Reading Time: 3 minutesWell acted and thoughtfully staged, though a little heavy-handed with its sincerity Four women, one birthday, three decades. Evelyn (Jess Dix) is turning something across childhood, adolescence and adulthood with every version of the party played out…
Reading Time: 2 minutesFour Mondays running now, Upstairs at Ronnie Scott's has now become a standing appointment for me. Classical Mondays sits a little oddly against the club's usual late-night jazz pulse but never fails to shine.
Ben Goldscheider, Callum Smart and Richard Uttley have been playing together since 2017, almost a decade of creating an authentic and smooth dynamic. They opened with Mozart's Horn Quintet in E-flat, reworked for their line-up which almost became a quiet tribute, as we learnt Mozart himself once lodged across Firth Street during his London years.
Reading Time: 2 minutesSappho has always been more myth than woman. The premise announces itself early on when Sappho (Charlotte Boyle), visiting us some the past, parallels trees falling in forests to lesbians going unrecorded, letting the audience know the play’s premise in ancient Greece is less of a history lesson rather than a rom-com populated with birthdays, housewarmings and the ordinary social churn of an island where everyone seems to know everyone else's business.
Reading Time: 3 minutesWatching a woman who cannot stop watching herself produces its own vertigo. Written by Heather Woodhouse and directed by TJ Roderick, In His Words is an exercise in mise en abyme, a Russian-doll structure where a story folds a smaller version of itself inside its own frame.
Reading Time: 2 minutesVivaldi wrote The Four Seasons for the girls of the Ospedale della Pietà, the Venetian orphanage where he taught and where his young female students were both his orchestra and his inspiration.
Reading Time: 3 minutesMahler’s therapy session, staged first and then played flawlessly from memory A cuckoo call, and a timpanist who fluffed his cue in front of several thousand people – Aurora Orchestra’s Mahler’s First By Heart had all the…
Reading Time: 2 minutesFin is a courier by day, an illustrator by ambition and permanently one bad shift away from admitting neither is working out. She's a protagonist engineered to represent an entire generation's inability to hit any of the milestones it was promised in career, relationship or a deposit on a flat. Between the gig economy grind, the on-off boyfriend and the Catholic parents bracing for news they don't want, the premise is the familiarity of overhearing a friendgroup's chat.
Reading Time: 2 minutesHarmony, population 375, is the kind of town where everyone knows everyone's business, until a stranger disrupts their usual routines. Matthew Bourne's The Car Man is Grease meets Carmen, in 1950s varsity jackets, cigarette smoke, girls-versus-boys posturing where the toxic masculinity is the engine block. With a stranger blowing into town and a marriage already curdling on the vine, Harmony is one Man Wanted sign away from combustion.
Reading Time: 2 minutesBirkby strides on in full 90s guru dressed in a blazer and equipped with a remote cocked like a weapon, fully ready to teach the room how to dominate its destiny, or at least asking the audience, do we ever have control?
Reading Time: 2 minutesOld friends, new tricks, and the flugelhorn as the unbilled third lead. Friends who have known each other from school make the best duos; Whitehead and Milne prove it within seconds of Gershwin’s Three Preludes. A cheeky…