Richard III at Almeida Theatre: Ralph Fiennes puts the bunch-backed toad and the bottled spider into Shakespeare’s villain June 17, 2016 Richard III | Almeida | ★★★★★ Richard III is the ideal play for these post-facts times, where rhetoric is no longer anchored to reality and fear is the prevailing political currency. We approach a referendum whose result will be decided by whichever apocalyptic vision of the future the public chooses to believe. Across the pond a [...]
Tale of Tales film review: Salma Hayek is brilliant in this gory fairytale June 17, 2016 Tale of Tales | Dir. Matteo Garrone | ★★★★☆ Italian film maker Matteo Garrone, best known for his realist Mafia drama Gomorrah, makes a surprising choice for his English language debut in this 17th century fairytale. We follow the interweaving stories of three monarchs – an ageing ruler (Toby Jones) who acquires a strange [...]
Soul at Hackney Empire review: This play about the life of Marvin Gaye fails to hit any high notes June 17, 2016 Soul | Hackney Empire | ★☆☆☆☆ On April Fools Day, 1984, Marvin Gaye was shot and killed by his father in the house they shared. Gaye’s was a life ripe for drama, and Roy Williams’ new play explores it, seeking to answer the questions essential to understanding the man. Who was Marvin Gaye? Why [...]
Where You’re Meant to Be Film review: Arab Strap singer Aiden Moffat meditates on life, death, rivalry and the cultural importance of music June 17, 2016 Where You're Meant To Be | Dir. Paul Fegan | ★★★★☆ This wistful documentary about a folk-music tour by former Arab Strap singer Aiden Moffat starts out as a road trip but becomes a meditation on life, death, rivalry and the cultural importance of music. The voice-over, delivered in Moffat’s distinctive dry prose, is [...]
Long Way North film review: Beautiful animation hides an age-old story June 17, 2016 Long Way North | Dir. Rémi Chayé | ★★☆☆☆ Long Way North is at its best when nothing’s happening. The French-Danish animation, set in St Petersburg and voiced in English, unfurls languidly, idling over shots of the sun setting over the Winter Palace, or seagulls slowly circling a ship adrift in a blue ocean. The [...]
Late Night at the Barbican review: a surreal mesh of dance, sorrow and economic woe June 17, 2016 Late Night | Barbican | ★★★★☆ Three couples sit in the wreckage of a music hall. A song comes on and they start to dance, expressionless, waltzing in neat circles around each other. Every so often one breaks ranks to stand before a microphone and deliver opaque lines of dialogue. Europe has fallen. War and [...]
These 23 London restaurants just won awards for their wine lists June 17, 2016 We all know London is a city of booze-lovers – but that's just been made official, after 23 of its restaurants were awarded honours at the Wine List Awards. That makes the capital's wine lists the second best in the world. London eateries including St John, Dinner by Heston and The Ledbury were given three-star [...]
Focus On Bloomsbury: House prices are blooming marvellous in this intellectual corner of central London June 16, 2016 Bloomsbury conjures up images of fusty intellectuals like former residents Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, EM Forster and John Maynard Keynes. Home to austere, prestigious institutions like the British Museum, the Royal Portrait Gallery and University College London, it isn’t necessarily somewhere you’d think of moving to. But the recent clamour for central London property has [...]
The Affordable Art Fair in Hampstead is the savvy way to buy original art without breaking the bank – and we can get you in for less June 16, 2016 If you, like me, didn’t quite make it to Art Basel in Switzerland or Design Miami in the States this weekend, then a day out at the Affordable Art Fair (AAF) in Hampstead is a great , wallet-friendly alternative. Each year AAF happens all over the world, from Milan to New York, Singapore to Seoul, [...]
Opinion: Why canny investors need only look for co-working spaces to find London’s housing hotspots June 16, 2016 London’s biggest employment story during the last decade is Tech City, surrounding Old Street Roundabout. In recent years Tech City has undergone significant redevelopment, with investment from companies such as Cisco, Facebook, Google, Intel and McKinsey & Co. Now the third largest tech cluster in the world, it generates 27 per cent of London job [...]