Reviews
David Kettle
In Two Minds, Traverse Theatre ★★★★ Mother is finally getting her kitchen extension. It’s a lot of work, though, and it’ll take several weeks. So she’ll have to move in – temporarily – with her Daughter, in her city studio flat, while the work takes place. The relocation is smooth and straightforward, however – well, kind of, until Mother returns to her obsessive praying, and even cancels the building work itself when she gets furious at how long it’s taking.Joanne Ryan’s increasingly tense but ultimately moving two-hander from Dublin’s Fishamble theatre company might have a dramatically Read more ...
James Saynor
So, it falls to me to review perhaps the least-anticipated film of the year. Borderlands is based on an admired video game, and there may be nothing more hostile than pissed-off video-gamers.The tsunami of online negativity aimed for weeks at merely the film’s trailer was nothing compared to the onslaught that followed the lifting of review embargoes these past few days. The picture was slammed and dunked. If they think it’s all over for the era of Peak Superhero Movie, it is now. Come back Madame Web, all is forgiven.But there is, at least, a question of interest for readers of this Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s a brave company that embarks on a staging of John Steinbeck’s award-winning 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. A grim study of human goodness in an unrelentingly cruel universe, it’s a long slog for both cast and audience.Steinbeck based his novel on his experiences in 1936 of reporting for a San Francisco newspaper on the US migrant camps known as Hoovervilles, after the President who set them up. But relief for their residents — escapees from the US’s economic collapse in the early 1930s and the Dust Bowl that then destroyed over-farmed land in Texas and Oklahoma — would have to wait Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This was my first Prom of the season – always an exciting moment, even in my fourth decade as an attendee. I was hearing the BBC Philharmonic under its newly appointed Principal Guest Conductor, the excellent Anja Bihlmaier, in a programme of two giants of the 19th century Romantic repertoire separated by warp & weft by the American composer Sarah Gibson.This was not the originally billed commission beyond the beyond, as Gibson died of cancer at the age of 38 on 14 July, with the new piece unfinished. It was replaced by warp & weft (2021), based, according to the programme note, on Read more ...
Simon Thompson
The Queen’s Hall isn’t going to know what has hit it after the opening weekend of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. What’s usually the festival’s demure home of chamber music – string quartets, piano trios and so on – was still recovering from Jakub Józef Orliński’s theatrics from Saturday morning, when it encountered this scorching performance of choral music from the Schola Cantorum de Venezuela (★★★★★).The Schola Cantorum’s main reason for being in Edinburgh last weekend was to take part in Golijov's La Pasión según San Marcos in the Usher Hall on Saturday evening, but Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The title sounds as if we ought to be in for an evening of Virginia Woolf, and, indeed, one of the astonishing women on view (Deborah Findlay) was in fact a co-star of the recent West End version of Orlando. In fact, this late-summer offering is a scorching reminder of the power of European theatre at a venue, the Almeida, that has of late focused its attentions (often very well) on the American repertoire, from Tennessee Williams to Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, amongst others.I also can't remember a show that has foregrounded women so formidably. The French writer Annie Ernaux's 2008 "hybrid Read more ...
Gary Naylor
If I were a rich man, I'd be inclined to put together a touring production of Fiddler on the Roof and send it around the world, a week here, a week there, to educate and entertain. But, like Tevye, I also have to sell a little milk to put food on the table, so I’ll just revel in the delights of this marvellous show in the theatrical village nestling within Regent’s Park.The book (by Joseph Stein based on the short stories of Sholem Aleichem) pulls off one of great art’s essential tricks - it finds the universal in the specific. That’s why it ran for 3000+ performances on Broadway Read more ...
Simon Thompson
When I first started attending the Edinburgh International Festival in the 1990s, the Opening Concert (capitals intentional) was a grand Usher Hall affair on a Sunday evening; a central work of the western classical tradition to set the festival running. Not any more. They’ve steadily moved the opening of the festival forwards over the years (the first of 2024’s preview events took place last Thursday) and this year the opening concerts take place over not one but two nights.The theme that director Nicola Benedetti has chosen for this year’s festival is Rituals that unite us, and the opening Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I think my dad might have been an alien,” Adam (Faraz Ayub; Line of Duty; Screw) tells a self-help group he wanders into. What does that make him? He doesn’t feel at home anywhere – not with his family or, perhaps not surprisingly, at his job in a burger bar at Sky Peals motorway services.And in fact he is almost homeless: his white mother (Claire Rushbrook) is moving out of their flat with her new man, to Herefordshire - "Where's that?" he asks vaguely. She wants him to pack up his things but he stays in front of his computer, transfixed, while they take his bed apart, and carries on Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Emma Sidi Is Sue Gray Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★I have no idea what Sue Gray - the former senior civil servant who is now The Prime Minister’s right-hand woman - sounds like, but I’m guessing not someone who has stepped straight out of The Only Way Is Essex.Hilariously, and to great effect, that is character comic Emma Sidi’s presentation of a woman finding herself at the heart of government without really knowing why.“The last four years have been mental!” says “Sue Gray” as she introduces herself - Sue Gray refers to herself in the third person frequently, and always with her full name Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“One charming night gives more delight than a hundred lucky days”. So claims one of the gorgeous (and, in this case, risqué) numbers that stud Purcell’s “semi-opera” The Fairy Queen like sequins on a flamboyant party gown.Directed by tenor-turned-conductor Paul Agnew (pictured below), the Baroque ensemble Les Arts Florissants – together with singers from its sister company Le Jardin des Voix and dancers from Compagnie Käfig – certainly threw one hell of a Proms party. The illustrious French group’s all-dancing, all-singing, hip-hop-flavoured remake of Purcell’s loose riff on A Midsummer Night Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Eric Rushton, Monkey Barrel @ The Hive ★★★★ Eric Rushton tells us he has enough cash on him to return the price of one person’s ticket if they don’t like what’s about to follow. No one takes up the offer, although I suspect a few in the audience may have taken a few minutes to tune into his individual style of comedy.Essentially Real One is a shaggy dog story that uses a surreal hook – a vivid dream the comic had about the actress Margot Robbie – to examine regrets, embarrassment and a life that’s yet to take off.Rushton intersperses his account of that dream – in which he managed to Read more ...