Almeida Theatre Now I am a history girlie, chuck me a bustle, a hoop skirt, a cod piece (cheeky) or a corset and I’m blissful. However uncomfortably, I am a feminist, and so often the voices of women are absent or drowned out from the past. Enter Ava Pickett! As the suddenly sandalled masses of Islington shuffle into the theatre, ...

Barbican Centre When London feels like it’s having a hot grey bowl of diffused sunlight pressed down upon it, many flee to the AC-wafted basement of the Barbican. But what is clicking along down there pulls more of a crowd than just those on the hunt for a cool troglodyte refuge. Samuel Beckett returns to one of his historic homes. ...

Barbican Hall We the assembled shuffle in our finery, clothes dancing with embroidered jasmine and cherry blossom. We wait, breath baited for the glowing diamond of classical music: Lang Lang, unassuming in black with a shock of dark hair, pacing on stage to weave the piano magic we have heard so much about. Starting playing at 3 this man is ...

Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club Another queer venue to be struck down: Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club is tottering, reopening, and running but with the shadow of eviction looming. However, some heavy hitters (Equality) have rallied behind the banner, an online campaign, swell in support, and there is a tentative future. So, on a balmy spring Monday evening I waited ...

Trafalgar Theatre 210 years ago Jane Austen published Emma.180 years later in classic 90s fashion it was America-fied into the film Clueless, and a mere 30 years after it has leaped genre once again on stage in another brat-turned-benevolent-branching. Now I have had my fair share of eighties/nighties remembrance recently. In the last year, I have seen beloved films known ...

Theatre Royal Stratford East What flutters into your mind when you think of Valentine’s Day? Cards, chocolates, overpriced steak? Or in antithesis Galentines Day? Fuzzy friendship and nothing even remotely resembling a heart? But unless you are a certain brand of political zealot, revolution, dissolution and talking animals aren’t top of the list.  Come the 14th of February, my partner ...

Arcola Theatre Breathing: involuntary, critical, and often taken for granted. Diane Samuel’s premiere starts with the familiar in-and-out heaving of meditation. Gonging steel pan drums and a lead facedown in lotus position unfurl to a convulsive tale of Europe’s greatest shame and the essence of life itself. Isabella Van Braeckel proves that a basement doesn’t have to be limiting. Her ...

Barbican Hall The evening has a sense of celebration, of newly minted and upcoming grandeur. Jakub Hrůša’s face is one we will gladly get used to as he takes up his post as musical director of the Royal Opera House. Tonight, he leads the BBC Symphony Orchestra, weaving fellow Czech composer Pavel Haas’s tumbling emotions with Beethoven’s youthful exuberance and ...

The Phoenix Arts Club As Blue Monday billows into our lives, instead of fighting it, why not lean into the misery? Musical Theatre fans rejoice in a rather wet way for this evening of classics, mashups and lesser knowns. Buried deep in the soil of the West End, The Phoenix Arts Club resembles the bedroom of a truly fanatic theatre geek. James Edge, ...

King’s Head Theatre : ‘A middle-of-the-road tale’ Originally an earnest memoir by Sergey Fetisov, Firebird: The Story of Roman morphed into a middlingly successful 2021 film written by Peeter Rebane and starring/written by Tom Prior. Now the King’s Head Theatre has given this tale wings once more. But is this flight doomed to end in a cooking pot? The gist, in case both ...