England
An Enemy of the People, Duke of York's Theatre - performative and predictableWednesday, 21 February 2024
Real life is a helluva lot scarier right now than you might guess from the performative theatrics on display in the new West End version of An Enemy of the People, which updates Ibsen's 1882 play to our vexatious modern day.Matt Smith is in... Read more... |
Album: Laetitia Sadier - Rooting for LoveWednesday, 21 February 2024
It must be kind of unreal living in the Stereolab universe.A band of geeky introverts, beloved of the type of hairclip-and-satchel indie ultras a friend of mine used to call “the Scooby Gang” for their tendency to resemble Shaggy and Velma, over the... Read more... |
The Hills of California, Harold Pinter Theatre - ladies' night for Jez ButterworthSaturday, 17 February 2024
Art makes for unexpected bedfellows, and so it proves in Jez Butterworth's moving if meandering The Hills of California. Butterworth's first play in seven years owes a lot more to as unexpected a source as the musical Gypsy than it does to such... Read more... |
Dear Octopus, National Theatre - period rarity is a real pleasureFriday, 16 February 2024
Sisters are doing it for themselves, just as families as a whole are, too, on the London stage these days. Dear Octopus follows Till the Stars Come Down and The Hills of California as the third domestic drama I've seen in the last 10 days and... Read more... |
This Blessed Plot review - a right old English carry onSunday, 28 January 2024
The hefty Essex builder Keith Martin, who plays a version of himself, as do most of the non-professional actors in Mark Isaacs' comic docufiction This Blessed Plot, is no Olivier or Branagh. But he puts brio and a touch of bombast into the dying... Read more... |
Northanger Abbey, Orange Tree Theatre review - larky retelling of Austen’s satire with a poignant coreFriday, 26 January 2024
What Zoe Cooper has concocted in her loving rewiring of Jane Austen’s first completed novel looks at first sight like a knockabout satire of a satire. But her aim is more sober than that: a queer rereading of this text as she first experienced it as... Read more... |
Album: The Smile - Wall of EyesFriday, 26 January 2024
Since The Smile drummer Tom Skinner’s bandmates Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood are two-fifths of Radiohead, the trio is often designated a “side project”, or satellite, as if its music pales beside the mothership’s. On the strength of its second... Read more... |
Masters of the Air, Apple TV+ review - painful and poignant account of the Eighth Air Force's bombing campaignThursday, 25 January 2024
“Are they all like that?” asks a shaken Major Bucky Egan (Callum Turner), after he’s completed his first bombing mission over Germany as a guest of the US Eighth Air Force’s 389th Bomb Group. They’ve been battered by flak and lacerated by German... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Steven Wilson on Porcupine Tree, 'The Harmony Codex' and electro-dominanceTuesday, 12 December 2023
This September Steven Wilson issued The Harmony Codex, his seventh solo record in 16 years. Though rooted in mortal concerns and alert to real-world dangers, this radiant suite of electronically textured songs is so dreamily redolent of... Read more... |
Powell and Pressburger: In Prospero's RoomSaturday, 02 December 2023
There’s a thread of bright magic running through British cinema, from Powell and Pressburger through Nic Roeg, Derek Jarman and Lynne Ramsay, and it’s wrapped around Jarman’s last home like fisherman’s rope.His friend and collaborator Tilda Swinton... Read more... |
Peter Pan Goes Wrong, Lyric Theatre review - adult panto delivered as jolly chaosFriday, 01 December 2023
Mischief Theatre set themselves a big challenge when they evolved their brand of knowing slapstick. And not just about how to destroy the scenery without maiming themselves.More crucially, they have to pull off the Janus-faced trick of playing the... Read more... |
A Christmas Carol, The Old Vic review - older, wiser, and yet more movingTuesday, 28 November 2023
Familiarity has bred something quite fantastic with the Old Vic Christmas Carol, which is back for a seventh season and merits ringing all available bells - those and a lost love called Belle being crucial to the show. Matthew Warchus's staging at... Read more... |
