The best of the Brits ahead of Saturday’s awards, a host of fantastic films, spectacular stage performances – they are all featured in our critics’ picks of the best of music, film and theatre. Read on to find out what to see and do this weekend…
MUSIC – BRITS SPECIAL
GIG OF THE WEEK
Raye
The Brits, which take place tomorrow, have already sprung a surprise. Rachel Keen, the soul singer better known as Raye, has collected a record seven nominations.
Raye – who is nominated for a record-breaking seven Brit awards – has a star quality that is unmistakable. She has an infectious warmth and a sensational set of pipes
For the industry, Raye is a prodigal daughter. She went to the Brit School – and dropped out. She landed a singing contract with Polydor, who refused to release her album. So she released it herself and it went to No2.
She is now big enough to have sold out the vast O2 Arena in London, while still small enough to play the cosy O2 Academy in Bristol.
A free spirit with roots in Tooting, Yorkshire, Switzerland and Ghana, Raye is so fond of chatting to the crowd that she often ends up paying a fine for over-running.
Her material is hit-and-miss, but her star quality is unmistakable. She has an infectious warmth and a sensational set of pipes. She can start a song like Amy Winehouse and finish it like Whitney Houston.
Tim de Lisle
Touring until March 15. Although most tickets are sold out, there are waitlists available
FOUR OTHER FAB ALBUMS FROM BRIT NOMINEES
The enduring bond between Damon Albarn’s Blur and their fans is reinforced by the release of the group’s ninth album, their first since 2015’s chart-topping The Magic Whip.
Produced by James Ford, who also plays keyboards, it’s a refreshing return – one made all the more impressive by Blur’s refusal to play the revivalist card by resurrecting the cheeky-chappy choruses and Cool Britannia schtick of their heyday.
Damon describes The Ballad Of Darren as ‘a big heartbreak record’ and ‘a reflection on where we find ourselves now’, and some songs here are informed by the deaths of close friends. The prevailing mood is a melancholy one, characterised by some beautifully sung, melodic ballads, but there’s also a healthy ratio of the offbeat, art-school impulses that powered Blur through the post-Britpop years.
You can hear the creative chemistry Damon enjoys with the band – most crucially with guitarist Graham Coxon – on opening track The Ballad, where Albarn’s husky croon is augmented by Coxon’s sympathetic accompaniment.
Against Damon’s tuneful piano and a heavenly string quartet, the pair trade vocal lines on a song that looks back at happier times the band’s formative years through the sobering prism of recent losses, including that of drummer Tony Allen, a regular Albarn collaborator. Coxon is again a dominant presence on St Charles Square. His discordant guitar squalls hark back to 1997’s hard-rocking Song 2, as Albarn tells a tale of fear and loathing in West London.
From there, the album swings between catchy, guitar-driven rockers (Barbaric, The Narcissist) and slow, sad songs illuminated by a sense of grandeur (Russian Strings, Far Away Island).
The album closes on The Heights, a song about Blur’s relationship with their audience. ‘I gave a lot of heart, so did you,’ sings Damon. ‘Standing in the back row, this one’s for you.’
There’s no Britpop nostalgia here. But The Ballad Of Darren proves Blur can still create a sense of enormous well-being.
Adrian Thrills
JESSIE WARE: That! Feels Good!
The transformation of Jessie Ware into a disco diva gathers pace on the London singer’s fifth album.
Once celebrated as the doyenne of sultry, down-tempo electronica, she threw herself into dance music – albeit the ‘dancing round your kitchen’ in lockdown variety – on 2020’s What’s Your Pleasure, and is now refusing to look back.
Getting to this position hasn’t been easy. Jessie, 38, initially failed to live up to the promise of her elegant, Mercury Prize-nominated debut, Devotion, and hit a low point in 2018 when she played a disastrous set, riddled with sound problems, at the Coachella festival in California. Her confidence dented, she was left facing an uncertain future.
Salvation came not in the studio but in the kitchen, where she had just launched the award-winning lifestyle podcast Table Manners with her mum Lennie. The enterprise bought Ware valuable breathing space, allowing her to re-evaluate her career.
And just as Coachella saw her at rock bottom, her zestful live shows since the pandemic have strengthened her self-belief. That! Feels Good! is unashamedly retro. British clubland luminaries James Ford and Stuart Price – aided by Ware’s long-term collaborator (and now drummer) Dave Okumu – frame her exuberant vocals with arrangements that nod to 1970s disco, 1980s funk and 1990s French house.
The spirit of fabled New York nightspot Studio 54 looms large on an album that would make a great party playlist.
On Pearls, she looks to classics such as Chaka Khan’s I’m Every Woman as she sings of her desire to balance domestic bliss (she’s a mother of three now) with her need to let go: ‘I’m a lady, I’m a lover, a freak and a mother? it’s my human nature, I crave a little danger.’
On Hello Love, her soulful voice is multi-tracked to impressive effect, while the seductive Latin grooves of Begin Again take their cue from time spent enjoying ‘the heat, sweat and sensuality’ of Brazil.
The energy levels drop just once: Lightning harks back to the softer, Sade-like moods of old, though the tempo is still brisk. That! Feels Good! isn’t an album of huge emotional depth.
But Ware is too set on spreading joy to do anything other than look on the bright side. In doing so, she has delivered one of the feelgood hits of 2023.
Adrian Thrills
KYLIE: Tension
When a new Kylie Minogue single was announced last May, all the indications were that the Australian pop goddess would stick to the style of her 2020 album, Disco – one of many dance records that sprang up in lockdown.
And, sure enough, Padam Padam ticked all the right kitchen-disco boxes, without being particularly memorable on first hearing. Then something happened – despite being side-lined by youth-oriented radio stations unwilling to champion a 55-year-old woman, Padam Padam picked up momentum, becoming a TikTok sensation and 2023’s pop earworm.
The song – written by Norwegian singer Ina Wroldsen and British producer Pete ‘Lostboy’ Rycroft – gave Kylie her first solo Top Ten single since 2010’s All The Lovers, and it sets the tone perfectly for Tension, an album about seizing the day that reasserts Minogue’s reputation as a consummate showgirl while adding nuance to her signature sound.
‘You look like fun to me, you look a little like somebody I know,’ she teases on Padam Padam, and the first half of the album is infused with celebrations of the dancefloor.
The title track, with its breathless vocals and insistent piano, is a house music banger. Hold On To Now tells us to live in the moment.
There are nods to the past, too. The catchy One More Time would sit easily alongside her 1990 hits Better The Devil You Know and Step Back In Time.
10 Out Of 10, made with Dutch DJ Oliver Heldens, looks to Euro-pop for inspiration. ‘After we’re done, let’s hop in the shower,’ sings Kylie, revelling in the sexual innuendo but leaving just enough to the imagination.
There are no departures as daring as the country detours taken on 2018’s Golden, but she does make a few unexpected moves as the album progresses. Hands, all handclaps and funky bass, takes its cue from 1990s R&B while Green Light is a – sadly tepid – exercise in jazz-funk.
On Tension, she finds solace in dancing, and it’s her most irresistible release in decades.
Adrian Thrills
The notion of the supergroup isn’t new. It dates back to the 1970s, when rock acts such as Cream and Emerson, Lake & Palmer were put together by musicians who had made their names in other bands.
Now the concept is being revived by three U.S. singer-songwriters who are pooling their talents as Boygenius. For anyone confused by the name – a droll reference to the idea of the tortured male mastermind – Boygenius are an all-female affair, formed five years ago by Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker.
Bridgers, 28, is the best known over here, having duetted with Taylor Swift and supported The Rolling Stones. Dacus and Baker, both 27 and from the American South, have also made their marks as solo artists.
Virginia-born Dacus is a vivid, funny songwriter and Baker, from Memphis, brings a crunching poppunk sensibility to the table.
Any fears the collaboration might dilute their individual strengths are soon dispelled. The Record is a bravura blend of chiming soft-rock, indie-pop and acoustic folk. Julien says she wanted ‘sick riffs that made you truly giddy’ – and The Record delivers.
It begins in subdued fashion, though. With the onus on the trio’s a cappella vocals, Without You Without Them is an old-timey number about how our identities have been shaped by our ancestors. From there, it’s a case of fast-forwarding to the kind of full-tilt, but slightly offkilter, rock and roll popularised by bands like the Pixies.
The album articulates the hopes and anxieties of its millennial makers, while its songs are enriched via the inclusion of seemingly mundane everyday details. ‘Some October, in the future, I’ll run out of trash TV,’ deadpans Dacus on We’re In Love. There’s also a rich understanding of the rock canon.
Not Strong Enough is a brilliant homage to The Cure that works in a mention of one of that band’s biggest songs (‘Drag-racing through the canyon, singing Boys Don’t Cry’), and there’s even a track called Leonard Cohen.
It’s not all about the power chords, either. Paul Simon is thanked as an inspiration on Cool About It while Emily I’m Sorry is an acoustic strum. When Bridgers sent Dacus and Baker a demo of the latter, she asked if they could ‘be a band again’. They had first made music together when they released an EP to promote a joint-headline tour. Now they’ve returned as a supergroup – and a compelling one at that.
Adrian Thrills
FILM
FILM OF THE WEEK
Dune: Part Two Cert: 12A, 2hrs 46mins
Dune was bursting out all over Leicester Square at the world premiere a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been to lots of grand openings there down the years, but never to one quite as flamboyant, with quite as much fanfare, causing so much frenzy.
Probably not for 60 years, since the heyday of The Beatles, has that patch of central London resounded with the kind of noisy adoration directed (this time) at the star of the Dune films, 28-year-old Timothée Chalamet. And at least there were four Beatles to share the attention. The young American star gets ‘Chalamania’, as it’s known, all to himself.
Dune: Part Two mostly unfolds in subtle shades of brown and beige. This makes Paul’s (Timothée Chalamet) eyes look even bluer, like Peter O’Toole’s in Lawrence of Arabia
The bigger issue, though, was this: would Denis Villeneuve’s epic sequel justify the razzamatazz, not to mention the investment of an entire evening? Dune: Part Two lasts almost three hours. It is even longer than the first film, and that seemed to go on forever.
Happily, it does. The 2021 movie tackled many of the plot complexities that for years fuelled the belief that Frank Herbert’s mighty 1965 science-fiction novel was ‘unfilmable’ (claims not exactly punctured by David Lynch’s 1984 stinker). It was terrific, but exhausting, laboriously introducing us to the inter-planetary empire Herbert imagined, and the various dynasties grappling for power or simply survival.
The sequel has a mercifully more straightforward narrative. On the barren planet Arrakis, with most of his own kinsfolk wiped out, Paul Atreides (Chalamet) prepares to lead the beleaguered, disenfranchised Fremen tribe against his and their mortal enemies, the formidably evil House Harkonnen.
Ruled by the grotesque Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard in a wobbly fat suit), to whom they swear allegiance at chilling Nuremberg-style rallies, the Harkonnen owe their political and military supremacy to their control of ‘spice’ — the most valuable commodity in this universe, generally assumed by Dune devotees to be a metaphor for oil.
Paul’s aim is to disrupt spice production, but unlike our own Just Stop Oil brigade, he needs to do more than lie down on a motorway. Anyway, Arrakis doesn’t have motorways. It’s a vast desert, in which he must prove himself to the Fremen by undergoing various challenges, such as sand-surfing behind a worm roughly the size of a superyacht.
Paul has a useful ally in the Fremen chief, Stilgar (Javier Bardem), not to mention a Fremen lover, the smouldering and beautiful Chani (Zendaya).
But there are others who mistrust him. Is he a false prophet or their true ‘mahdi’, their messiah? His modesty clinches it. ‘The Mahdi is too humble to say he is the Mahdi,’ someone says, approvingly, which reminded me strongly of the scene in The Life Of Brian, when Brian’s efforts to convince his followers that he is entirely ordinary backfire, on the basis that only the true messiah would deny his divinity.
I hope Villeneuve had Monty Python in mind, too, because there isn’t otherwise much obvious wit or fun in this film.
But it is supremely stylish, with a piercing Hans Zimmer score and marvellous work by cinematographer Greig Fraser.
Mostly, the action unfolds in subtle shades of brown and beige, as if the set designers were told to restrict themselves to the edges of the Farrow & Ball colour chart. This makes Paul’s eyes look even bluer, a bit like Peter O’Toole’s in Lawrence of Arabia. As Noel Coward famously said at that premiere, if he’d been any prettier it could have been called Florence of Arabia. The same is true of Chalamet. Any more ravishing and they’d have had to call it June.
But Paul is a fierce warrior first and foremost, who has a truly gripping set-piece duel with the emerging champion of the Harkonnen (a shaven-headed Austin Butler), and whose muscular beauty pleases Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh), scheming daughter of the Emperor (Christopher Walken).
Butler, Pugh and Walken are all new additions to the cast, incidentally, along with Lea Seydoux and, in a cameo, Anya Taylor-Joy. From the first film, Rebecca Ferguson and Charlotte Rampling also return. There are stars everywhere you look, in a movie that is lavish in every way, and demands to be seen on a big screen.
It’s genuinely spectacular. But take sandwiches.
Brian Viner
FOUR OTHER FAB FILMS STILL IN CINEMAS
Painting The Modern Garden: Monet To Matisse
Cert: U, 1hr 33mins
When I was 18 I lived for a year in Paris and, for a (fairly) normal teenager, became strangely obsessed with the Jeu de Paume, the museum in the Tuileries Gardens where in those days the great Impressionist paintings were housed. If you’ll forgive me for sounding fanciful, even now when I see those same works by Monet, Manet, Degas and co, it feels a bit like meeting up with old friends.
Claude Monet was a passionate gardener who painted plants with sublime skill
So Painting The Modern Garden: Monet To Matisse was a treat for me.
The documentary was made in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title at London’s Royal Academy, and in its slightly over-earnest way (nobody could accuse this film of jauntiness) offers some lovely insights into the importance of gardens to the Impressionists in general, and Claude Monet above all.
He was a passionate gardener, who bred dahlias and collected hybrid species of water lilies, and of course painted them with sublime skill.
You probably need to be at least a gardening enthusiast, or a lover of Impressionism, to enjoy this film. But if you’re both, it’s compost for the soul.
Brian Viner
Shoshana
Cert: 15, 2hrs 1min
Shoshana arrives in cinemas with tragically apposite timing.
For while Gaza burns in 2024, Michael Winterbottom’s hugely moving period drama not only does an excellent job of explaining the historic role of the British in creating the mess that is Israel/Palestine but also shows how little has changed in almost 90 years.
Irina Starshenbaum is terrific as the Shoshana, well supported by Douglas Booth
The Russian actress Irina Starshenbaum is terrific as the passionate young Zionist of the title and she gets strong support from Douglas Booth as her British intelligence-officer lover and Harry Melling as a sadistic police officer.
Matthew Bond
Cert: 15, 1hr 40mins
Internet ‘trolling’, whereby unpleasant people hide behind online anonymity to heap foul-mouthed abuse on social media users, is one of the horrors of modern life. But there’s nothing new about such insults, as shown in a thoroughly entertaining new film.
Yes, Wicked Little Letters, set in 1920s Littlehampton, takes us back to the days of the poison-pen letter, where a freshly franked stamp and an elegantly handwritten address gave no clue of the unsigned nastiness within.
Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley and cast entertain in Wicked Little Letters
Here, the letters are addressed to Miss Edith Swan (Olivia Colman), a God-fearing spinster, but their ripe contents are read out with angry relish by her domineering father (Timothy Spall).
Her appalled mother (Gemma Jones) looks on in shock as language still not acceptable in a family newspaper, but all too common in a 15 certificate film, pours forth. Ah, but who sent them?
The Swans believe it to be Rose (Jessie Buckley), the wild war widow who lives next door, and with whom Edith has fallen out. Only WPC Moss (Anjana Vasan) has her doubts, but no one will listen to her. She’s a woman, after all…
This is lightweight commercial fare but it’s a good and largely true story and director Thea Sharrock draws well-judged performances from her top-notch British and Irish cast.
Matthew Bond
American Star
Cert: 15, 1hr 47mins
At 81, Ian McShane really ought not to be able to carry an entire feature film. But he does so effortlessly in American Star, which sees him playing an ageing assassin who travels to the Canary Islands for his latest job.
Thanks to Ian McShane as an ageing assassin, American Star is worth catching
But as he waits for his target to arrive, he gets happily distracted by an attractive young woman (Nora Arnezeder) and her mother (Fanny Ardant) and by the rusting hulk of an old liner. Ah, that’ll be the American Star, which has washed up on a Fuerteventura beach… a bit like him.
It’s very nicely shot and perhaps a little too thoughtful for thriller purists but still definitely worth catching.
Matthew Bond
THEATRE
SHOW OF THE WEEK
Standing At The Sky’s Edge
Chris Bush’s love letter to Sheffield and its famous Park Hill Estate, powered by Richard Hawley’s magnificent songs, started life at the city’ Crucible Theatre, before transferring to the National Theatre, where it proved it’s anything but local.
Now, garlanded with awards, it is lighting up London’s West End. Robert Hastie’s superbly staged production finds an ideal home in another appropriately brutalist building, the Gillian Lynn Theatre. Ben Stones’s design takes advantage of its height and width to suggest a patch of the vast, walkway-linked estate with views of the city.
Alastair Natkiel as Marcus and Laura Pitt-Pulford as Poppy in the award-winning Sheffield-based musical, Standing At The Sky’s Edge
Park Hill is truly iconic. An ultra-modern post-war dream rehousing the slum-dwellers in 1961, its subsequent decay reflected the decline of the city’s steel industry in the Eighties and Nineties. But it rose again. Revamped by urban developers (and now Grade II listed), it’s been gentrified inside and out.
The building’s history emerges through three sets of imagined residents whose lives simultaneously intersect in the same space.
As steelworker Harry carries his wife Rose over the threshold, they can’t believe their luck. Until it runs out, and a splintered family of Liberian refugees moves in and Connie is born.
How ironic that she is the estate agent who shows her former home to yuppie Poppy, a Londoner starting afresh following a break-up with her girlfriend.
In one characteristically economical and comic scene, Sheffield’s famous Henderson’s Relish, the essential accompaniment to Harry and Rose’s shepherd’s pie, doesn’t work the same magic on the Liberians’ dish or Poppy’s Ottolenghi aubergines.
Inevitably perhaps, the piece can at times feel schematic, soapy, predictable. While Hawley’s glorious, hopeful As The Dawn Breaks intensifies the moment, other songs seem slotted in.
Lynne Page’s choreography, in which characters wave their arms like living lava lamps, could be more inspired.
But there more to relish here than the Henderson’s. In its own way, Standing At The Sky’s Edge is a monumental achievement.
Georgina Brown
Gillian Lynne Theatre, London. Until August 3, 2hrs 50mins
FOUR OTHER SPARKLING SHOWS
Hir
The pulling power of this strong revival of Taylor Mac’s play is the presence of Hollywood actress Felicity Huffman, who is terrific making her UK stage debut as Paige, matriarch of a dysfunctional family.
Mac’s dark comedy is a cross between a domestic drama and a state-of-the-nation allegory, with a large helping of queer theatre thrown in.
Felicity Huffman, making her UK stage debut, is terrific as matriarch Paige
Paige’s son Isaac (Steffan Cennydd) is a US Marine returning from battle, only to find his family home looking like a war zone. Clothes and magazines litter the filthy floor, and his father Arnold (Simon Startin), who’s had a stroke, is dressed as a clown.
Arnold’s condition has liberated Paige from a violent marriage and domestic chores, and now she humiliates her husband. Her ally is her other child, Maxine, transitioning into Max (Thalia Dudek).
Mac delves into identity, family politics and the power of belonging to a tribe under Steven Kunis’s direction — but the evening really sparkles when Ms Huffman is on stage.
Veronica Lee
Park Theatre London. Until March 16, 2hrs 20mins
Dear Octopus
Dear Octopus is a total treat. Written by Dodie Smith, it was a hit in 1938, and here stars Lindsay Duncan, never better as the bossy but kind Dora who, with her husband Charles (Malcolm Sinclair, a tweedy twinkler), are celebrating their golden wedding anniversary.
Lindsay Duncan is never better than as the bossy but kind Dora in Dear Octopus
The household includes several generations – grandparents, willowy grown-up daughters with crimped hair, small children – all laughing, bickering and making up.
The presence of servants and words like ‘bally’ and ‘lawks’ date it. But the characters all seem so real. Particularly Fenny (Bessie Carter), whose unspoken love for buffoonish master Nicholas (Billy Howle) is an open family secret.
Written in the receding grief of one world war and on the cusp of another, this English family saga feels terribly reassuring. Nico Muhly’s music is haunting, while Frankie Bradshaw’s rotating set and costumes are pitch perfect.
A rediscovered gem.
Robert Gore-Langton
Lyttelton Theatre, London Until March 27, 2hrs 45mins
Cable Street
This musical by Tim Gilvin (music and lyrics) and Alex Kanefsky (book) places The Battle Of Cable Street not just in the context of anti-Semitism in 1936, but also the fight against fascism in Spain — as ‘No Pasaran!’ [‘They shall not pass!], which closes the first act, attests.
Danny Colligan is one of the standout cast members in this musical
The cast play multiple roles as several storylines interweave (occasionally confusingly) in 1936 and the present day, in Adam Lenson’s ambitious production.
Mr Gilvin’s dominant score moves between hip-hop, boy band pop and stirring ballads.
The 1936 Cable Street populace interact, bicker and fall in love, but ultimately discover the strength of unity among Jews, Irish dockers, Caribbean sailors and others, even if some are attracted by Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.
The second half is tighter. The 11-strong cast are excellent and sing beautifully; while Danny Colligan, as an unemployed man who gets caught up with the Blackshirts, and Sha Dessi as a rabble-rousing activist, are standouts.
Veronica Lee
Southwark Playhouse, London. Until March 16, 2hrs 25mins
King Lear
Danny Sapani could well be the best Lear I’ve ever seen — even if Yael Farber’s production doesn’t match his titanic majesty.
Volcanic, dangerous and devastating, Sapani is also childlike, lost and frightened in a colossal performance that rides Shakespeare’s poetry with grace and gravitas. And what a voice — his whisper makes goosebumps, his boom alerts shipping.
Danny Sapani and Clarke Peters as King Lear and the Fool
Audiences may wonder why Clarke Peters’ Fool drifts around like the ghost of Lear’s father. A psychotic hallucination, perhaps? And Fra Fee’s Edmund signifies his wickedness by puffing a joint rather than exploring Shakespeare’s mischievous verse.
Gloria Obianyo, as the devoted daughter Cordelia, breaks the goody-two-shoes mould: giving back-chat to her father, and a single finger to both her sisters.
Alec Newman and Michael Gould are refreshingly clear, simple and direct, too, as Lear’s loyal friends Kent and Gloucester.
Why Farber has Gloucester push a piano to Dover on his suicide mission, I cannot tell.
But whatever the mysteries of her production, she gets one thing spot on: Sapani’s mighty, moving monarch. Go for him alone.
Patrick Marmion
Almeida Theatre, London. Until March 30, 3hrs 30mins
