fri 22/08/2025

LGBT+

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, Touring

It's all about the ballerinas: Raymonda soloists (from left) Fernando Medina, Paul Ghiselin, Raffaele Morra and Robert Carter

Les Grands Ballets Classiques de Stoke Poges are a company waiting to happen for most of us, but for Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo a bitter rivalry must be endured - one of their ballerinas didn’t show up last night in High Wycombe, due...

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Scott Agnew, The Stand, Glasgow

Scott Agnew: The 6ft 5in Glaswegian likes long stories

Scotland certainly loves its comedy. In addition to the month-long bliss that is the Edinburgh Fringe, just along the M8 Glasgow has been providing its own few weeks of fun since 2003. Their comedy festival has a very different feel to it - less of...

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DVD: The Kids Are All Right

Hailed by swarms of critics for its wit, warmth, compassion and daring challenge to conventional notions of gender and matrimony, Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right strikes your correspondent as an exhaustingly solipsistic exercise in...

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Christopher and His Kind, BBC Two

Is there a televisual instruction manual for Nazi-era dramas? Cabaret singers with heavily kohled eyes, champagne from unmatched glasses in a shabby-chic apartment, smoke-filled gay bars in cellars with muscled trade, Stormtroopers marching in...

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The Children's Hour, Comedy Theatre

Who needs America for the American theatre? Barely six weeks into this year, and already we've had the bracing and bilious Becky Shaw, the West End transfer of Bruce Norris's perpetually award-scooping Clybourne Park and Woody Guthrie taking up...

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Seduction: An Erotic Black Comedy, Above the Stag Theatre

Show a little tenderness: Simon Boughey as the Movie Producer and Stanley Eldridge as the Rent Boy in the final scene of Seduction

Have you ever found onstage nudity sexy? Unlike a friend of mine, for whom the epiphany of the National Theatre's Bent was the giant member in the first five minutes, I honestly haven't. Sensuous, once, in the Maly Theatre's skinny-dipping Platonov...

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Robert Mapplethorpe, Alison Jacques Gallery

Peter Reed, clenching his buttocks, by Robert Mapplethorpe

The first thing to make clear is that Robert Mapplethorpe, notorious for his photograph of himself with a bullwhip up his arse, is not really a photographer: he is a sculptor who works in the medium of photography. What else can explain the...

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Toast, BBC One

Nigel Slater (Freddie Highmore) displays that Sixties delight, shepherd's pie

All the time I was watching Toast last night, based on Nigel Slater’s memoir of his early years, I was wondering whether it was filmed for the benefit of the audience or of Slater himself. The final scene (no spoiler – we know how this story ends...

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Lip Service commissioned for second series

Fans of BBC Three’s Lip Service have been given an extra seasonal gift in the form of confirmation by the BBC that a second series has been commissioned. The Glasgow-based drama about a group of twentysomething lesbians and their intertwined lives...

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theartsdesk Christmas Message

'It’s not hard to picture MacGowan, with his graveyard grin and pickled-egg eyes, gracing our Christmas cards'

Once upon a time in the central West Bank, a child called Jesus was allegedly born to a virgin. Once upon an even earlier time, the Greek demigod Perseus was also allegedly born to a virgin, likewise the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli. You can...

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Loose Cannons

There is a climactic moment in Loose Cannons when one of the characters has rather more dolci than is good for her. For anyone without a sweet cinematic tooth, the two hours’ traffic of this soft-centred Italian melodrama may induce a similar kind...

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John Waters, Shoreditch House Literary Salon

I've been to a fair few spoken-word events in my time, and as a rule the more upmarket they are, the worse they tend to get. The bigger the celebrity or cult cachet of an author, the more likely they are to attract a crowd that turn up mainly to be...

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