Things to do in London today

The great Irish playwright Conor McPherson returns from his long absence with a bang this year. Next up at the Old Vic is a return for his hit Dylan’s musical Girl from the North Country; later this autumn he’s the adapting playwright for the stage version of The Hunger Games. But before that is what the real McPherson heads have been waiting for: The Brightening Air, his first original play since The Night Alive in 2013. It’s a slow, wistful start, the dial firmly tuned to ‘Chekhov’. The setting is a semi-dilapidated County Sligo farmhouse, at some point in the ‘80s. McPherson - who also directs - meticulously builds up a sprawling cast of characters centring on the trio of siblings who inherited the farm from their father. There’s intense, troubled Stephen (Brian Gleeson), who does most of the running of the place; there’s train-mad Billie (Rosie Sheehy), whose tar-thick accent and general lairiness briefly distracts you from the fact she’s obviously on the spectrum and incapable of independent living; and there’s Dermot (Chris O’Dowd), a deeply annoying, reasonably successful businessman. Dermot has long since moved out, but the occasion of their reunion is the arrival of their uncle Pierre (Seán McGinley), a blind, discredited priest who they regard with a mix of fondness and pity.  McPherson probably has a couple more characters than he strictly speaking needs here, but it’s still deft stuff, a slow-burn, bittersweet drama about a family finally disintegrating under...

I choose to believe that the name of Mohamed-Zain Dada’s new drama about a speed awareness course in Birmingham is a nod to the seminal Keanu Reeves ‘90s thriller of the same name. Okay, it would have to be an ironic nod. But not as ironic as you might think. Speed starts off in wilfully mundane Britcom territory, but ends up somewhere rather more Reeves-friendly. Harleen, Samir and Faiza are a mismatched trio of British Asians who’ve each acquired nine points on their driving licences. This course is their last chance: get through it, and they have a reprieve. Don’t, and there’s no more driving for the foreseeable. Unfortunately they have to contend with Nikesh Patel’s stupendously annoying Abz, the course leader.  Like the ungodly offspring of Alan Partridge and Pauline from League of Gentlemen, Abz spouts patronising cliches and wields his leverage over the group like a cudgel: if they don’t go along with his course they can kiss driving bye bye. Nonetheless, he seems to genuinely want to help them better themselves. But what’s with his bizarre, therapy-like techniques? Why does he keep running off to answer his phone? And it is weird that everyone here is Asian? No spoilers, but despite the fact we never leave Tomás Palmer’s magnificently mundane hotel function room set (complete with a real fish tank), Dada takes us on quite a journey over 80 minutes.  At first the playwright simply has fun with the characters and the set up. Patel’s uptight Abz is a lot of fun of...

What is a portrait, really? What is its role? And what makes it different from ‘just’ a photograph of a person? These are all questions that spring to mind when walking around A Thousand Small Stories, the first ever retrospective of Eileen Perrier’s photography. Since the 1990s, the London-born photographer has used her camera to capture individuals in their local communities, and this show highlights some of her finest work.  In ‘Red Gold and Green’ – a series of pictures taken of British Ghanaians in their London homes – Perrier sets up rolls of fabric in block colours, matching the Ghanaian flag, acting as a DIY professional backdrop. But elements of their private lives sneak into shot, adding a sense of intimacy: we spot framed family pictures, a vinyl collection and other nicknacks, like a Hendon rotary club wall hanging. The result feels personal, as though the family home is an extension of the self. Discrete references to the formal rituals of portraiture – the dreaded school photo day, an awkward extended-family get together – continue throughout her practice. In ‘Nation’, a series of photographs of commuters on the Paris metro in 1999, plasticky red seating doubles as a background, uniting the windswept strangers in their shared surroundings. In ‘Peckham Square Studio’, she uses Victorian photography techniques, with a hidden headrest for the sitters – but the photographs aren’t uptight, they’re vibrant, with a movement and cleanness that feels hyper-modern. ...

Great news for all young Egyptologists: there’s a wonderfully educational temporary exhibition currently running in London devoted to all things Ancient Egypt, that offers genuine insight into this most iconic of cultures via its informative displays and genuine awe via the copious numbers of thousands of years old artefacts on display. But enough about the Young V&A’s excellent Making Egypt exhibition. I’m here to talk about Tutankhamun: The Immersive Exhibition, a globe-trotting VR-enhanced attraction nominally devoted to the eponymous boy king of the eighteenth dynasty. How to put this? I’m not sure you’re likely to learn a lot, and there is something slightly dispiriting about the early sections, which are basically a standard museum-style experience except all the objects on display are gaudy replicas. I never really felt like I found out that much about Tutankhamun or the culture he came from at all, though the exhibition is better on Howard Carter, the eccentric British archaeologist who located the tomb in 1922.  However, after a couple of rooms, it gives up pretending to be a straight-up exhibition. In rapid succession we’re hit by a balls trippy 30-minute immersive film vaguely themed around Egyptian myths of creation and death; an even weirder VR film in which we’re cast as Tutankhamun himself, newly woken up in the afterlife; a ‘holographic’ film about mummification; and a more immersive second VR in which we can potter around the big man’s tomb. It kept my...

This review is from 2024. What a long, strange trip it’s been. Indie-folk musician Anaïs Mitchell’s musical retelling of the Orpheus story began life in the mid-’00s as a lo-fi song cycle, which she gigged around New England before scraping the money together to record it as a critically acclaimed 2010 concept album that featured the likes of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and Ani DiFranco on guest vocals as the various mythological heroes and villains. Going through the next 14 years blow-by-blow would be time-consuming, but in short thanks to what I can only describe as THEATRE MAGIC, Hadestown is now a full-blown musical directed by the visionary Rachel Chavkin, its success as a show vastly outstripping that of the record. It played the National Theatre in 2018, on its way to becoming the most unusual Broadway smash of the modern era. And it’s finally come back to us. Now in a normcore West End theatre, its otherness feels considerably more pronounced than it did at the NT. The howling voodoo brass that accompanies opener ‘Road to Hell’ is like nothing else in Theatreland. Mitchell”s original songs are still there but have mutated and outgrown the original folk palette thanks to the efforts of arrangers Michael Chorney and Todd Sickafoose. Rachel Hauck’s set – which barely changes – is a New Orleans-style saloon bar, with the cast all dressed like sexy Dustbowl pilgrims. It’s virtually sung through. It is essentially a staged concert, but it’s done with such pulsing musical...

This review is from 2013. Brace yourself for a shock: ‘South Park’ creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Broadway-munching musical is not particularly shocking. Sure, there are ‘fucks’ and ‘cunts’ and gags about baby rape – but most of it is deployed ironically; beneath it all, this is a big-hearted affair that pays note-perfect homage to the sounds and spirit of Broadway’s golden age. The strapping young Latter Day Saints missionaries in ‘The Book of Mormon’ are as cartoonish as any ‘South Park’ character, with the endearing alpha-male woodenness of the ‘Team America’ puppets. In other words, they are loveable, well-intentioned idiots, traversing the globe like groups of pious meerkats, convinced they can convert the heathen through sheer politeness. And if they have doubts, then as Stephen Ashfield’s scene-stealingly repressed Elder McKinley declares in glorious faux-Gershwin number ‘Turn it Off’, ‘Don’t feel those feelings – hold them in instead!’ His advice is ignored by the show’s heroes, narcissistic, highly-strung Elder Price (Gavin Creel) and dumpy, lying Elder Cunningham (Jared Gertner). The pair are sent to Uganda in an effort to convert a village to Mormonism, a religion that essentially tells the penniless villagers how great distant America is. The locals are not keen: Price cracks and unwisely clashes with a crazed local warlord; Cunningham makes up his own version of Mormonism which involves fucking frogs to cure oneself of Aids. ‘The Book of Mormon’ is,...

Interview: Robert Icke ‘if theatre isn’t astonishing, what’s the point?’ Robert Icke made his name directing boldly reimagined takes on some of the greatest plays ever written: Hamlet, Professor Bernhardi, The Oresteia and last year’s Oedipus (which cleared up during this year’s theatre award season). Despite the sense that he has genuinely added something to millennia old works, it’s still a big deal to make his debut as a ‘proper’ playwright. Even his most outrageous rewrites have had somebody else’s ideas at their core. Manhunt, his play about Raoul Moat, is all him. And to be clear – and I’m going to shock you here – it’s not as good as Hamlet. Nonetheless, after a tentative start where it looks like it’s going to serve as a sort of well-intended apologia for Moat, Manhunt really settles down into something compellingly weird. It’s an examination of toxic masculinity, yes, but in the same kind of way that Moby Dick is an examination of toxic masculinity. The early stages see Samuel Edward-Cook’s triple-jacked double-stacked Moat in the dock for a variety of changes. If you have any familiarity with his short, brutal, bitterly absurd rampage across the north east, you’ll get that this trial can’t possibly have happened – it’s a vague existential framing device designed to get Icke’s Moat to defend his actions almost from the off.  There is undeniably something gauche about his pleading about the state of his mental health and hard childhood. And there’s a level of...

This review is from 2022. My Neighbour Totoro is now running at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in the West End with a mostly new cast. Studio Ghibli’s 1988 cartoon masterpiece My Neighbour Totoro is a stunningly beautiful, devastatingly charming film, in which not a huge amount happens per se.  It follows two young sisters who move to the countryside with their dad and basically get up to a lot of extremely normal things… while also fleetingly encountering a succession of astounding otherworldly creatures, most notably Totoro, a gigantic furry woodland spirit, and the Cat Bus, a cat that is also a bus (or a bus that is also a cat, whatever). Its most iconic scene involves young heroines Mei and Satsuki waiting at a bus stop, and Totoro shuffling up behind them, chuckling at their umbrella (a new concept to him) and then hopping on his unearthly public transport. So if you’re going to adapt it for the stage you’re going to have to absolutely nail the puppets you use to portray Totoro and co.  The RSC absolutely understood the brief here, although you’ll have to take my word for it, as for this first ever stage adaption – by Tom Morton-Smith, overseen by legendary Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi – the company hasn’t allowed a single publicity photo of a single puppet (bar some chickens) to be released.  Nonetheless, the puppets – designed by Basil Twist, assembled by Jim Henson's Creature Workshop – are fucking spectacular. They have to be fucking spectacular because that’s the...

Though you can buy all of Michael Bond’s books in the gift shop, let’s be clear here: the Paddington Bear Experience has very little to do with the first 50 or so years of the marmalade-loving ursine’s existence. Rather, the lavish new central London immersive experience makes no bones about fact it’s a live extension of the world of the two (soon to be three) StudioCanal movies. Theoretically I suppose that’s a shame. Debuting in print in 1958, Paddington has a rich history and London’s first proper attraction dedicated to him doesn’t explore it at all. But who are we kidding here? The Paul King films are modern masterpieces, and Paddington would be left as a beloved but past-his-prime nostalgia character if it weren’t for them. He’d have his little statue at the station. But nothing like this. You don’t absolutely need to have seen the films, but there are countless callbacks to them in this gentle adventure, which essentially an immersive theatre show. As we begin by waiting at a small recreation of Paddington Station to board our train to Windsor Gardens, we’re serenaded by a pre-recorded version of the band from the films playing ‘London is the Place for Me’; when we make it to Windsor Gardens for this year’s Marmalade Day Festival, designer Rebecca Brower has faithfully recreated the entire downstairs of the Brown’s boho Notting Hill pad. And then of course there’s Paddington himself - constantly teased as just out of full sight, his prerecorded voice would seem to...

In the unlikely event you were worried a leap to the stage for JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series would result in it becoming aggressively highbrow, self-consciously arty or grindingly bereft of magical high jinks, just chill the hell out, muggle.  ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ is an absolute hoot, a joyous, big-hearted, ludicrously incident-packed and magic-heavy romp that has to stand as one of the most unrelentingly entertaining things to hit the West End. Writer Jack Thorne, director John Tiffany and a world-class team have played a blinder; if the two-part, five-hour-plus show is clearly a bit on the long side, it’s forgivable. ‘The Cursed Child’ emphatically exists for fans of Harry Potter, and much of its power derives from the visceral, often highly emotional impact of feeling that you’re in the same room as Rowling’s iconic characters.  There’s also a sense that this story of wizards and witches is being treated with the respect its now substantially grown-up fanbase craves. No disrespect to D-Rad and chums, but the leads here are in a different acting league to their film counterparts’: Jamie Parker and Alex Price are superb as battered, damaged, middle-aged versions of old enemies Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. Sam Clemmett and Anthony Boyle are a fine, puppyish, sympathetic engine to the play as their awkward sons Albus and Scorpius, trying to escape their parents’ shadows. It is a bit of a sausage (wand?) fest in terms of the lead parts, although in the...