In the Black Fantastic is the most exciting exhibition of the year July 4, 2022 From the moment you enter In the Black Fantastic, the blockbuster new exhibition at the Hayward gallery, you can tell it’s something special. A giant sculpture made up of interlinking forearms stacked to the rafters snakes dramatically across the main concourse; to your left an entire wall is taken up by a kaleidoscopic collage filled [...]
Inside the brilliantly creative Glastonbury Theatre & Circus fields June 28, 2022 It’s not all about Macca and Billie Eilish, don’t you know? Some of Glastonbury’s best areas involve no music at all. For instance, the Theatre & Circus fields are some of the festival’s oldest areas, where performers surprise punters with spontaneous shows as they pass by, and there are full-scale acrobatics pieces that you’d pay [...]
Glastonbury 2022: Protest and celebration as festival roars back June 27, 2022 It’s been an anxious three years for Glastonbury, but this weekend the most important and influential of the UK’s music festivals, and one of the most essential stages in the world, returned for the first time since 2019. Did it rain? Of course it did – but only a little bit. Late afternoon crowds on [...]
Cost Of Living: Can A New Job Solve The Problem? June 26, 2022 Escalating costs are leaving many of us out of pocket. A new piece of research from networking group People Like Us and Censuswide has revealed that spiraling costs are affecting a huge segment of the UK workforce. Forty-nine percent of workers say they are now living from pay cheque to pay cheque, and 53% say [...]
A Doll’s House Part 2 at the Donmar is a welcome sequel to Ibsen’s classic June 24, 2022 A visit to A Doll’s House Part 2 prompts a question – why can’t we leave Nora alone? Lucas Hnath’s play at the Donmar Warehouse is just the latest in a long line of spinoffs based on Ibsen’s quintessential feminist text. The original A Doll’s House famously ends with Nora leaving her husband, Torvald, and, more [...]
Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is a joyous celebration of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll June 24, 2022 The life and times of Elvis Presley have been dramatised often over the years, from TV biopics to surreal fictional accounts such as 2002’s Bubba Ho-Tep. But a big budget biopic of one of the 20th century’s most famous figures has never been attempted until now. Directed by Baz Luhrmann with an eye-catching cast, Elvis [...]
That Is Not Who I Am at the Royal Court is weird and brilliant June 24, 2022 All is not what it seems in the Royal Court’s That Is Not Who I Am, an “internet thriller” directed by security industry veteran Dave Davidson. For a start, that isn’t really the name of the play – it’s called Rapture – and Dave Davidson doesn’t exist. It’s a bold gambit. From the outset the [...]
Jurassic Park’s sound designer reveals the secret sounds of the dinosaurs June 17, 2022 For sound designer Al Nelson, jobs don’t come much bigger than Jurassic Park. When the technician started out in the industry in the late nineties, one of his first big jobs was The Lost World, Steven Spielberg’s follow-up to Jurassic Park, the film which birthed the seismic dinosaur franchise. In the 25 years since, Nelson [...]
My Fair Lady review: Polished production lacks energy June 17, 2022 “Wouldn’t it be loverly,” Eliza Doolittle wonders in My Fair Lady, dreaming of a life of chocolate, heat and warm feet. Let me put it to Eliza: wouldn’t it also be ‘loverly’ if more musicals had the audacity to radically rethink their tired misogynistic plots like this version of My Fair Lady does? Musicals have [...]
Jitney review: Atmospheric and quietly revolutionary, but lacks plot June 17, 2022 August Wilson, who The New York Times described as “theater’s poet of Black America”, is having a moment. Fresh off the success of recent Oscarwinning film adaptations of his plays Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, we are now seeing a return to the London stage for Jitney, Wilson’s workplace drama, which won the Olivier [...]