New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Theatre
A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
This is a peculiar play and does not work for me. Some of it is very funny but there are real flaws
Alex has a strong powerful voice and was faultless, she is far better now than she was on the X-Factor
London,




Impending doom: Annabel Scholey as Olga in The House of Special Purposes
We all know what happened to the Romanov family — the deposed Tsar and Tsarina, plus their children — in the titular Ekaterinburg location in 1918 but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a fine drama to be made out of the months of their imprisonment.
Heidi Thomas, that skilled television writer of Lilies and Cranford, is adept at providing rich characterisation in just a few lines, which allows us to bond in particular with the adolescent Romanov daughters, as they strike up tentative intimacies with their captors.
What’s lacking, though, from both Thomas’s writing and Howard Davies’s fluid direction, is any real sense of impending peril. The Romanovs’ world effectively ended with the Russian Revolution, yet the lack of urgency the stoical family displays suggests they’re in a jolly summer camp, rather than the furthest ante-room of the last-chance saloon. A more acute sense of the political turmoil unfolding outside would also be welcome.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.