Anna Russell

London

Contributor at The New Yorker

Contributing writer @newyorker. Likes London a lot.

Articles

The Play Where Everyone Keeps Fainting

2 weeks ago | newyorker.com | Anna Russell

The last time Shakespeare’s bloody tragedy “Titus Andronicus” was staged at the Globe Theatre, in London, in 2014, members of the audience regularly fainted. Each performance, the crew kept a running tally of the fallen. Recovering theatregoers were placed in a separate box for the remainder of the show. “I used to be disappointed if I got three fainters,” the production’s director, Lucy Bailey, recently told me.
The Strange Experimental-Theatre Experience Giving New Meaning to “Show, Don’t Tell”

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Anna Russell

Somewhere in London’s theatre district—I can’t say where—there’s a nondescript office building with a neon sign in the lobby that reads, in blue cursive script, “You Me Bum Bum Train.” The illuminated sign, and the handful of nervous-looking people that gather outside four evenings a week, are the only clues that there’s something odd going on. “Bum Bum Train,” as it’s known, is an immersive theatrical experience, which invites one audience member into its surrealist world at a time.
The Strange Experimental-Theatre Experience Giving New Meaning to “Show, Don’t Tell”

1 month ago | flipboard.com | Anna Russell

7 hours agoThe vice president and his wife, Usha Vance, got hit with a harsh tune as they took their seats for a concert. JD Vance took in an orchestra of boos and jeers on Thursday as he and his wife, Usha Vance, attended a concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. (You can check out the video …
Why Was a Climate Activist Put in Prison for Five Years?

2 months ago | newyorker.com | Anna Russell

The London Orbital Motorway, or the M25, is a vast ring road that runs in a shaggy circle around the outer edges of the capital. If you live in the city, it’s the road you might take to the airport, or the suburbs, or the countryside, and it provides a kind of unofficial border to the Greater London Area. Also provided: lots of traffic. Every day, the road plays host to some two hundred thousand vehicles.
Ali Smith’s Playful Dystopia

Jan 17, 2025 | newyorker.com | Anna Russell

Recently, just before lunch with the Scottish author Ali Smith, at Moro, a beloved North African and Mediterranean place in London’s Exmouth Market, I locked myself out of my new phone. I couldn’t remember my password, or my backup, or my backup’s backup. My authenticator was not authenticating. I spent a fruitless hour trying to prove my identity—to whom?—and then left for the restaurant. When I told Smith about my morning, she cackled with delight.
Britain’s Badger Wars

Jan 10, 2025 | newyorker.com | Anna Russell

A hundred years after the opening of St. Pancras station, now the flashy London home of the Eurostar, a narrow strip of land opposite the train tracks near Regent’s Canal had fallen into disrepair. Once a polluted coal drop, by the nineteen-seventies, the two acres of open space had become an abandoned wasteland. Then nature took over. Or, humans helped nature take over. Trash was cleared. Trees were planted.
Graham Norton Would Like a Chat

Jan 3, 2025 | newyorker.com | Anna Russell

For nearly twenty years, Norton, the U.K.’s chatter-in-chief, has hosted “The Graham Norton Show,” a Friday-night talk show in which celebrities sit opposite him on a red couch and, well, chat. They do not talk politics; they do not philosophize. They chat. Norton likes to chat, and he’s very good at it. Just after arriving, dressed down in a purple plaid shirt, he was full of bonny small talk. He mentioned a piece I’d written and asked how I ended up in London.
Watching an American Election from Across the Pond

Nov 3, 2024 | newyorker.com | Anna Russell

Roman Road, in London’s East End, is a busy thoroughfare just south of Victoria Park. It sits on the bones of an ancient route used by the Romans, but is better known for its scruffy outdoor market and historical proximity to jellied eels. (“One of the great market streets in London,” the reformer Charles Booth wrote, in 1887.
James Graham Thinks We’re in a Crisis of Storytelling

Oct 24, 2024 | newyorker.com | Anna Russell

The brutalist Royal National Theatre building, which sits aggressively on the south side of the River Thames, in London, is a “love it or loudly despise it” kind of place—all concrete edges and unwelcoming angles. King Charles III once morosely described it as “a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London.” For the playwright and screenwriter James Graham, however, it holds a certain appeal. “I think the geometry of it is fucking sexy,” he told me recently.
How Funny Is Britain’s Labour Government?

Sep 28, 2024 | newyorker.com | Anna Russell

When the British comedian Rosie Holt heard that Rishi Sunak, then the Prime Minister and head of the Conservative Party, would be holding a snap election in July, earlier than many expected, her first thought was: “So annoying!” “The election screwed up so many things,” she told me on a recent hot afternoon. Holt was drinking a gin-and-tonic at the Prince, a sweltering wood-panelled pub in Stoke Newington, in North East London. I opted for a beer.