London
Laura de Lisle
"It's gonna be the best golf course in the world," a man in an Aertex shirt and a bright red baseball cap is assuring us. "The best. I guarantee it." You can tell he's the kind of person who thinks talking quickly and loudly is the same thing as being right.If this sounds vaguely familiar, that's because Hannah Patterson's new play Eden, staged at the Hampstead Theatre Downstairs by Matthew Xia, is based on a true story, that of Donald Trump's luxury golf course in Aberdeenshire and the backlash it faced from local residents. Patterson transports the action to the fictional village of Eden, Read more ...
Heather Neill
Here's a recipe for a successful National Theatre production: take a well-loved classical comedy, employ an outstanding young director and a talented writer (so much the better if they have a proven track record together) and cast gold-standard actors, including, if possible, someone with a screen presence. What could possibly go wrong? Well, unfortunately, just such a promising mix fails to gel in Tartuffe. Director Blanche McIntyre and John Donnelly were responsible for a well-regarded tour of The Seagull in 2013, while favourite actors Olivia Williams, Kevin Doyle and Susan Engel are among Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was TV gold-dust. The original seven series of Only Fools and Horses were broadcast on BBC One from 1981-1991, and a string of Christmas specials kept the show running until 2003. It was showered with awards and critical acclaim, and in 1996 the episode "Time on Our Hands" drew a record-breaking 24.3 million viewers.This musical version at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, authored by Paul Whitehouse and Jim Sullivan (son of the show’s creator John Sullivan, who died in 2011), whisks us back to 1989, and deftly recreates the dodgy Peckham milieu of the Trotter family. This consists largely of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s 1945 and World War Two is nearly over. Somewhere in England, Fiona Symonds (“Feef” to her friends) is training to be a spy and be dropped behind enemy lines. Her training involves such amusements as being woken in the night by having a bucket of water chucked over her, then being interrogated by two fake German officers.But the end of the war in Europe brings Feef’s dreams of covert derring-do to a sudden halt. Wrapped in the arms of her American lover Peter McCormick (Matt Lauria), she wistfully laments that she now won’t be able to parachute into Germany and blow up bridges. Perhaps Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Venezuelan pianist and composer Gabriela Montero is an outspoken advocate for political change in her country, using her musical standing as a platform from which to highlight Venezuela’s "hijacking" by "forces of criminality, barbarism and nihilism". She also seeks to express this struggle through her own music and indeed, in this case, through the programming and staging of a whole concert. In this, she was broadly successful, although not unreservedly so.This concert, with the strings of the Scottish Ensemble, was centred around Montero’s 2018 quasi-piano concerto Babel, surrounded by Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Imagine for a moment that you are at, say, the Derby. It’s pretty good. But then in flies Pegasus, the mythical winged horse. What happens?We need to talk about these rare moments of almost inexplicable magic in concerts, because unless I’m massively mistaken, that is one crucial factor that keeps us going to them. Perhaps you’ve witnessed one. Something happens. Some might say that a spirit descends. An atmosphere comes to surround us and we all sense it, musicians and audience alike, and we lose ourselves in it together. Welcome to Milton Court’s evening with the Doric String Quartet and Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“No one wants a pervert for a daughter,” thinks Marnie (delightful TV newcomer Charly Clive), a 24-year-old from the Scottish Borders, who has intrusive thoughts. Don’t we all? But relentless graphic images about “fucked-up sex” have been messing with Marnie’s head since the age of 14, most recently featuring her mum (Arabella Weir) and dad, which rather puts her off her stride when she’s trying to give a nice speech at their anniversary party.It’s like The Sixth Sense, she says, but instead of seeing dead people she sees naked ones, usually having sex, occasionally involving animals. This Read more ...
Katherine Waters
The heart of the V&A’s sumptuous Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams is a room dedicated to the workmanship of the fashion house’s ateliers. A mirrored ceiling reflects dazzling strip-lit cases which hold the ghosts of ballgowns, slips and jackets — adjusted prototypes, haute couture maquettes — made in white toile by the seamstresses of Dior’s Paris studios before they begin work on the final garment. The pieces tower overhead, stacked in an apparently infinite iteration of shoulders, waists and necklines, cuffs. Over here’s a grouping with jester fastenings, over there, jerkin Read more ...
Ellie Porter
“Don’t love me yet,” replies Patti Smith to the first of tonight’s many excitable shout-outs. “Who knows, after 20 minutes you might be gone!” An unlikely scenario, given that this show – part of the Roundhouse’s annual “In the Round” series, which also features Ronnie Spector and Shirley Collins – sold out in nanoseconds and is packed with rapt fans. It’s billed as “An Evening of Words and Music”, but if you’ve ever seen Patti Smith before you’ll know that this combination is pretty much a given (I don’t think I’ll ever forget Smith's furious performance of Allen Ginsberg's “Footnote to Howl Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The title comes from a slogan used in a 1920s newspaper ad for Weinberg’s, a gramophone, record and sheet music shop in Brick Lane. Readers saw the words in Yiddish though. Brick Lane was central to London’s Jewish East End and those who lived in the area after the escaping the eastern European pogroms of the late 19th century brought their popular culture with them – a popular culture which, like any other arriving here, evolved and enriched Britain.Music is the Most Beautiful Language in the World: Yiddisher Jazz in London's East End 1920s–1950s collects British Jewish-themed jazz and dance Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
On Drums was inhabited by a parade of fine-looking young and middle aged multi-ethnic anglophone drummers, all introduced by Stewart Copeland, the American drummer of the Police. In vintage film and contemporary interviews his chosen musicians seemed almost invariably fit and trim whatever the substances ingested in the past. Presumably touring schedules and the sheer physical effort (only temporarily supplanted, it turns out, by Roger Linn’s 1980s invention of drum machines) of banging the instruments kept our musicians in good nick.Copeland suggested that percussionists, sitting behind Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Fired by the spirit of the MR James ghost stories which used to be a Christmas staple on the BBC, Mark Gatiss conceived this amusing bonne bouche as both a seasonal chiller and a nod to the ghost of broadcasting past. In passing, he also managed to shoehorn in a survey of changes in social and sexual mores which have occurred over the last 40 years.His vehicle for this was the venerable thespian Aubrey Judd, host of the long-running radio show The Dead Room when he's not picking up TV bit-parts as "dementia man 2". As he described it himself, in his fulsome and fruity and r-rolling baritone Read more ...