Barbican Centre

What do you do when your world is falling apart? When regimes are oppressing, corporations are exploiting, society is crumbling and economies are collapsing? Well, you can fight, you can make art, or you can just live. The Indian artists in the Barbican’s big autumn show do all three. In 1975, India declared a state of emergency and suspended democracy; in 1998, it developed nuclear weapons. The 25 years in between were decades of total tumult, which all of the art here tries in some way to address. It’s a dizzyingly varied show. Navjot Altaf’s monochrome images of fists and mobs are angry, punk politicism, while Pablo Bartholomew’s photographs of parties and families are tender everyday intimacy. Nalini Malani’s early video work is a subtle, semi-abstract expression of disillusionment and anger, while Sudhir Patwardhan’s paintings are desperate critiques of rampant, destructive urbanisation. All these different approaches all still similarly moving stories.  Other works show people trying to live, to get by, in difficult times; the everyday scenes of Gieve Patel’s paintings, the gay men just existing next to landmarks in a country where homosexuality was a punishable offence in Sunil Gupta’s photos. There’s a tangible sense of nostalgia and grief India was a place in flux, and places in flux need moulding, influencing, like in Sheba Chhachhi’s portraits of female activists. But in all this turbulence, things are lost, and there’s a tangible sense of nostalgia and grief to a

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum has cast you as an extra in a tense, hazy film about alienation, love and murder. She’s built a series of plywood film sets in the Barbican Curve, and filled them with rough, bare paintings, each one detailing a grim, uncomfortable narrative arc. A woman arrives in some generic colonial outpost of wide open, empty landscapes and claustrophobic buildings. The sets recreate the outlines of a house, then a bedroom. In the paintings, awkward looks are exchanged, relationships are strained, washing is hung, a knife is brandished.  Lovers share a cigarette under the sheets, then a body is found on a porch. The final set is a courthouse, the paintings depict only white jurors. All these riffs on film noir, femme fatales and murder mysteries tell a story of otherness, alienation and injustice. The implied narrative is full of anger and violence and jealousy in a colony watched over and controlled by an uncaring dominant culture. The ideas are good, but the execution falls flat. The paintings are a bit shoddy and unfinished, and the sets are plain, dull plywood. It feels rushed, more like a sketch than the final thing, more like a storyboard than a full movie.

I live in Bromley, the actual suburbia in Hanif Kureishi’s seminal debut novel The Buddha of Suburbia. And when I read the book, wickedly funny and weirdly sexy as it is, I always envisaged it as set in a drab and melancholy minor key world of browns and greys, not – I’ll be honest – dissimilar to the present day borough. But in Emma Rice’s typically freewheeling adaptation for the RSC and her own Wise Children company, ’70s Bromley is daubed in gobs of Technicolor – plus, admittedly, quite a lot of brown and grey – for a gleeful joyride of a show that heavily leans into the more Dionysian side of Kureishi’s writing, supercharging the semi-autobiographical story of Karim, a sexually omnivorous mixed-race young man coming of age in the second half of the decade  Playing the ebullient Karim, the infinitely charming Dee Ahluwalia begins the show at a mic, addressing us with a stand-up’s swagger as he sets the scene for a chaotic hurtle through some very formative years that begin as his Pakistani dad – the titular ‘Buddha’ – embarks upon an affair with the boho neighbour, while Karim simultaneously has it off with her preening son. An awful lot happens in Kureishi’s novel of race, class and sexuality, and Rice manages to cram most of it in, in a story that leaps giddily from the woes of Karim’s parents to the complicated life of his hardcore feminist best friend Jamila (Natasha Jayetileke) - whose father goes on hunger strike to coerce her into marrying the adorably hapless Chan

CRIPtic Arts artistic director Jamie Hale helms a meta-showcase for four exciting leftfield disabled theatre makers.

Although it’s provided a steady pipeline of new plays – including the all conquering ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ – the RSC hasn’t transferred a single Shakespeare to London since 2019. The pandemic and the success of ‘Totoro’ can reasonably be blamed for that. But it’s a treat to have it back with the Bard: the Globe is great but its productions are neccessarily somewhat rough and ready; the RSC offers a slicker, bigger budget take on Shakespeare and it’s great to get both. Transferring to the Barbican straight after Emma Rice’s acclaimed ‘The Buddha of Suburbia’, Eleanor Rhodes’s production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ was praised for its surreal freshness when it debuted in Stratford back in February. Casting for this transfer is TBC.

Classical music impresario Raymond Gubbay presents his annual handpicked selection of music for the festive season. Highlights include the Christmas carol singalong (Dec 17), Love Actually with live orchestra (Dec 21), Beethoven's Ninth (Dec 28), the music of Zimmer vs Willimas (Dec 31), and the New Year's Day Proms. All set to take place in the Barbican's lovely hall, these musical picks are a classy, Christmassy way to spend an evening. 

It’s a pretty damn starry start to 2025 over at the Barbican, as producers Wessex Grove lure legendary German theatremaker Thomas Ostermeier back over to London – following last year’s An Enemy of the People – to craft his first original British show. And what a cast: the legend that is Cate Blanchett will star as vain, insecure middle aged actress Arkadina in a new version of Chekhov’s early masterpiece by Ostermeier and Duncan Macmillan. Tom Burke will play her writer lover Trigorin, with Emma Corrin as the young actress Nina who becomes infaturated with him. They’ll be joined by Priyanga Burford (Polina), Zachary Hart (Medvedenko), Paul Higgins (Shamrayev), Tanya Reynolds (Masha), Kodi Smit-McPhee (Konstantin) and Jason Watkins (Sorin). It’s a stunning cast, but don’t go expecting a trad production from provocateur Ostermeier – his interpretation of the play is liable to be as much a talking point as anything Blanchett does, no matter how spectacular.