Reviews
Marina Vaizey
Another October and another Frieze week just passed. This means the biggest of big hitters have been turning up in London. The economic quantifiers aren’t precise, but there have been plenty of estimates. Hordes of well-heeled visitors mean big profits for hotels, restaurants, shops and transport. All the people employed to literally make the fair, and the huge cluster of shows, events and happenings which take place because of Frieze, from auctions to ancillary fairs, mean conservative estimates are now hovering around £50m+ for the London economy. And no, that’s not for art sales but all Read more ...
Marianka Swain
When gifting the unheard a voice, the temptation is often to make it a solemn one. Thankfully, Paddy Campbell has, for the most part, sidestepped puritanical preaching in his debut play based on experiences working at a ‘wet house’, a homeless hostel where incurable alcoholics can drink in a secure environment. Though tonally uneven, at its best Campbell’s piece delivers unpalatable truths with a bitingly funny sweetener.Wet House, developed with Newcastle’s Live Theatre, introduces naïve new recruit Andy (Riley Jones, pictured right with Chris Connel) to the bleak environs of Crabtree House Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Mash-ups, genre-bending and creative anachronism can be a fun way to inject life into a stale idea. Pirates meet ninjas, Victorian engineers find themselves constructing steam dirigibles and aetheric ray guns and zombies somehow find their way into space.With Card Dungeon, developer Playtap Games has combined not two clichéd settings, but three different takes on ways to play in the same clichéd setting. Card Dungeon is a curious hybrid of roguelike dungeon quest, tabletop role playing game and card battler. You are The Crusader, a brave knight who seeks to defeat the source of evil Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It's throwback week on the West End, with two very different shows recalling the darkest days of America's racial disharmony. But whereas The Scottsboro Boys shocks and satirises and has us choke on our own laughter, Memphis is content to be the feel-good flipside. Throw a few home truths and some grit into the mix – disturbing but not too real – keep it predictable and sentimental, even a little patronising, and you ensure that everybody is dancing in the aisles and feeling good about themselves at the close.This 2010 Broadway Tony-winner is a bit like Hairspray but without the wit and self- Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
The Jimi Hendrix redux directed by John Ridley, Oscar-winning scriptwriter of 12 Years A Slave (and the underrated Undercover Brother, among others), was highly anticipated - especially as this take on the great guitarist’s life would not, apparently, feature any hits.Although this sounded like a deliberate plan, one suspects Ridley was hampered by a perennial film budgeting problem: soundtracks cost a lot. So, no greatest hits but snippets of covers work perfectly well to tell the story of Jimi’s breakthrough year 1966-67 – with Jimi well portrayed by the telegenic, talented and relaxed Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mother love is mangled, yanked inside-out and tested almost to destruction in Australian writer-director Jennifer Kent’s heartfelt horror debut. The Babadook enthusiastically fulfils its remit to scare, but finds its fright in the secret corners of maternal instinct, where frustration, grief and violence meet.Amelia (Essie Davis) is the mother of 6-year-old Samuel (Noah Wiseman), who was born hours after her husband died in a car crash, speeding to the hospital as she went into labour. The matrix of guilt and mourning from that trauma still defines Amelia and Samuel’s relationship. She looks Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Installed in the main exhibition space, this could have been a blockbuster show introducing a large audience to an important moment in Russian Theatre; but tucked away in the Department of Theatre and Performance, where spaces are narrow and galleries small, there is little room to show off these superb exhibits to their best advantage. Only the initiated will, I fear, brave these claustrophobic corridors and persevere long enough to appreciate the goodies on offer.Faced with walls painted bright red, labels hung too low and hard to read, copious detail about each production but little Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The last time I saw Lee Mack live, my companion and I were literally in pain because we were laughing so much. It's perhaps unfair to expect a repeat of such a wonderful, life-affirming experience - live comedy is an ephemeral art, after all - but the comic doesn't appear to be even trying to achieve the same effect on his audience in his latest show, Hit the Road Mack, and this time we both left disappointed.His 75-minute set - including a lengthy Q&A, almost always a sign of a shortage of material - is delivered at Mack's usual breakneck speed as he paces across the stage. The comic Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The night before he was locked up, Chris Huhne had that Grayson Perry round for tuna steaks. Who knew? Perry was embarking on a series of portraits about identity at a crossroads, and can there be a more public crisis of identity than a Cabinet minister going to prison? But first Perry wanted to get to know his subject. Huhne was resistant to probing. “People are not like Russian dolls,” he volunteered. “They are exactly like Russian dolls!” countered Perry.Perry’s theory of the portrait is that a good one “tells you something a thousand selfies never could”. A portraitist is somewhere Read more ...
fisun.guner
In a tavern somewhere in Tokyo, two Japanese macaque monkeys work a daily, two-hour shift (under Japanese law, these hours are regulated). Dressed in miniature uniforms, the monkeys’ main task is to deliver hot towels to amused customers before drinks orders are taken by a human. The customers tip the monkeys in boiled soy beans. A search on YouTube throws up quite a few of these monkey-waiter skits. Who knew? Perhaps all the footage comes from the same restaurant, since it seems unusual enough to have warranted a jolly “strange but true” item on Japanese news. One segment of this news Read more ...
emma.simmonds
As the bald title suggests, Fury is a work of righteous, focussed rage. It's a combat film which swaps preaching and profundity for pure anger at the brutalising, destructive war machine, and still manages to be illuminating. For, even at its most thrillingly Hollywood, Fury retains a keen sense of the waste of life. Director David Ayer's fifth film features explicit, immersive and impactful violence and works best when it's pummelling the audience and Nazis alike, with deafening, meticulously executed action that threatens to punch a hole through both the screen and your ear-drum.Set in Read more ...
Matthew Wright
In the time that Culture Club have been planning reunions, bands, movements, whole musical eras have come and gone. And still, once every couple of years, a rumour circulates, and a demo is aired. Generally, nothing comes of it, and those memories of dancing drunkenly to “Karma Chameleon” grow a little fainter. Now, with last night’s taster gig at Heaven (where the band gave their first big London performance in 1982), we can definitively say, they are back. A nationwide tour is booked, new songs are written, and the album (provisionally entitled “Tribes”, if I heard Boy George correctly) is Read more ...