London
joe.muggs
Metronomy have gone all out to knock off their quirky corners here, and goodness, it’s worked. It’s quite a move from a band whose eccentricity has always been part and parcel of their image – and they really haven’t done it by halves, in fact they’ve brought themselves a lot closer to their peers and near-peers in the process. But somehow, by zooming in on the archetypal, risking losing unique character, this album really demonstrates the level of talent that Metronomy main man Joe Mount really has. It’s been a roundabout route here – this is the seventh Metronomy album in 16 years Read more ...
David Nice
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 Whishaw – how happy Kay must have been about that – does relatively few lines to camera and what was essentially a diary has been shaped into a seven-part drama.It just about manages to balance horrors with human warmth and springs a few shocks even on those who’ve read the book or seen Kay’s show.An apparent bombshell was dropped recently by Read more ...
aleks.sierz
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 as possible. First staged in 2018, and subsequently revived several times nationwide, Jessica L Hagen’s debut play has been adapted by Ryan Calais Cameron and now visits the Soho Theatre in London.The show was loosely inspired by a particularly grotesque incident which happened in September 2015, when two women from a group of four were turned away Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
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 Guide to the Galaxy film. But although it sounds forbidding as a concept it is anything but in performance, where it is engrossing, textured, emotionally engaging and dramatic. Path of Miracles is a mighty sing, and an ambitious project for any choir to take on, but the Elysian Singers tackled it with commitment and skill.Path of Miracles was Read more ...
Graham Fuller
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 countryside sex; thematically, it anticipated the current critical favorite The Lost Daughter by nine years.Amulet, Garai's first feature as writer-director, builds substantially on that promise. A neo-Gothic horror film, it tells the story of an educated European refugee Tomaz (Alec Secăreanu), who’s surviving in London by taking dangerous Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
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, but his mesmerising performance isn’t enough to make sense out of Morris’s inscrutable script.Fidel (Ofoegbu, pictured below) is decluttering, shredding documents he doesn’t need anymore. He stumbles across a page of biology notes, and starts testing himself on parts of the body: hypothalamus, oesophagus, carotid canal. He scrawls the words in Read more ...
joe.muggs
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 singles and streams into the tens, even hundreds of millions on tracks, but he hasn’t necessarily got the name recognition of some of his contemporaries.Maybe it’s that range that’s the issue: he has an instantly recognisable voice, but given that he spans soul, rap and the kind of grand sweep Celtic romanticism that almost puts him in Lewis Capaldi Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
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 contented mother of two.She likes L’Air du Temps perfume (one of Hadley’s Sixties tropes: Jill, a character in The Past, also uses it), loves the panelled oak doors in her hallway, and has a special bond with her nine-year-old son, Hugh.Hadley’s eighth novel is as absorbing as any of her other fiction, with complex family secrets, brilliant insights Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
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 lateral flow tests came out negative. Such is concert life in the Covid era. Nobody could be expected to find a replacement to perform Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand at two hours’ notice, so the work was dropped. Still, what remained made up in sheer wow-factor what it lacked in duration. Entitled “Poems of Ecstasy”, the programme Read more ...
Gary Naylor
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 Kenneth Williams - and it's a testament to the format's longevity that Adele did one as recently as November. With a few crucial differences, David Suchet - Poirot And More, A Retrospective captures the warmth and easy pleasures of that much-loved format.Two chairs, placed the required two metres apart on stage, set the tone for the evening: Read more ...
First Person: young composer Nicola Perikhanyan on a new immersive reality experience at London Wall
Nicola Perikhanyan
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 Romans created our city, and while much has changed there's still so much consistency in how our society exists, both the beauty and the flaws. As a civilisation, how far have things really shifted?London is a city of contrasts, it's a city you can never tire of because it's constantly evolving and every layer of its history contributes to its Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
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?That the stories relating to her professional life – the personal life was kept much more off limits – around her celebrated office off St Martin’s Lane, up those flights of stairs, have lived on is due not least to Alan Plater’s 1999 drama Peggy For You in which he (one of the hundreds of writers on Ramsay’s roster, of course) imagines a day in the Read more ...