Reviews
Marina Vaizey
Julian Fellowes, now the Conservative peer Lord Fellowes, left behind the fictional world of Gosford Park and Downton Abbey to give us this sumptuous tour of Blenheim Palace. Nor were its surroundings neglected as vista after vista showed us Blenheim’s lavishly landscaped gardens, fountains and columned monument to John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, victorious over Louis XIV. It was his military prowess that led to wealth and Blenheim itself, gifted by the grateful nation and thus an early example of government subsidy.But this was more than a gushing visit to yet another stately home. Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
As a political act, the first performance of Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel in 1916 is exceptionally important. It was staged in Washington DC by the drama committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and was the first play by an African-American woman ever to be professionally produced (as well as one of the first to feature an all-black cast).As drama, though, it does not quite measure up. The themes it features - segregation, racism, insidious intolerance - are undoubtedly powerful and too-little discussed on the stage. Yet the play’s dialogue Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Grupo Corpo means Body Group, and if that sounds like the name of a global exercise consortium, it’s because it should be. If I were an entrepreneur media mogul type, I would have shot out of my seat at Sadler’s Wells last night and straight round to the stage door to persuade the Pederneiras siblings who run the company - it's emphatically a family business - that they need to do a fitness video or five, and syndicate an accompanying wordwide branded exercise class guaranteed to have the likes of Zumba and Les Mills, the BodyPump people, quaking in their last year’s Nike Airs.Grupo Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
As revered as the Greek tragedies may be, I have to admit to feeling a little weary of all that conspicuous, over-ripe angst, and the expectation of our sympathy, even empathy for matricides, patricides, filicides and all such. Rather than resonate through time, they’ve brought me to the point where I’m feeling “enough already”.I’m overstating. Yet a version of the above is one reason why I find Ian Rickson’s production of Sophocles’s Electra, from Frank McGuinness’s 1997 adaptation, so appealing. Rather than pummel the audience with emotion, this leans back a little, lets air into the play, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“The minute I touched New York,” wrote Berenice Abbott, “I had a burning desire to photograph the city of incredible contrasts, the city of stone needles and skyscrapers, the city that is never the same but always changing.” Backed by funding from the Federal Art Project, the elegiac photographs she took of New York in the 1930s record cluttered corner shops and brownstones standing cheek by jowl with new high rise developments. “The past jostling the present” was how she described the juxtapositions of old and new that she found so inspiring (pictured below left: Rockefeller Centre, New Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
2014 is the 250th anniversary of the death of Jean-Philippe Rameau, France’s baroque giant and maverick. To say that the UK celebrations have been muted is to put in generously, reconfirming a national trend that has long sidelined this repertoire in favour of more familiar Italian and German contemporaries. So it was especially good to see the Wigmore Hall full for an anniversary concert from instrumental ensemble Les Paladins and soprano Sandrine Piau.But, emerging back out onto Wigmore Street after barely more than an hour of performance, I found myself baffled. Was this brief evening of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In a house in Nuneaton, a man calling himself Stinson Hunter lures paedophiles towards exposure, shame and possible prosecution. “We set the profile that is like the rope,” he explained. “And then if they choose to put that rope round their neck and hang theirselves [sic], that is their choice. We have not pushed them.”The bait is simple. Hunter loads a fake female profile on a casual dating site then awaits contact from men. His replies, in the voice of a fictional girl, make it repeatedly clear that she is underage. Undeterred, men turn up for what they assume is a rendezvous for illegal Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Mesmerising in her sustained emotional rawness, Emmanuelle Devos is at her empathetic best in Violette, a psychological study of a woman damned by her loveless childhood and what she perceived as her ugliness.Devos gave an impression of homeliness and dowdiness as the near-deaf secretary ridiculed by her colleagues in Jacques Audiard's Read My Lips, but in that 2001 film, as in Martin Provost's Violette Leduc biopic, she obliterated conventional value judgments about women's appearances. She has a habit, too, of rendering almost appealing negative qualities like neediness, self-consciousness Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some feared that turning Gillian Flynn's bestselling novel into a movie couldn't be done, but with Flynn herself in the screenwriter's chair and the clinically precise David Fincher wearing the director's hat, it's turned out a treat. It's long at 145 minutes, but it needed space to accommodate its titillating mix of police procedural, whodunnit, social satire and psychological drama.Gone Girl is the story of the marriage of Nick and Amy Dunne, a pair of high-profile journalists whose blissfully gilded Manhattan existence has been brought to a shuddering halt by an economic recession which Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Writing is a tedious activity, usually requiring a great deal of time spent alone at a desk with a pen, typewriter or laptop. It gives you bad breath and piles. Since a literal representation of this would be death on any stage, plays about writers need a dash of spice. In Pulitzer-Prize nominee Theresa Rebeck’s 2011 comedy, Seminar, this comes from seeing a quartet of budding writers being humiliated by their teacher. Luckily, there’s no writing on show, but there is rather a lot of silent reading - which is second to writing as a soporific.The seminar involves four young hopefuls paying $ Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Alan Bennett’s 80th birthday last May deserves celebrating not just as a point of respect for a formidable playwright but with awe at his continuing liveliness. More than 40 years after 40 Years On, he is still producing hits, and at Kingston’s Rose an opportune revival of two of his spy plays from the 1980s reminds us that the cuddly Yorkshire macaroon-lover with the swot’s glasses is quite the George Smiley: there are mercilessly observant eyes behind those lenses.It was under the last Soviet president Gorbachev, when the Cold War was a permanent feature of contemporary history still, that Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This is what Goat look like: There are seven of them, five band members and two front-women, the latter constantly whirling about the stage like dervishes. One of the guitarists and the bassist are clad in dark attire with black cowls over their heads akin to those worn by nomadic Arabic riders in the Sahara – but also a little like hangmen. The second guitarist has on a beanie hat underneath which resides a gold mask, as if he were a sinister ancient deity returned to haunt an Eighties B-movie. The drummer, in an Afro-flavoured smock, wears a mask that’s part bird, part skull, and the bongo- Read more ...