Barbican Centre

  Modern-day revivals of musicals from the genre’s so-called ‘Golden Age’ can be challenging – caught up, as they often are, in the sexism of their time. ‘Kiss Me, Kate’, which debuted in 1948, is a particularly acute example. With music and lyrics by Cole Porter and a book by Bella and Samuel Spewack, it’s structured as a play within a play. The narrative follows the on-and-off-stage conflict between actor, director and producer Fred Graham and his ex-wife Lilli Vanessi as they argue their way through a chaotic Baltimore pitstop of his touring production of one of Shakespeare’s more unlovely plays, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, in which they act as Petruchio and Katherina (Kate). Petruchio’s humiliation and subjugation of Kate forms the thrust of the story. It’s to big shot American director Bartlett Sher’s credit, then, that the show’s mirroring of scenes within scenes in his impressively large-scale, major new revival at the Barbican Centre is heavily laced with irony. As Petruchio, Fred (Adrian Dunbar, swapping ‘Line of Duty’ for the chorus line) can’t get his whip (don’t ask) to work and looks stupid; in the climactic scenes, Lilli (played by bona fide Broadway star Stephanie Block) sings ‘I Am Ashamed’ with the kind of knowing wink you could probably see from space. This is all amplified by Michael Yeargan’s gorgeously elaborate set, which not only revolves to show the ‘backstage’ scenes but also leaves plenty of empty space on either side. We’re always aware of the ‘acto

It’s a hard heart that can leave Francis Alÿs’s Barbican exhibition without being a little broken by it. At the Barbican, the Belgian artist – best known for films where he performs walking actions, pushing a block of ice until it melts, kicking a flaming ball through a desolate border town – has taken himself out of the work, and turned his eye on children. The gallery is an ear-blistering cacophony of infantile whoops and screams, dozens of screens showing kids around the world playing games. They skip stones on a lake, jump rope, race down a hill, roll huge snowballs, kick tyres down dirt roads, race snails with their shells painted blue and red. It’s a room of unbound, uncontainable joy, of burgeoning self expression and emerging independence, finding voice through play. Because that’s what kids are meant to do, it’s what they’re built for. All these games from around the world are a way of testing out boundaries – between peers, between the self and the world – this is how these dumb-as-rocks little beings become actual humans. It’s beautiful, it’s inventive, it’s necessary. These are the early steps in interpersonal disputes, this is embryonic proto-war. But it’s not all ecstatic innocence. Kids in Cuba battle each other with flattened sharpened bottle caps, two little English girls smash each other’s conkers to bits, children are slowly isolated and excluded in a game of musical chairs. In learning to become humans, kids must also learn to compete, to fight. These are

A director who truly feels at the top of her game right now, Emma Rice’s adaptation of Hanif Kureishi's classic semi-autobiographical novel about a young Asian man’s outrageous coming-of-age in ’70s suburban London scored ecstatic notices when it premiered in Stratford-upon-Avon recently in a co-production between the RSC and her Wise Children company. Now it's heading our way, the first RSC show to transfer to the Barbican since the pandemic. Casting is TBC

Although it’s provided a steady pipeline of new plays – including the all conquering ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ – the RSC hasn’t transferred a single Shakespeare to London since 2019. The pandemic and the success of ‘Totoro’ can reasonably be blamed for that. But it’s a treat to have it back with the Bard: the Globe is great but its productions are neccessarily somewhat rough and ready; the RSC offers a slicker, bigger budget take on Shakespeare and it’s great to get both. Transferring to the Barbican straight after Emma Rice’s acclaimed ‘The Buddha of Suburbia’, Eleanor Rhodes’s production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ was praised for its surreal freshness when it debuted in Stratford back in February. Casting for this transfer is TBC.