London
fisun.guner
Radio interviewer: “Are you Royalists?” George: “Of course! We’re not weird.” Gilbert & George may have been accused in the past of being coprophiliac pederast fascists (owing to their love of turds, anuses, young men with cropped hair and bovver boots and the Union Jack), but this art duo can certainly make you smile. In fact, Gilbert & George can often be quite irrepressibly funny – definitely "ha ha" as well as peculiar. And since they and their art seem as one, one senses they’d make excellent after dinner speakers.Why not? As fresh art-school graduates, they thoroughly convinced Read more ...
peter.quinn
McCartney and Wonder. Jagger and Bowie. Mullard and Baker. Music history teaches us that the star collaboration doesn't always transmute into artistic gold. The Chairman of the Board himself, with a little help from Vandross, Streisand, Bono et al, had a spectacular misfire with Duets Vol 1. Mercilessly butchering many of Francis Albert's best-known songs, the results, artistically speaking, aren't so much a case of, “Yeah, I once recorded with Sinatra, you know,” as, “Number of copies: entire stock. Ship to: my private nuclear bunker.” And that title, Duets, is a bit rich. But then Frank Read more ...
carole.woddis
I suspect there is a different production waiting to be unveiled for Witold Gombrowicz’s 1938 black comedy Ivona, Princess of Burgundia. Under the arches at Waterloo, tucked beside the station down a dark and dank service road is the Network Theatre. Home for half the year to amateur theatre, it also now hosts professionals such as Sturdy Beggars, a fledgling group set up by post-grads from The Poor School drama training space at King’s Cross. A complete surprise to me, the Network Theatre boasts one of the finest pair of red velvet stage curtains you’re likely to see in London, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Donmar Warehouse's 2011 season listings take audiences, as so often, in unpredictable directions, from the farcical tensions of American competitive spelling to the high tragedy of 18th-century Schiller. Full season guide below.King Lear, William Shakespeare, 3 Dec-5 Feb, 2011Derek Jacobi has long had his eye on the title role of King Lear and finally gets to play it under the direction of Michael Grandage, with whom he has worked profitably in Don Carlos and Twelfth Night. Read theartsdesk's Q&A with actor Derek Jacobi.The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, William Finn/Rachel Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Eileen Atkins (b 1934) acquired long-overdue fame with her performance in the BBC adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford. Her desiccated spinster was the indisputed star turn until death did us part. It’s taken a while. Aside from half a century’s commitment to the classics and new plays, unlike the other more celebrated DBEs she has had a parallel career as a writer. There have been two plays about Virginia Woolf, as well as a screenplay of Mrs Dalloway. With Jean Marsh she also created Upstairs, Downstairs which is returning to British television in an updated revival. This time round Read more ...
judith.flanders
Oh dearie, dearie me. Modern Perspectives sounded like it had such promise. Running alongside the big Canaletto show in the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery, two finished works and one work in progress by Ben Johnson are on show in Room One. The idea is to look at a contemporary artist who, like Canaletto and his coevals, produces panoramic views of cities. Johnson, despite his quasi-illustrative, photo-realist style, says he produces not "topographical representations of a real place, but perhaps a manifestation of a dream... timeless and transcendent". Wouldn’t it be pretty to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
When not one but two street dance crews blasted into Britain’s Got Talent 2009, it felt like a pressure cooker blowing. An ardent, physical and excitingly exact form of dance that had been bubbling away, compressed and hidden, under the surface of British public entertainment exploded. Of the two, Diversity (the eventual winners) and Flawless, it was Flawless’s 10 men who had the almost scarily precise look of a serious dance company, and last night they crowned a massive year for them at the Royal Festival Hall, London, with a full-length show, Chase the Dream, that proves them to be fine Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Once upon a time, just before Lord Reith began permanent rotation in his place of rest, there was a hideous botchjob of a television genre known as the docusoap. It wasn’t quite documentary and it wasn’t quite soap. It was scriptless drama with “characters” whose “narrative arcs” were tweaked and massaged into what you'd loosely call "stories" in post-production. The docusoap launched the idea that the public will gladly work on television for sweet Fanny Adams. If there’s one thing you can applaud reality TV for – if there’s just one thing - it’s that it pulled the trigger on the docusoap. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
They say that crime doesn’t pay, yet the criminal underworld has certainly been good to William Monahan. His slick screenplay for 2006’s Boston-Irish gangster flick The Departed won him an Oscar, and now London Boulevard – a mean-streets-of-south-London, Lock, Stock knock-off, casual knifing of a film – sees him make the upgrade to the coveted writer-director credit. With Colin Farrell, Keira Knightley and Ray Winstone along for the ride (and the likes of Anna Friel and David Thewlis squashed into the back seat), Monahan takes a cinematic tour of London’s seamier sites and scenarios, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Musical luminaries including Mick Jagger, Paul Weller, Ray Davies and Liam Gallagher are lending their support to a campaign to save The 100 Club, the historic music venue in London’s Oxford Street. Soaring business rates of £4000 a month and an annual rental bill of £166,000 have driven the club to the brink of bankruptcy, and unless the savethe100club campaign proves successful, it faces closure by Christmas.Club owner Jeff Horton says: “The Government, Westminster council and even some of the commercial landlords say they want to help small businesses, they say they want to preserve Read more ...
peter.quinn
Another sold-out gig, another standing ovation, another memorable night. A sprightly 89 years old, the vocal pipes may not be quite so silky, but on the first of a three-night run at Ronnie Scott's, Jon Hendricks – dubbed the “James Joyce of jive” by Time magazine - still had the chops to show why he's considered one of the most original and influential singers in jazz.Actually, to call this a gig sells the evening short by a country mile. Accompanied by a trio of vocalists - his daughters Aria and Michele, plus Kevin Fitzgerald Burke - this show was part family “git-together”, part Read more ...
marcus.odair
It's now over 20 years since saxophonist Jason Yarde emerged, aged just 16, with pioneering London collective The Jazz Warriors. Since then he has played with big hitters like McCoy Tyner, Hugh Masekela and Roy Ayers, as well as a younger generation including Gwilym Simcock and Soweto Kinch. Yet he's more than an in-demand sideman, having also established himself as a composer and arranger in his own right through work for the LSO and BBC Concert Orchestra.
Both sides of that personality were evident at Chelsea’s sober 606 Club for this London Jazz Festival show, Yarde’s first appearance at Read more ...