Author: The Reviews Hub - London

Composer: Oliver Messiaen Conductor: Vasily Petrenko Piano soloist: Steven Osborne Ondes Martenot soloist: Cécile Lartigau The Southbank Centre’s Multitudes festival aims to reimagine orchestral music for all the senses. The performance of Messiaen’s expansive Turangalîla symphony by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, which has been included in the festival’s programme, is accompanied by a striking visual element: a full-length silent film by the animators, 1927 Studios. The programmatic elements of Messiaen’s symphony lend it well to this treatment; however, the symphony feels slightly relegated to background music in the process, with the highly stylised film often giving a comic effect when…

Writer: Rachel Fenn Director: Lydia Mcnulty Roam Theatre company’s founders, Rachel Fenn and Lydia Mcnulty, bring Night Shift to the Drayton Arms, delivering an evening of thought-provoking comedy. The arrival of graduate Nadia at Supersave creates turbulence in the otherwise peaceful night shift team. Rocking the boat with questions about the future of colleague Jay, her entrance into the supermarket threatens to disrupt the equilibrium Simon has so painstakingly crafted. As the two butt heads, Jay is left to look at his life and ponder its stagnation. Night Shift deals with people’s work/life balance, the aspirations and disappointments of life,…

Writer: Mark Burgess Director: Selina Cadell Zeb Soanes does an astonishingly accurate impression of Jedi Knight of the Realm Sir Alec Guinness, despite looking not at all like him. The dry, precise, patrician tones of the great actor are recreated astonishingly well; the arch namedropping and mildly risqué stream of anecdotes is recognisable by anyone who ever saw the man on a chat show. He is a gossip, and he is slightly naughty. He has an endless stream of stories. He offers a lot of suggestions on the Proper Way to Act, which is essentially to do nothing, but to…

Writers: Nat Neri and Caolon McGinley Director: Nat Neri At the tail end of the 19th century, Oscar Wilde’s decision to sue the Marquess of Queensberry – who had described him as a sodomite – for libel ultimately became the playwright’s undoing. Queensberry’s defence involved proving that Wilde had multiple relationships with men, causing him to be prosecuted, charged and imprisoned. In The Homosexual’s Guide to the Galaxy, the trial is commented on by the Wilde-like aesthete Jonathan (Rain Reid) and his neighbour, vicar’s son David (Caolon McGinley). Through their conversation, they reveal their affection for one another, but although…

 Conductor: Evan Rogister Echoes of Hill and Horizon is an imaginatively designed immersive concert performed as part of Multitudes, a multi-arts festival at the Southbank Centre. The programme of traditional English pastoral pieces is played amidst an appealing light creation by Squidsoup (creative director Anthony Rowe). A grid of long strings of circular light bulbs hangs over the orchestra, with another higher installation suspended over the stalls. Programmed to respond to the beat of the music, the lights pulse in rainbow swathes of colour. The regularity of the bulbs has something of the pleasing symmetry of the current imaginative display…

Writer: Alexis Gregory  Director: Campbell X There are unreliable narrators, and there are unreliable narrators. Some keep their deception or disillusion right down to the last minutes of a play or up to the final page of a novel, but in his one-man show about drug paranoia, Alexis Gregory’s narrator reveals himself in the first ten minutes of the play when he talks about fake shops in Acton Town. This early disclosure somewhat spoils the story, which is based on Gregory’s own experiences. Knowing that Alex is suffering from, perhaps, chemsex psychosis, the audience is therefore invited to watch him…

Writer: Virginia Woolf, adapted by Flora Wilson Brown Director: Júlia Leval Virginia Woolf described her 1931 experimental novel, The Waves, as a play poem. Comprising six interweaving soliloquies that focus on inner lives and personal identities, it’s a text that prioritises thoughts over action. It’s not an easy read in the way that James Joyce’s Ulysses is no breeze,  but if you’ve ever tried and failed, then you need to see it performed. Way before Our Friends in the North, Friends or Sex in the City, Woolf recognised how friends could be closer than family and more reliable than blood ties. Played out…

Director and Choreographer: Shobana Jeyasingh In William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the island is often described in various ways through the eyes of the members of the shipwrecked crew. Whether for good or ill, it is something they regard as alien and mysterious. But for Caliban, whose island it is and who accuses them of taking, it has a long history before the Milanese courts arrived on its shores. That is the inspiration for Shobana Jeyasingh’s one-hour dance reinterpretation. Here, the island belongs to the Caliban, a community rich in books and dance. In the opening sequence, the octet of dancers…