wondered what all the honking outside my hotel was and it’s a seemingly endless stream of motorcycling santas driving through the streets of krakow

why is the hot norwegian chef apparently making dozens of toasties when the ambassador only wanted one

in Krakow and my hotel has charger sockets that mean there was actually no need for me to have brought an adaptor, obviously varies from country to country but genuinely astonishing how much the experience of travelling abroad has changed in my lifetime

as you would expect from the NYT, the best thing about this article is the 100% absence of any bants

fair play to jeremy o harris, there but for the grace of god etc

it’s that time of the year where I feel like a froth-mouthed contrarian for using apple music

Mama Goose at Stratford East is a terrific panto that shows what a gift Vikki Stone is to the whole ‘scene’ – so much to love but the AI love interest, playwright Ché Walker as a geezerish goose, and the very childish Elon Musk scene were my highlights www.timeout.com/london/theat...

Fallen Angels at the Menier is quite nice but for me maybe something a bit perverse about treating plays that were shocking 100 years ago as pleasant period pieces today www.timeout.com/london/theat...

bloody hell!

everything about that Graham Linehan Observer piece is cursed, and I'm afraid it makes for a pretty good read

I very much enjoyed Paddington the Musical though I feel like the 5* reviews are all bit ‘British theatre critics get sentimental about a heartwarming thing’ www.timeout.com/london/news/...

I was today years old when I learned Tom Stoppard did some script doctoring on Revenge of the Sith

ah RIP, what a titan, obviously old as the hills but still a shock as he seemed like such a vibrant figure into deep old age, still working, still supportive of revivals etc. What a life

David Eldridge’s adaptation of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is very well done, I was gripped, well done all www.timeout.com/london/theat...

The Globe/Headlong Midsummer Night’s Dream is loads of fun for ages and then goes and makes an incredibly weird decision at the end that totally kills the buzz www.timeout.com/london/theat...

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at Riverside Studios is astoundingly bad in a real but seriously guys WTF why didn’t you just stick to the plot of the novel guys sort of way www.timeout.com/london/theat...

The Lyric Hammersmith panto is once again the sharpest and most inventive game in town, and top marks for turning Pretty Fly for a White Guy into a song about a Ucas inspection www.timeout.com/london/theat...

Review: ★★★★★ ‘All My Sons’ starring Bryan Cranston at Wyndham’s Theatre

I loved Ivo van Hove’s All My Sons, probably not quite the watershed his View from the Bridge was but nonetheless magnificent and head and shoulders over the other productions I’ve seen – VH really embraces its undercurrents, it feels incredibly rich www.timeout.com/london/news/...

it is three days since secret cinema sent out an email to their entire mailing list saying they would announce their new show the next day (the show has still not been officially announced despite a deadline article saying what it was)

obviously hms for looking but some of the grok-musk sycophancy tweets are absolutely sublime

I thought End at the NT suffered from the need to replicate the structure of Beginning – too much happened in a single 90-minute chat. But I've enjoyed the fact David Eldridge’s NT trilogy is basically a really forensic dissection of middle-aged Brits www.timeout.com/london/theat...

if Mani had only ever written the bassline to Kowalski he’d be rightly hailed as a legend

no review of Van Hove’s All My Sons until tomorrow night but I can reveal there was an absolutely SUBLIME moment at the end when Bryan Cranston said the words ‘all my sons’ and there was a hushed but very audible 'mmmmm!' from multiple audience members around me

herein lies my account of a weekend getting over-involved with 24-hour-long Lovecraft-inspired immersive theatre show The Key of Dreams www.timeout.com/uk/theatre/i...

do kids maypole dance anymore? I'm not sure if my primary school was unusually pagan or my kids' school is unusually, er, unpagan

I was saying the other day that it was weird these days to have West End Shakespeare not directed by either Robert Icke or Jamie Lloyd and I then fretted Icke had only done one this decade, so thank you Robert Icke for directing Romeo & Juliet next year www.timeout.com/london/news/...

just had a discussion about the genre of Doctor Who episode that is basically ‘oh wow the Doctor has coincidentally travelled back in time to the writer’s personal historical hobbyhorse’ and what cringe episode WE would write

sad the Americans don’t get June Watson (90), thrilled they instead get Anne Reid (90) – I mean that’s living a life isn’t it

I went to see Last Day of Pompeii: The Immersive Exhibition and it was enjoyably silly in a kind of 'somewhat inaccurate history for a 14-year-old metaller’ sort of way www.timeout.com/london/thing...

Porn Play at the Royal Court has an incredibly committed performance from Ambika Mod at its centre, but I couldn’t help but feel a drama about a woman addicted to violent porn is so rare that all the clever clever stuff about Milton really clogged it up www.timeout.com/london/theat...

the guardian writing an editorial in praise of the return of Play for Today and then slagging off the actual product feels emblematic of the whole situation - people love the idea of P4T but what could it possibly actually be like in 2025? www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

thrilled to say I'm in today’s Guardian theatre section (quoted last in a reviews round up) www.theguardian.com/stage/2025/n...

I thought if The Hunger Games: On Stage had had a really great lead performance it would actually have been pretty great, as it is Mia Carragher is okay but not a generational talent etc www.timeout.com/london/news/...

Play for Today is back tonight apparently - here’s a thing I wrote about the complicated phenomenon of nostalgia for a show that ended 40 years ago and could never exist in its old form today!

if you take every Bond film as canon then he’s a 100+ year old shapeshifting entity doomed to repeat an endless cycle of recruitment to MI5, meeting the latest incarnation of Blofeld, etc etc (tbh I'd be into a film that expressly addressed this)

Joyce Carol Oates please post about how Musk has never known the joy of tackling a Grizzly Bear Cub

this incredibly goth Charli XCX/John Cale collaboration from the Emerald Fennell Wuthering Heights soundtrack is so good it‘s making me temporarily open-minded about the film www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgp7...

oh no no no

this is a delightfully classic Stage social sell insofar as the piece is not really about that but asking what people are nostalgic for when they say they’re nostalgic for Play for Today and whether that can really exist in 2025-slash-six

weirdly light and funny take on Othello at the Haymarket, you’d say 'what do you expect in a commercial theatre’ but funny how jarring it feels now West End Shakespeare has basically become the preserve of Jamie Lloyd and Robert Icke www.timeout.com/london/theat...

this is a boring comment but my ultimate game pass xbox subscription price has not gone up, will it continue to not go up?

Happy Mamdani won, happier still that after several long hard decades, the 2025 New York City mayoral election has been concluded

£74.50 as top price for the new Court season is an unfortunate sign of the times, over a tenner up on this year

finished reading Lord of the Rings with the eldest, a process that has taken up most of the year. ONLY NOW is her permitted to watch the films

so paddington is going to be played by a small person in a bear costume, is that what the big secret was

the most annoying thing about this phenomenon is it is implicitly based on the assumption everything was loads better five years ago or whatever, which it definitely wasn’t

I am increasingly convinced Your Party are a psyop by the Greens

I can’t stress this enough: you cannot understand politics without reading this paragraph about why there’s no such thing as a 1/3rd pound hamburger

This such a perfect patriotic 🇬🇧 Fleet Street cock-up. It's one thing for a news outlet to be duped by a competent hoaxer. Excruciating, yes, but there's a fairly long history of such fuck ups. But to put out a statement SAYING you'd been hoaxed but you'd actually just emailed the wrong guy?