Curtains draw anger from Madonna

It ain’t over until this lady singer says it is ... Madonna has accused a British venue of trying to ‘‘censor’’ her after it pulled the curtain down on her show as she ran over her 11pm curfew.

The 61-year-old American singer unleashed a tirade of swearing after accusing the operators of the London Palladium of switching off the light and sound and bringing the curtain down on her performance on Thursday.

With a shout of ‘‘artists are here to disturb the peace’’, Madonna and her dancers reappeared from behind the curtain to continue the concert with a microphone-free performance of I Rise.

The singer wrote on social media that she had been five minutes past the curfew with ‘‘one more song to do and the Palladium decided to censor us by pulling down the metal fire curtain that weighs nine tonnes. Fortunately they stopped it half way and no-one was hurt. Many thanks to the entire audience who did not move and never left us’’.

One spectator wrote on social media: ‘‘Glorious moment. She finished the show acapella in front of the curtain like a champ!’’. Others said that Madonna had a history of starting late. One said: ‘‘Start on time and you’ll be done before the curfew’’.

A spokeswoman for LW Theatres, which operates the Palladium, denied that the fire curtain had been pulled down. She said: ‘‘Contrary to a number of reports, at no point during last night’s performance did staff at the London Palladium pull down, or attempt to pull down, the Iron Fire Curtain.’’

Madonna is facing a lawsuit in the United States from two men who allege that they were kept waiting for hours past the advertised start time of her concerts in New York, in September and October last year. The singer, who has been photographed with a cane, has cancelled some London concerts for unspecified medical reasons. – The Times