London
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 ...
Adam Sweeting
The “hiding in plain sight” technique has proved appallingly effective for a list of notorious sex offenders. When in doubt, get yourself a prominent slot on the BBC and hang out with royalty, and you can get away with almost anything.The newsreader Huw Edwards is the latest in this roll-call of infamy, though he has vowed to challenge “misleading or fabricated claims” made about him, but Edwards seems like a mere amateur when compared with Rolf Harris. As we learn in this Australian-made two-part documentary, Harris hailed from the Perth suburb of Bassingdean, came to London in 1952, studied Read more ...
Gary Naylor
A couple of years ago, on a drive through the picture book hills and lakes of Connemara, my pal (his car, his driving, his choice) played a compilation of Frank Sinatra’s hits on the music system. He sang along lustily, as I contemplated the contrast with the landscape and wondered about how long it would be before I could suggest a bit of Van Morrison, The Pogues, Val Doonican…Because I’ve never really got "The Chairman of the Board". I see what others see, but it’s all too clean, too consciously produced, too overweening in its sheer Frankness for me to engage. Every song was Sinatra first Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You might think the spy thriller is a genre which has been worn out and abused to death, but this second series of The Agency is here to tell you otherwise. Once again penned by the prolific Butterworth brothers Jez and John-Henry, it brings us back to the CIA London station helmed by the laconic Bosko (Richard Gere) and his morose and curmudgeonly deputy Henry Ogletree (Jeffrey Wright).The star turn among their agents is the man codenamed Martian (Michael Fassbender), who remains haunted by his love affair with Sudanese anthropologist Sami Zahir (Jodie Turner-Swift, pictured below with Read more ...