London
This Is Going To Hurt, BBC One review - hospital drama with a realistic differenceTuesday, 15 February 2022
Painful more often than funny, this is not This Is Going To Hurt, the laugh-one-moment-rage-the-next book by obstetrician turned comedian Adam Kay. He’s written the script so essential truths remain. But the on-screen Adam Kay, national treasure Ben... Read more... |
Queens of Sheba, Soho Theatre review – energy, entertainment and rageMonday, 14 February 2022
Black women often find themselves subject to a double dose of prejudice. Pressure. They face everyday racism as well as sexism. It’s called misogynoir, and Queens of Sheba is a short show dedicated to calling it out. In as joyous and energetic way... Read more... |
Path of Miracles, Elysian Singers, St Pancras Church review – an ambitious musical pilgrimageMonday, 07 February 2022
Path of Miracles is a serious, hefty 65-minute choral work about the traditional Catholic pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela by – and there is a slight cognitive dissonance here – Joby Talbot, the composer of, among other things, The Hitchhiker’s... Read more... |
10 Questions for filmmaker Romola GaraiWednesday, 02 February 2022
The prolific actor Romola Garai first demonstrated her ability as a filmmaker with Scrubber, a gripping 20-minute feminist drama about a young middle-class mum and homemaker (Amanda Hale) who escapes her deadly routine through bouts of anonymous... Read more... |
Conundrum, Young Vic review - inscrutable and ungraspableTuesday, 01 February 2022
Conundrum is a tricky play. Written and directed by Paul Anthony Morris, founder of Crying in the Wilderness Productions, it’s an extended meditation on Blackness and what it means to live in a racist society. Anthony Ofoegbu is the star of the show... Read more... |
Album: Maverick Sabre - Don't Forget to Look UpThursday, 27 January 2022
Michael Stafford aka Maverick Sabre is the definition of a modern journeyman vocalist. Since 2008 he’s released three albums and appeared on a huge range of British and Irish rap, dubstep and drum’n’bass artists’ records. He’s had several top 40... Read more... |
Tessa Hadley: Free Love review - the Sixties, the suburbs and the hippie dreamTuesday, 25 January 2022
Free Love opens in 1967 and remains within that heady era throughout; no flashbacks, no spanning of generations as in Hadley's wonderful novels The Past or Late in the Day. Phyllis, aged 40, is a suburban housewife, C of E, deeply apolitical and a... Read more... |
LPO, Canellakis, Royal Festival Hall review - ecstatic sonorities at full peltMonday, 24 January 2022
This remarkable evening should really have been more remarkable still. The unfortunate pianist Cédric Tiberghien took an official pre-travel Covid test that obliged him to drop out at 5pm – even though, as he tweeted in frustration, three subsequent... Read more... |
David Suchet - Poirot And More, A Retrospective, Harold Pinter Theatre review - the much-loved actor looks backWednesday, 12 January 2022
In the 80s, An Audience With... gave a television studio to an actor who then recounted stories culled from a life in entertainment. The best subjects were the natural raconteurs with plenty to say - Billy Connolly, Barry Humphries, the incomparable... Read more... |
First Person: young composer Nicola Perikhanyan on a new immersive reality experience at London WallWednesday, 22 December 2021
There's something really moving about standing in the centre of London Wall's Roman ruins and looking up at the city that has grown around it. Thinking about our past, present and future simultaneously. More than 2000 years have passed since the... Read more... |
Peggy For You, Hampstead Theatre review - comedic gold, and a splinter of ice, from Tamsin GreigTuesday, 21 December 2021
Was Peggy Ramsay a “woman out of time”? The celebrated London literary agent, who nurtured the talents of at least one generation of British playwrights, surely counted as a legend in her own lifetime (she died in 1991). Has she lasted beyond it?... Read more... |
The Tiger Lillies' Christmas Carol: A Victorian Gutter, Southbank Centre review - cult band get inside Scrooge's headSaturday, 18 December 2021
Charles Dickens and Martyn Jacques is a marriage made in heaven (well, hell I suppose): the Victorian novelist touring the rookeries of Clerkenwell the better to fire his imagination and, 150 years or so later, the post-punk maestro mining London's... Read more... |
