in London's latest version of Long Day's Journey into Night, which has arrived on the West End (and at the same theatre) a mere six years after the previous version of Eugene O'Neill's posthumously premiered masterwork; that one headlined a top-rank Lesley Manville in the same part.Arthritic and lonely, Mary looks towards a past where she was "so happy, for a time", away from the crushing realities of the present. Those include a consumptive young son, Edmund ( Read more ...
David Nice
In the finale of the latest RuPaul extravaganza to make it to the BBC, our hostess asks each of the competitors “why does the world need drag now more than ever?” The question needs detailed answers as increasingly more intense hate is hurled against the age-old art around the world, and it’s clear that the finals, at least when not all-American, are more a love-in than a competition.Those who’ve resisted the Drag Race phenomenon until now should perhaps start towards the end of this or any other series. Not only will you get the best of what in the bring-em-back formulas are mostly also the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The story of Carmen is catnip to choreographers. No matter how many times this 180-year-old narrative has been tweaked and reframed in art, theatre, opera, dance and film, they keep coming back for more – which is curious when you consider that Carmen began life in a saucy French novella read in smoking rooms and gentlemen’s clubs.If it was fear of low-life women and racial contamination that made her provocative in the late 19th century, that hardly explains the persistence of Carmen into the 21st, nor the fact that two different full-evening dance versions are being presented at Sadler’s Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Is there a more purely likeable actress than Sheridan Smith, the performer who was still a teenager when she stole the show at the Donmar in Into the Woods and who managed, as Elle Woods in the West End premiere of Legally Blonde, to bring tears both to her eyes and ours?If so in the London theatre at the moment, I have yet to come across her, and the first thing to be said about the new Rufus Wainwright-Ivo Van Hove musical Opening Night is that it is jolly lucky to have Smith centre-stage. So engaging is this performer, so tirelessly focused and true even when the show she is fronting Read more ...
India Lewis
Andrew O’Hagan’s new novel, Caledonian Road, feels very much intended to be an epic, or at the very least has designs on being a seminal work, documenting the modern (European) human condition. Character and storyline-rich, dense, and morally weighty, it looks set up to be a "state of the nation" contemporary chronicle.Set roughly on the eponymous A5203, and elsewhere around London, the book’s main focus is the (quite clearly) doomed life of art critic and social parvenu, Campbell Flynn. As well as taking up the bulk of the narrative, he is the first character we encounter. It is a distinctly Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Thundercat is known for his love of having a good old noodle on his six-stringed bass guitar – and there was plenty of that going on at the Halls in Wolverhampton on Easter Sunday. But this was far from the whole story of his show that threw in sci-fi funk, prog jazz and hip-swinging soul music to a performance that was dedicated to Anime master Akira Toriyama.Thundercat (or Stephen Bruner to his mum) was once the bass man for hardcore punks Suicidal Tendencies and while his show didn’t reach out that far, it was certainly one that didn’t just hit one button. Similarly, his audience was a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Pierre Novellie opens his show by telling how his latest show, Why Are You Laughing?, came into being. It started, he says, when he was heckled at a previous show by someone shouting out: “I have Asperger's and I think you have it too.” It's an arresting start but Novellie doesn't mention it again until the final section of the show.Instead he offers us diversions by way of biography, starting with his name and upbringing, which covers a few countries across two continents, from South Africa to the Isle of Man via France and Italy. Novellie then describes some of the worst gigs he has played Read more ...
Graham Fuller
In a Dagenham hospital, Silver Haze’s compassionate nurse Franky, played by Vicky Knight, meets Florence (Esmé Creed-Miles), who’s been admitted as a patient for having attempted suicide. After Franky dumps her boyfriend, the two women begin a tempestuous affair – or is that a tautology? Since this intimate low-budget romantic drama adopts Franky’s subjectivity, it’s apt that her impressions of falling in love glow with the effects of the eponymous marijuana strain she uses to Read more ...