National Gallery: Guided Tours & Talks ★★★★★ FREE


The National Gallery is one of the big ten for tourists and an oasis for locals. There's nothing nicer than to stop in the National Gallery on a gloomy day and soak up a bit of culture. In the summer, we tend to leave it to the tourists, but there are some great free lectures that can lure us in and always repay the investment on time that could have been spent in the sun. The Lunch Time talks are terrific introductions to exhibitions or interesting looks at specific  artists or paintings. The Ten Minute talks offer a quick insight into  a particular work. The free tours will make sure you get the most from your visit.

Reviewed by J.C.

 Our Score:  ☆☆☆☆☆ 

WHEN, WHERE, GETTING THERE:

Daily Tours (60 mins) -
Mon - Fri:  2 pm - 3 pm

Lunch Time Talks (45 mins) 
Usually Mon & Wed: 1 pm, sometimes other days 

Ten Minute Talks (10 mins)
Mon - Fri: 4 pm - 4:10 pm

Trafalgar Square
Nearest tube: Charing Cross Road
Map & Location: Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN, UK

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St. Martin in-the-fields: Lunchtime Concerts ★★★★ FREE

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Maybe the best musical value in London. The lunchtime concerts at St. Martin's are always a wonderful way to escape the hustle and bustle that is London and the sensory overload that is Trafalgar Square. This is a beautiful setting with great acoustics, and a church pew hard enough to make sure you don't nod off. Reviewed by J.C.  Our score:    ☆☆☆☆  WHEN, WHERE, GETTING THERE: Mon & Fri: 1 pm - 1:45 pm ( occasionally Tues & Thurs)  St. Martin in-the-fields, Trafalgar Square Nearest tube: Charing Cross https://www.stmartin-in-the-fields.org/whats-on
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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ★★★★ Almeida Theatre | Dec 10, 2024 - Feb 1, 2025

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Big Daddy's birthday is a night to remember! There are some strong performances in Tennessee Williams' classic, but it does seem like an unnecessarily drawn out affair. Daisy Edgar-Jones takes on the role of Maggie the cat, and she does a lot of cat-like crawling to make sure we get it. She is matched in these feline frolics by Seb Carrington who plays the ghost of Skipper, the real love of Maggie's husband, Brick. However, the constant stage presence of Skipper's spirit does seem an unnecessarily heavy-handed way of reminding us of his haunting importance. While Edgar-Jones' portrayal manages to wring a lot of the fury and frustration out of the role of Maggie, her scenes with husband, Brick, played by Kingsley Ben-Adir, never quite rise to the emotional intensity of his interaction with Big Daddy in Act II. It is notoriously difficult to play drunk, and Ben-Adir does so in a masterful performance that is wonderfully understated. His searing, soul-baring, exchanges...
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Love in Action ★★★★★ Sadler's Wells Theatre | Oct 31 - Nov 2, 2024

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Hideki Noda's Love in Action is a wonderfully wild ride into Japanese history centred on the bombing of Nagasaki in 1945. The piece which is based on Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov centres around the trial of Tomitaro, one of the Karamatsu brothers. He is accused of murdering his father as a result of a love triangle in which he shared a mistress with his parent. The story loosely follows the Russian author's original with Tomitaro's two brothers representing two contrasting perspectives on reality, the scientific and the spiritual, but in this version there is also a deeply political allegory. This is all broadly played for laughs, and the show abounds with wacky references to Western cultural touchstones from Leonardo's The Last Supper to Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire . There are also some brilliantly loony allusions to current pop culture. Who saw a quotation from Dirty Dancing coming? It is all a delightfully manic mishmash, and just...
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Ballet Shoes ★★★★ National Theatre | Nov 23, 2024 - Feb 22, 2025

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Noel Streatfeild's novel has been wildly popular since its first publication in 1936. The story of three orphan girls who end up being raised in the home of an eccentric palaeontologist, Great Uncle Matthew, has enchanted generations of young readers. GUM, as he is known, who is mostly absent, leaves the real care of the children to his ward and great niece, Sylvia, plus a housekeeper and a quirky set of lodgers. In this updated, occasionally ahistorical, theatrical version from Kendall Feaver, the National Theatre simply pulls out all the stops. With wonderfully inventive sets and the imaginative creation of sailing ships and flying fairies, Streatfeild's tale becomes an experience that should enthral any young audience members lucky enough to see it. The story has a particularly contemporary message with an almost exclusively female household forming a family of choice rather than blood. The family members also recognise and develop the very different ambitions of the young w...
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FIREBIRD ★★★★★ King's Head Theatre | Jan 9 - Feb 9, 2025

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The late 1970s were the height of the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union. However, set against the backdrop of this simplistically bipolar world, FIREBIRD relates a love story that ultimately questions the binaries that are often equally, naively imposed on relationships. As the impulsive, charismatic and enigmatic fighter pilot, Roman, Robert Eades puts in a performance that beautifully captures all of those qualities. He is both daring and disarming, and ultimately opaque, as he relishes taking chances both personally and professionally. Eades' presentation nicely contrasts to the more timid and grounded Sergey played by Theo Walker, and the chemistry between the two of them is thoroughly credible. In this highly charged atmosphere, Sorcha Kennedy successfully manages to hold her own in the rather challenging role of Luisa. She succeeds in creating a character who is strong, resilient and an equal force in the triangle that emerges, although we never see her intimate...
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The Invention of Love ★★★★ Hampstead Theatre | Dec 4, 2024 - Feb 1, 2025

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Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love is a palimpsest of ostensible contrasts. The first act has the reigning Oxford intellectuals (Jowett, Pater, Ruskin and Ellis) playing croquet whereas the second act shows a group of London press lords playing billiards. However, in both instances the real game is the same – power. The currency may be ideas or money, but the object is identical. Similarly, Stoppard sets up a parallelism between Oscar Wilde the rebel, who was actually a dramatic and social conformist, with AE Housman, the apparent conformist who quietly rebelled. Despite quite distinctive presentations their differences are more superficial than substantive. Housman's apparent internal contradictions are also similarly exposed as a matter of surfaces. The scientific scholar driven to perfect ancient texts and to seek the creator of love poetry in ancient authors such as Catullus, Propertius or Gallus, is himself an artist who in his poetry becomes an inventor of love. The di...
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The Maids ★★★ Jermyn Street Theatre | January 9 - 22, 2025

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Jean Genet based his 1947 play, The Maids , on the real story of an infamous 1933 murder in Le Mans when an abusive mistress and her daughter were killed by their two maids. This co-production between Jermyn Street Theatre and Reading Rep, which transfers to Reading at the end of January, captures all of Genet's absurdist horror, but it wavers uneasily between the realistic and the mannered in its presentation of this narrative of brutal social stratification and existential alienation. Anna Popplewell as Solange, the elder sister in service, brings a nicely restrained menace to her characterisation, and Charlie Oscar as younger sister, Claire, does a fine job of alternating between vulnerability and volatility as the two participate in the ceremony of dressing up as their employer and acting out her murder. Carla Harrison-Hodge hits some humorous notes as the obtuse, self-absorbed mistress of the household, but it is a performance that borders on parody. It reflects the kind of in...
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Hold On To Your Butts ★★ Arcola Theatre | Dec 10, 2024 - Jan 11, 2025

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Enjoyment of a parody is often proportional to one's degree of familiarity with the original, and that is certainly the case here. The performances are awesome and Jack Baldwin and Laurence Pears transition from one Jurassic Park character to another with astonishing facility. And then, they manage to become dinosaurs! Their professionalism and comic timing are awesome, and the ability to use only the most basic of props to create the film's scenes is terrific. Both actors display an extraordinary manic energy, and both manage to engage the audience's imagination. The display of how sound effects are created is also great fun, and, truth be told, our attention did occasionally wander over to watching the terrific work of Charlie Ives. Unfortunately, however, the trio's efforts cannot make up for the fact that there is too much dependence on the audience knowing the Jurassic Park story and being able to identify all the characters from taglines, vocal intonations or o...
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White Christmas ★★★★ The Mill at Sonning | Nov 27, 2024 - Jan 25, 2025

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It's official! Christmas is here. With a traditional buffet meal and their always enjoyable holiday show, The Mill at Sonning has kicked off the season! White Christmas with its satisfyingly predictable story is all about the music and the dancing, and Director Jonathan O'Boyle does a brilliant job of taking a small stage and capturing the essence of a big film musical. The tale of two GIs who, following the war, become a famous double act, and who then team up with a pair of singing sisters to put on a show which will save the Vermont inn owned by their former commander, is as sweet as maple syrup. It certainly takes us back to a simpler, more optimistic time in America, and there's not a hint of irony anywhere. In this iteration of the classic, the cast dance up a storm with some terrific choreography from Gary Lloyd, and celebrate Irving Berlin's great song classics such as "White Christmas," "Blue Skies" and "Count Your Blessings." The...
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Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake: The Next Generation ★★★★★ Sadler's Wells Theatre | Dec 3, 2024 - Jan 26, 2025

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Thirty years have gone by since Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake premiered, but it remains as fresh and entrancing as ever. It is a work that can be read on many levels, but the power of Bourne's reimagining of the classic ends up touching audiences quite viscerally. The clash between the cold, staid court in which the Prince is raised and the power of the Swan not only reflects the political reality of the time, it also has elements of a gay coming-out story while simultaneously invoking Freud's battle between the ID and the super ego and Nietzsche's dichotomy of uncontrolled Dionysian passion threatening a comfortable Apollonian order. For us, there is, perhaps, too much exposition and mime in the first part, although this might be ascribed to an intentional sharing of the ennui and flatness of the Prince's life. However, the production absolutely soars with the appearance of the Swan. Harrison Dowzell's dancing is simply extraordinary, and his performance has an a...
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