London
Aleks Sierz
Populist theatre really is a terrible flirt. You know the type of thing I mean: cheeky pursed lips, making eyes at the audience, strutting with a provocative wiggle. No need for subtle signals. No need for hidden depths. Okay, so here we are: Nadia Fall’s revival of Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party, the classic 1970s suburban wince-machine, finally arrives at the Harold Pinter Theatre in the West End, trailing the cheap perfume of crowd-pleasing populism, after first being seen at the Theatre Royal Stratford East two years ago, and touring since. One thing is certain: it’s enormously, and I mean Read more ...
David Kettle
Linus Karp Was Hit With An Umbrella, Underbelly, Bristo Square ★★★★From hectic Princess Di parody Diana: The Untold and Untrue Story (back at the Fringe next week) to wicked Paltrow take-down Gwyneth Goes Skiing, Awkward Productions – real-life partners Linus Karp and Joseph Martin – are Fringe regulars, and they’ve carved a distinctive niche with their high-camp, extremely silly, barbed and splenetic comedy shows.Their offering this year, however, is something rather different. In the summer of 2024, Karp was struck with an umbrella in a homophobic attack in Soho. Martin apprehended the Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Jorja Smith’s performance at the recent Radio 1 Big Weekend shebang is really worth tracking down if you want a lesson in high functioning nonchalance. Dressed down in denim, performing with only a DJ as backing, she gave very little in the way of gesture or pizazz, ran through mostly short snippets of her songs – and yet held the essentially pop crowd of thousands in the palm of her hand. From a lesser talent it wouldn’t have worked, but the vital thing here was that Smith was working with the tools of deep rooted Black London music. This was a soundsystem set, showcasing classic party Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Unlike in Britain, where the bar for entry is more survival than talent, “national treasure” is not a term in such wide currency in America. But Mavis Staples is indeed a National Treasure – rather, an International Treasure – writ large. Younger readers who were mesmerised by Timothy Chalamet playing Bob Dylan and who then asked on social media “what did Joan Baez and Pete Seeger do after A Complete Unknown?” (yes, really) may recall a scene early in that movie where “the unwashed phenomenon” (as Baez would later describe him) plays a hootenanny at Riverside Church. There he meets not Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Well, this is uncannily topical, thought I, as the opening number, “Where Is the Justice?” took me back to Jurisprudence seminars and caught plenty of the newspapers screaming headlines that very morning, decrying the government's early release scheme.Unlike Mr Burnham, Light, a bright schoolboy but one still prone to seeing the world as comprising only good and evil, unshaded by complexity, gains the means to do something about it. Courtesy of a bored shinigami (a Japanese death demon) he comes across a notebook that, merely by writing a victim’s name therein, ensures that death follows in Read more ...
Gary Naylor
What would ol’ Shakey think of such liberties? Two plays that may or may not be a single narrative, which may or may not have a missing middle section, stitched together with a bit of text added here and a bit there. Then staged outside a toffs' school on Richmond Hill, far from the spit and sawdust of Southwark in every sense.I'd conjecture - and maybe it’s wishful thinking, but The Bard certainly wasn’t precious with his work - that he’d have two questions above all others. Was the box office decent? Did the laughs land? Both would be answered to the actor-manager’s satisfaction.No Read more ...
Joe Muggs
On first impressions, London vocal trio FLO’s music can seem very familiar. Their sound has always been that of American R&B rooted heavily in the 00s – before EDM throb and then hazy, narcotic atmospheres started to dominate it – with vocal acrobatics and rich harmonies front and centre. And the lyrics very much have the preoccupations of that era: luxury, self-confidence, a lot of sex, and “popping bottles in the club”. On their second album, though, the closer you listen, the more you realise that there are some extremely interesting things going on the lyrics, which drip with Read more ...
Mark Kidel
There is a jovial intensity about the Jeremy Ledbetter Trio. As they launch vivaciously into the second set of their visit to a packed Ronnie Scott's, they clearly enjoy playing together, as the many smiles and expressions of delight they exchange on stage make blatantly clear. There is a relentlessness, though, as if they’d allowed themselves to be a little too possessed by their virtuosity and high volume.
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As Ledbetter (pictured left) makes clear in his opening intro, almost a harangue rather than something tentative, the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If the secret of comedy is timing and location, location, location determines a property’s success, then the producers of Here Comes J. Edgar! are batting on a sticky wicket. How can it hit it out of the ball park in a country with no ball parks?Okay, if London’s musical theatre fans can line up for singing cats in Regent’s Park – as they will from next week – will they do the same for a show about the tyrant who ran the FBI as a personal fiefdom from 1935 to 1972, told in the style of Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective? A hard sell indeed.But they have showbiz royalty onside. Harry Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Queerness is subversive – it dissolves gender binaries. You know the kind of thing: male/female, straight/gay, married/single, fixed/fluid. Likewise, queer theatre typically calls into question all the genre norms: comedy/tragedy, naturalism/symbolism, everyday story/tale of horror. In Eleanor Tindall’s haunting play, Tender – which returns to the main stage of the Bush Theatre a couple of years after premiering there in the studio – the usual conventions of both gender and theatre are challenged in a passionate love story. Is it a queer romance? Body horror? Haunted house? Who cares? Not me Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Social engineering gets a bad press. The whiff of creating a eugenics-inspired master race by other means clings to it, so too agitprop induced brainwashing, the Republic of Gilead also hoving into view. That’s at the level of a society, but at the personal level, it’s scarcely better received, the thought of tiny protégés being force-fed learning, violin or tennis racquet in hand, both bigger than they are.But I’m here (literally, right here, right now) because of such practices, the son of a panel beater and school dinner lady, who first went to a Russell Group university and later received Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
The best thrillers have not one, but two twists. Often, there’s a predictable twist, and an unpredictable one. So it is with The Guilty, Chloë Moss’s adaptation for the stage of the 2021 film of the same name by Antoine Fuqua, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, which is itself an English version of the 2018 Danish original, Den Skyldige, by Gustav Möller and Emil Nygaard Albertsen. Currently playing at the Donmar Warehouse, it’s a 60-minute monologue performed with compelling intensity by Russell Tovey. As with all the finest thrillers, it constantly keeps us guessing, asking what’s next?The set up is Read more ...