With a single dessert and just two glasses of wine our bill was kept in check - but the effort of doing so was not much fun
Babbo
Film
This is a film with beautiful performances and a visual style that urges you towards reflection
Bright Star
Theatre
Although the first half of Kwei-Armah’s production is pacy, funny and intelligent, the energy level then drops off
Seize The Day
I loved this film from start to finish. Take the girlfriend, tell your mum - I'd see it again tomorrow and will buy the dvd.
I saw this last night and can't remember the last time I was so moved in the theatre.
I have been to many of London's so-called best Japanese restaurants and none have been as good as the food that I've had at Aqua Kyoto
London,
17.04.09
As he makes his exit after almost 18 years at the Standard, our theatre critic calls for the London stage to be given the bright future it so richly...
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15.04.09
Calendar Girls is a chance to enjoy displays of prudery, coyness and vulgarity, a mixed cocktail of character-traits that remains forever English.
09.04.09
The extraordinary Death and the King’s Horseman, by Nobel prize‑winning Wole Soyinka, has never been seen in London until now.
08.04.09
On transfer to the West End, A Little Night Music leaves Nicholas de Jongh far less than enraptured.
07.04.09
Wallace Shawn does not condemn the liberal rich, he renders them luridly unbelievable in The Fever.
06.04.09
War Horse canters into town with the confidence of a natural-born winner in this superb production by Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris.
02.04.09
After her precocious debut at 19, with the award-winning That Face, Polly Stenham's second play, Tusk Tusk, confirms a startling, theatrical promise.
27.03.09
Jez Butterworth’s Parlour Song duly delves into the vexed problem of marriages heading for the rocks.
26.03.09
Douglas Hodge's emotionally fraught revival of Dimetos helps provide partial answers to questions that were raised in its 1976 premiere.
25.03.09
James Macdonald's production of Christopher Marlowe's unjustly neglected Dido, Queen of Carthage is anti-climatic.
24.03.09
London has never played host to a musical pitched on a higher level of gayness and camp comedy than this ingenious adaptation of Priscilla Queen Of...
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20.03.09
Shoulders hunched, knees jerked forward, one low-hanging hand contorted, Kathryn Hunter gazes at us with swivel-eyed interest in Kafka's Monkey.
19.03.09
Few more weird or perverse straight plays than Yukio Mishima's Madame de Sade can have hit the staid West End stage this century.
18.03.09
Nicholas de Jongh never realised there was a Felicity Kendal inside the late, lamented playwright Simon Gray, struggling to get out.
12.03.09
Deep Cut, a disturbing semi-documentary play by Philip Ralph serves as another jolting reminder of how well government ministers cover-up.
09.03.09
Mark Ravenhill has hit upon an arresting dramatic conceit to convey complex ideas and emotions in Over There.
06.03.09
Brian Friel's 19-year-old memory play, Dancing At Lughnasa, is shot through with scenes of outstanding pathos and rueful humour.
05.03.09
What makes A Miracle so poignant and Bondian is the way the main characters struggle to improve their lives.
05.03.09
In the larger space of the Lyttelton, The Pitmen Painters comes across as a glorious, instant classic of early 21st-century theatre.
04.03.09
Howard Davies's production of Burnt by the Sun makes it feel for the first few moments as if we remain in Chekhov country.