Reviews
Jasper Rees
On and on the stately galleon sails. The fifth wodge of Downton Abbey has been light on utter knuckle-gnawing preposterousness. Plots conjured up at random from thin air have been in slightly shorter supply than usual. The very worst you can say of it is that Lord Fellowes is no Agatha Christie. The poor old blighted Bateses have now been subject to a matching pair of cack-handed murder mysteries. To get accidentally banged up once in a slow-moving crime plot may be counted a misfortune. Twice looks like cluelessness.Last night brought further proof that the upper classes are just as capable Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
“He should be on banknotes.” Benedict Cumberbatch has spoken of his character, real-life hero Alan Turing, as if he knew him. Turing, who died in 1954, was the father of computing and, more importantly, a secret WWII hero as told in The Imitation Game. This highly anticipated biopic of Alan Turing, who was not only a gifted mathematician but also an ultra-marathon runner, is made even more alluring by an exquisite cast of Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley and Alan Leech (Tom in Downton Abbey), with Charles Dance and Mark Strong muscling up pivotal supporting roles.This beautifully designed Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Rock music excessively rewards its pretty young corpses. Edwyn Collins’ survival, like Wilko Johnson’s, is much more remarkable. Two massive strokes in 2005, when he was only 44, should really have finished the ex-Orange Juice singer. Edward Lovelace and James Hall’s film plunges us without preamble into the dramatised, subjective reality for Collins back then.The hits – “Rip It Up”, “A Girl Like You” – and the quick, sardonic wit of the old Edwyn on the pop promo circuit appear as ill-fitting fragments, of little practical use as we see waves crash against the Scottish coast, and the singer Read more ...
David Nice
One queen is much like another in so-called “historical” Italian early to mid 19th-century opera. Elizabeth of England, Christina of Sweden, take your pick, they all fall for a tenor courtier who loves Another (the seconda donna, soprano or mezzo). With Donizetti, the musical drama is almost as disposable as the plot until a stonking number or two rolls up. Jacopo Foroni, more or less unknown until Wexford resurrected him a year ago, has a few more felicitous orchestral touches but nothing as memorable as Donizetti's best. Cristina, regina di Svezia served at Wexford, and last night in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Cyril Davies' All-Stars: Radio Sounds of Cyril Davies Various Artists: Girls With GuitarsAn escalating side effect of the current vogue for vinyl is that some reissues are being released only in that format – and some are so interesting they merit covering. theartsdesk saw this a while ago with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Jimmy Page’s Lucifer Rising soundtrack and John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil. So, once again, this week’s reissues aren’t available on CD.The compilation Girls With Guitars does though draw from a series of CDs – three so far – issued under that title, each of which Read more ...
Matthew Wright
It’s supposed to represent everything simple and homely, for a white audience at least, its tales of God, family and heartbreak the stuff of everyday America. For British listeners, more at home with “Parklife’s” dirty pigeons and cups of tea than Dolly Parton or Johnny Cash, the cultural background needs more sketching in, and BBC Four had its work cut out telling the story of a city, and a music both so familiar and so exotic.The programme’s procession of talking heads had to cover the ground rapidly, without the slick editing of, say, the HBO-made Sonic Highways, in which Dave Grohl and Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
English National Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet have staged programmes of war pieces already this year; now here's the Royal Ballet bringing up the rear in its own inimitable (and rather oblique) fashion with a triple bill that picks up on and subtly plays with the anxiety felt by those great British artists, Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden, in the 1930s and 1940s. Brandstrup's Ceremony of Innocence, first performed at last year's Aldeburgh Festival and set to Britten's 1937 Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, promised much, but for my money didn't deliver. With a Britten score, a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Is the Rose Playhouse London theatre’s best-kept secret? Or simply its worst-publicised? Either way, this gem of a space, tucked away behind the Globe in Bankside, needs and deserves a greater following. If it continues to stage shows like the delicately beautiful Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang however, it’ll be an easy sell. Gentle and melancholic, inventive and profoundly moving – this is a show with a particular autumnal alchemy to it.The first purpose-built playhouse to stage any of Shakespeare’s plays, The Rose was rediscovered by accident in 1989. Two-thirds of the foundations of the Read more ...
Miriam Gillinson
There’s no denying that this one-woman show, starring Tricia Kelly, is mightily ambitious. Written by East German playwright Manfred Karge and rarely revived, Man to Man depicts a German widow – Ella Gericke – who decides to impersonate her dead husband, Max, and take over his life. The play opens with Hitler’s army advancing, spans 50 years, covers dozens of characters and includes a number of surreal dance, dream and fantasy sequences. Demanding indeed – but a bit of a mess.Man to Man launched Tilda Swinton’s career in 1987, which gives you an idea of the versatility and, well, wackiness Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s fascinating to catch the moment when an already great film director moves onwards and upwards, to another level. Russia’s Andrei Zvyagintsev has been collecting major festival prizes for more than a decade, since his debut feature The Return won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2003. After that he became a regular at Cannes, with his follow-ups The Banishment and Elena; his latest film, Leviathan, came away from the Croisette this year with the best script award. Many critics there felt that it merited something more.Because Leviathan marks a change of direction for Zvyagintsev, a move Read more ...
David Nice
It has to be the ultimate cornucopia of choral and early-instrumental invention. So long as the musicians immerse themselves in the beauty of a strange adventure, it doesn’t matter where you hear Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610: however selective the acoustic, you’ll always get something out of one rare combination of sounds or another. The challenge of The Sixteen on their latest tour was never going to be one of communication, only of adapting in the move between cathedrals and concert halls.If the Winchester experience began in the aural equivalent of a dimly-lit room, it ended in total Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The voice is unmistakably Icelandic. Fluting and dancing around the notes, the words it carries are broken into segments which don’t respect syllables. Although singing in English, Hildur Kristín Stefánsdóttir hasn’t sacrificed her Icelandic intonation.The music itself is also unmistakably Icelandic. As with fellow Icelanders múm, electronica has been assimilated bringing a glitchiness which knocks the lush, ebbing and flowing arrangements off balance. Yet the totality is folky and warmly intimate.Innra, the third album from Rökkurró, is a lovely thing – a musical postcard from a world where Read more ...