London
Sarah Kent
I’m a sucker for traditional vitrines and the procession of old style display cases installed by Ali Cherri in the Renaissance galleries of the Sainsbury Wing look very handsome.During his residency at the National Gallery, the Lebanese artist has been researching evidence of trauma in the collection. Of course, images of torture, murder and cruelty abound in paintings of the humiliation and crucifixion of Christ and the many martyrdoms portrayed in gory detail for the edification of the faithful. It’s amazing how we can gaze with disinterested curiosity at open wounds, severed heads or Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Mike Bartlett’s Cock invites suggestive comments, but the main thing about the play is that it has proved to be a magnet for star casting. Its original production at the Royal Court in 2009 starred Ben Whishaw, Andrew Scott and Katherine Parkinson. Now, this West End revival is performed by Jonathan Bailey, Taron Egerton and Phil Daniels. Reports that Rocketman star Egerton fainted during the first preview have raised public interest in a play whose explicit title, with or without an asterisk, seems particularly provocative in a commercial theatre setting. So what’s it all about?John, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The Merchant of Venice is a comedy, you say? Shakespeare, as ever, refuses to be confined to convenient boxes, his best plays’ extraordinary pliability and longevity a testament to the piercing eye he cast towards the slings and arrows that assail humankind. More than most of his works, The Merchant of Venice requires a director to take a stance, especially these days, so as to send the audience in a chosen direction. This is not unique - no text can. nor should, be sacred - but those decisions bubble closer to the surface in The Merchant than perhaps any other play in the canon. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Love is the most difficult four-letter word. And platonic love is perhaps the hardest kind of emotion to write well about. But it’s the central subject of Amanda Wilkin’s Shedding a Skin, and she describes it beautifully. This 2020 Verity Bargate award winning one-woman show, which has also been shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn prize, had a sell-out run in the summer of 2021, and now the Soho Theatre brings back this heartwarming story, whose effect is heightened because the playwright herself takes centre stage. Wilkin plays Myah, a mixed-race thirtysomething who loses her Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The main course of this Wigmore lunchtime concert was Brahms but I was lured in by the dessert: a rare chance in this country to hear the music of the French composer Guillaume Connesson. Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski and his international group also treated us to a newish piece by another Macedonian, Pande Shahov, in a nicely-proportioned programme that started with high seriousness and ended with a fluffy-light soufflé.Sadly I was unable to be there in person, but caught the stream on the Wigmore’s website – their streaming of concerts that began during Covid seems to have become a Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
With its violent storms, bombed out cities and stories of families ripped apart by war, Small Island feels very much like a play for our times. From its stunning opening, in which the frantic silhouettes of humans are interwoven with black-and-white footage of hurricane-swept palm trees, it whirls us into an epic tale of fractured dreams, fraught beginnings and a constant search for humanity amid hatred.Timely though it seems, this is of course the return of Rufus Norris’s 2019 production of Andrea Levy’s Orange-Prize-winning Windrush novel that traces the stories of two women – one born in Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Mark was teased about the fallout shelter at the bottom of his garden by his co-workers (that wasn’t the only thing – every friendship group has a target for micro-aggressions) but his foresight pays off when terrorists explode a suitcase bomb on a Friday evening. Louise, hungover after her leaving do, wakes up down there, Mark having rescued her from the rubble and sealed the door against the radiation. She faces 14 days locked down with him waiting for the air to clear.When the director Lyndsey Turner planned her revival of Dennis Kelly’s 2005 two-hander, she could hardly have expected the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We open on “Seventeen is Swell”, the antithesis of Janis Ian’s 70s angsty anthem, “At Seventeen”. Megan is living it large as the cheerleader’s leader with her football captain boyfriend, two loving if strict parents and a golden future of all-American domestic bliss ahead. In short, she has all her pom poms in a row.Well, except she doesn’t really enjoy the more intimate moments with the dim jock, Jared; she has pin-ups of Eva Herzigová where Johnny Depp should be; and she’s, horror upon horrors, a vegetarian! In the kind of Midwest town where you might expect Louis Theroux to turn up to Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Barbican’s Postwar Modern covers the period after World War Two when artists were struggling to respond to the horrors that had engulfed Europe and find ways of recovering from the collective trauma.Perhaps inevitably, a considerable amount of sturm und drang was produced by artists such as Alan Davie, Eduardo Paolozzi and Francis de Souza. Melodrama may have seemed appropriate as an expression of the despair and fatigue they experienced, but the work has weathered badly and now feels decidedly overblown.You could say that, as people emerging from a global pandemic, the last thing we need Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Football stories are never just about a game — they are also about life and how to live it. In Tyrell Williams’s Red Pitch, his debut play now getting an enthusiastically staging at the Bush Theatre after a shorter version wowed audiences at the Lyric Hammersmith in 2019, three young black teens meet at a five-a-side pitch in South London. They have different characters, but are united in a singular vision of what success means: being a star footballer and buying the best car in the neighbourhood. But, just as they are beginning on the journey to realise their dreams, that neighbourhood is Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“You could read at home,” says Bettina (Anoushka Chadha), Year 10, her school uniform perfectly pressed, hair neatly styled. “You could be an annoying little shit at home,” retorts her sister Asha (Safiyya Ingar), Year 13, all fire and fury in Doc Martens and rainbow headphones. Two Billion Beats, Sonali Bhattacharyya’s new play for the Orange Tree, draws us in with snappy lines and raucous energy before delivering an emotional wallop.Asha is waiting to go home until their mum has left for work so she doesn’t have to talk about her history essay. She got 85%, but her mum only cares about the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
It might seem odd to start with the encore, but I’ve never seen one like it. At the end of its two-night residency at the Festival Hall, having just romped through the rigours of The Rite of Spring, the players of the Budapest Festival Orchestra put their instruments down, shuffled to their feet and sang for us. Stravinsky’s humble, minute long Ave Maria made the perfect counterpoint to the violent paganism of the Rite, and the sound made by the untrained voices of these highly trained musicians added a vulnerability and sincerity to what had gone before.The two all-Stravinsky programmes that Read more ...