By: Steve Dinneen

Life&Style Editor I'm the editor of City A.M. The Magazine, and editor of the daily newspaper's Life&Style section. We cover food, wine, going out, culture, technology and travel. I'm also the head judge of our Toast the City awards that celebrates hospitality in the Square Mile. Find me on X @steve_dinneen

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Far Away review: Chilling Caryl Churchill drama staged in 45 minutes is a breath of fresh air

February 14, 2020

In our current theatrical landscape, where three-hour plays are the norm and two-part, seven-hour epics are the height of sophistication, there’s something thrilling, almost transgressive about the sentence “45 minutes, straight through”. Caryl Churchill’s 2000 play Far Away is a poster-child for short-form story telling, trimming every ounce of fat, wasting not a single word. [...]
Endgame at the Old Vic review: Samuel Beckett double bill is delightfully taxing

February 7, 2020

There was a club night in Glasgow in the early 2000s called Optimo, which occasionally used the slogan: “You won’t like it, sugar” (taken from the lyrics of a Whitehouse track that you really shouldn’t google). It always struck me as a brilliant bit of marketing, at once embracing and ridiculing musical elitism. I can [...]
Daniel Isn’t Real review: Arnie Jr stars in this neon horror mashup

February 7, 2020

‘Keep your friends close and your imaginary friends closer’ could be the tagline for this psycho-horror starring the handsome young progeny of Arnold Schwarzenegger. It follows introverted law student Luke, whose childhood-trauma coping-mechanism, an invisible pal called Daniel, reemerges with violent intent. While Daniel Isn’t Real’s budget is relatively meagre, it brings to mind an [...]
Parasite movie review: Bong Joon Ho’s surreal social commentary is a work of rare genius

February 7, 2020

Over the last 90 years, the Academy has deigned to nominate just 10 foreign language films for the Best Picture gong, with none of them walking away with the gold statue. There’s an 11th in the running this year: Bong Joon Ho’s superlative Parasite. The director, whose oeuvre spans both Korean- (The Host, Mother) and [...]
Uncle Vanya at the Harold Pinter Theatre review: Toby Jones delivers an acting masterclass

January 31, 2020

Just as Dickens charted the plight of the underclass in Victorian England, Chekhov chronicled the slow collapse of the Russian aristocracy at the end of the 19th century. In Ian Rickson’s production of Uncle Vanya, adapted by award-winning playwright Conor McPherson, this breakdown is made literal, with trees winding through broken windows and vertiginous bookcases [...]
The Lighthouse film review: Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe shine in this tale of madness at sea

January 31, 2020

From kids’ TV show Round the Twist to video game Bioshock, popular culture has painted lighthouses as, at best, weird and spooky, and at worst responsible for the complete collapse of society. Well guess what: it’s yet another bad day for the lighthouse marketing department. Robert Eggers follows up his brilliant 2016 period horror The [...]
Mushrooms: The Art, Design and Future of Fungi at Somerset House – A celebration of humanity’s great, unsung alliance

January 31, 2020

There’s something about mushrooms that’s at once fascinating and horrifying. I remember opening a cupboard in an old flat and discovering a little field of pure-white mushrooms sprouting out of the carpet. Part of me was amazed that these strange things had taken up residence in my home, and part of me wanted to burn [...]
Faustus: That Damned Woman at the Lyric review – A flimsy gender-swapped adaptation

January 31, 2020

The drive in British theatre to stage more plays by and about women has led to a spate of gender-swapped classics, reexamining and recontextualising their patriarchal power dynamics. Christopher Marlowe’s snappily titled The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus is the latest, and, on paper, it’s an ideal candidate. As Chris [...]
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote review: Terry Gilliam goes balls-to-the-wall in this kaleidoscope of imagination

January 24, 2020

Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote begins with a title card: “After 25 years in the making… And unmaking”. He’s not kidding – Gilliam started work on the film in 1989, it entered full production almost a decade later with Johnny Depp starring, only to see illness and floods destroy the work and [...]
Picasso and Paper at the Royal Academy review: A daft name adorns a roller-coaster of form and imagination

January 24, 2020

With Picasso and Paper, the Royal Academy confirms what we have suspected all along: the diminutive Spaniard did, in fact, make use of the material we know as ‘paper’. Sometimes he drew on it, other times he cut it into funny shapes. You could never tell what he was going to do next, when it [...]

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The Lake District but thrilling, with yacht trips and 4×4 off-roading

By: Steve Dinneen

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