Entertainment

This review contains spoilers Obsession is a work about frustrated sexual expectations and celluloid dreams. It is self-reflexive and caught in the repetitive loop of Luchino Visconti’s 1942 film Ossessione yet feels like a radical comment on our age. Ivo van Hove directs and Simon Stephens gives us an English version translation. This collaboration makes sense: previous work from the two, such as Songs from Far Away, brought multiple layers of meaning and theatrical transcendence to  an experimental level. And...

I don't know about you, but as for me if I never hear or read the word meta again it'll be too soon, unless of course it's someone singing 'I Met a Girl' from that fine old musical Bells Are Ringing. It is not that I have any prejudice whatsoever against self-referential elements within a specific piece of media (at the most basic level we would lose the Christmas Panto for one thing) rather it is the over-use of the...

The Ferryman, set in Derry in the 1981 by Jez Butterworth, comes after his last sell out 2009 show Jerusalem. As with that play the title here is ambiguous. Who is The Ferryman exactly? Is it the actual ferryman who takes hundreds of disillusioned Irish men and women to Liverpool in search of a better life? Is it Mr Muldoon, the IRA hit man who haunts the stage with a terrifying vengefulness? Or is it Quinn Carney, who is caught...

In 2014, West London-based dance teacher Donna Schoenherr conceived of the idea of a dance organisation that would provide weekly top quality dance and movement classes for those living with Parkinson's, as well as with other mobility restrictions. Donna, a former professional dancer, and founder of dance organisation Ballet4life.com®, had supported her father through his struggles with Parkinson’s for three decades. Through these struggles, she had been greatly inspired seeing first-hand the benefits that movement based therapy had for him and...

The programme for this year’s Creativity and Wellbeing Week 2017 has just been announced. The festival, led by London Arts in Health Forum, takes place from 12-18 June and features hundreds of events including talks, discussions, theatre shows, mass sing-a-longs, music performances, dance, film screenings, death cafes, art exhibitions and more. The festival presents opportunities for people to learn more about what creativity can offer health and wellbeing and showcases organisations using the arts to realise this potential. Last year...

The Penguin Essentials 'are essential reads' that include 'some of the most important books from the last 100 years – with covers designed by contemporary artists so that they feel fresh and unexpected, appealing to a new generation of readers.' (Including the super-stylish Dave Eggers cover above!) Titles range through the Classic canon with Brideshead Revisited, The Great Gatsby and A Passage to India, through to modern meta-revisions of Classics with Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea (reimagining Jane Eyre) and J...

Matthew Mole of Scanners has a new album as ARVI and not only is it rather good, he's also given TLE Music a sneak preview of ARVI's debut album The Law - see below, as well as the first video to Anything You Want. The album features many of the accomplished, lush melodies of Scanners' dark transatlantic pop, but in more contemplative, acoustic compositions. "This album is very different to Scanners in that the sound is much more acoustic," Matthew told TLE Music. "It's softer and...

Camden Rocks Festival have confirmed Royal Republic and Leeds’ Pulled Apart By Horses will join the 2017 line up this June 3rd. Camden Rocks Festival 2017 is the biggest multi-venue all-day music event of the UK festival calendar. Progressively expanding each year adding new venues - 2017 will take place across 25 of Camden Town’s legendary music venues, now including Koko - and feature 250 bands, it’s become the annual highlight for many in the London locality. With near 100 more...

There could not be a better time to write a play about revolutionary commitment and individual freedom. Journalist Paul Mason’s piece about working class female communards exiled to New Caledonia on the back of a colonial project for their part in the 1871 Parisian uprising asks hard questions about what happens to personal freedom and culpability when revolutions are defeated. Mason has drawn on three sources for this almost biographical work focused on anarchist, feminist, teacher, ethnographer and revolutionary Louise...