Spades, Roundhouse

SPADES, ROUNDHOUSE Canada's most imaginative director turns his 360 degree gaze on the Iraq War

Canada's most imaginative director turns his 360 degree gaze on the Iraq War

You don’t so much watch a Robert Lepage show as surrender to it, and his latest project sees Canada’s most innovative theatre-maker in full assault. It’s hard to think of another director whose response to the Iraq War would involve an Elvis impersonator, menopause as a major plot point and a visual cadenza for twelve perspex chairs, but that’s the love/hate thrill of Lepage. Spades is the first in a planned tetralogy of plays each themed around one of the suits of cards.

The Killers, Roundhouse

Vegas power-poppers treat Camden to a night of back-to-back hits

The moment everyone will remember came exactly an hour in: Brandon Flowers was singing  “All These Things That I've Done” with the conviction of a man at confession. Behind him a video screen showed a loner carrying a long wooden sign on his shoulder like a cross. In the desert in front of him scantily dressed women stood by a grave. Suddenly there was an explosion above us all. Red and silver glitter thunderbolts rained down. Whilst some rushed to gather them up, others waved smartphones to capture the instant on video.

Twelfth Night/The Tempest, RSC, Roundhouse

The RSC's trio of shipwreck plays offer a watery journey through Shakespeare's career

The RSC’s Twelfth Night dumps its audience unceremoniously onto the shores of Ilyria in the thump and beat of waves. While Viola struggles from the (very deep and very real) water, asking “What country friends is this?”, we by contrast find ourselves in familiar territory. Like this season’s opener, A Comedy of Errors, both Twelfth Night and The Tempest take their birth in the water. But as the triptych progresses and comedy turns to uncertainty and ethics, so Shakespeare’s drama itself suffers something of a sea-change.

Paul Weller, Roundhouse

PAUL WELLER: Middle-aged kicks with The Modfather, steering clear of his Jam/Council back catalogue

Middle-aged kicks with The Modfather, steering clear of his Jam/Council back catalogue

I had a terrible fright last week. While listening to BBC London DJ Robert Elms introduce a track from the new Paul Weller album, Sonik Kicks. What I heard sounded remarkably like Oasis. It seemed that the man who once influenced Noel Gallagher was now so bereft of ideas he was reduced to ripping off Noel Gallagher. To my relief Robert Elms followed the track with an apology. He had pressed the wrong button and had played a Noel Gallagher track by mistake.

If you've got enough hair to make it stand up at 53, why not flaunt it?

AV Festival, Newcastle/ Heiner Goebbels's Surrogate Cities, RFH/ London Contemporary Orchestra, Brunt, The Roundhouse

Musical revelations from Susan Stenger, Jem Finer and the final weekend of Reverb 2012

It's often more fun on the margins. The pickings are richer. The view is clearer. You can take aim easier. The AV Festival has spent more than eight years here, on the counter-cultural edges, delving into the divisional cracks between art, music and film.

Ana Silvera, Imogen Heap, Estonian Television Girls Choir, Holst Singers, Reverb 2012

A night of dream logic at the Roundhouse from two stellar young female composers

Freud would have loved the final night of Reverb 2012's opening weekend. First came a screening of a mad early Surrealist film from Germaine Dulac and Antonin Artaud, in which a priest chases a woman's breasts that have turned into two seashells. Then came the even madder sight of the Estonian Television Girls Choir dressed up in stripey national dress, coyly jellyfishing around the Roundhouse stage during their a cappella piece, while their long-haired conductor, Aarne Saluveer, beat time on an old metal plate.

Nicolas Jaar, The Roundhouse

NICOLAS JAAR: The Chilean-American king of one-man electronica opts for plain and serious

Most prestigious date yet for the Chilean-American king of one-man electronica

The Roundhouse is a melee of moneyed cosmopolitan twentysomething trendies. The beautiful people are out in force. My God, there are some delicious women and men here, expensively dressed, uptown couture to the hilt, a hefty smattering of languages from around the globe. Unexpectedly, for me at least, 22-year-old Chilean-American electronica prodigy Nicolas Jaar has the most chi-chi gig in London tonight. This is not a plus – the queues at the bar are half-an-hour long, dilettante party people buying rounds of exotic shots and bottles of bubbly, waving wodges of tenners about.

The Low Anthem, Roundhouse

THE LOW ANTHEM: An absorbing evening from the defiantly uncategorisable Rhode Island band

An absorbing evening from the defiantly uncategorisable Rhode Island band

This show was memorable almost as much for the audience as it was for the music. The Roundhouse was perhaps two-thirds full for a show that The Low Anthem’s singer Ben Knox Miller said was “the biggest gig of their career” (adding: “And I’ve never called it a ‘career’ before”), but those who were there had clearly come to see the band rather than catch up on gossip, because the audience’s attention was absolute, their silence total; I can scarcely recall a gig where the crowd’s concentration was so complete.