Reviews
aleks.sierz
Dramatic national events such as riots tend to attract verbatim theatre practitioners like smashed shop windows attract looters. In this new play, Alecky Blythe – who specialises in recording ordinary people and editing their words into a humane story – takes to the streets to see what people were saying during the English riots of summer 2011. The main problem at the outset is that citizens armed with new digital media have already filmed and recorded memorable scenes from these events. So does Blythe have anything to add to what we already know?A kind of recognisable British Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Slap and tickle and slapstick meet to varying degrees of not very funny in this comedy starring Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel as a married couple who attempt to spice up their love life with a home-made skin-flick. Extreme product placement, a lack of chemistry between the two leads and a tame script co-written by Segel and long-time writing partner Nicholas Stoller fails to deliver. Thankfully there are solid supporting turns from Rob Lowe and Jack Black.Opening like Sex and the City, with Annie (Cameron Diaz) tapping away on her keyboard like a wholesome Carrie Bradshaw she recalls her Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Bennet family had an issue. Time to get the Austenesque quips out of the way. For the Bennets in Gems TV the truth universally acknowledged was, roughly: “That a £100 million family-run jewellery television channel risking running out of its best-selling African gem, not to mention suffering from a shortage of screen presenters who can flog the stuff, must be in want of a friendly television documentary format to get them out of their fix.” (For the record, no one seemed sure if it was a single “t” or a double one in Bennet: ITV gave them one – closet Janeites there, eh? – the Read more ...
David Nice
After the enervating excesses of Salome and Elektra at the weekend, the abundance of notes at the Proms continued in a piano recital and an orchestral showstopper, but this time with built-in air conditioning. After all, both 22-year-old Benjamin Grosvenor and septuagenarian Charles Dutoit are absolutely in control of the colours they make, very occasionally too much so. But it was a rainbow-hued day inside the Cadogan and Royal Albert Halls, culminating in a spectacular and perhaps unrepeatable Respighi triple bill of Roman impressions.The Grosvenor happening (***) was a first in several Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dan Stevens puts Downton behind him to become a CIA-built killing machine laying low in a New Mexico small town, in Adam Wingard’s bonkers new thriller. He looks all the better for it. Aristocratic English charm translates into Southern civility as his character David insinuates himself into a family grieving for a son he served with in Iraq. David’s just here to help. If young Luke (Brendan Meyer) needs to be shown how to quieten down the bullies at school with a few broken bones, Dad (Leland Orser) would have his promotion prospects improved by a nasty accident to a colleague, or Mom ( Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Poet and campaigner John Betjeman, who died 30 years ago this year, still has a public profile most writers would die for tomorrow. He shares with Philip Larkin the distinction of having written some memorably, demotically quotable lines of verse, their respective denunciations of Slough and parents being possibly the two best-known pieces of 20th-century verse.Yet while Larkin has suffered from a perception of racism and misogyny, Betjeman’s reputation as a far-sighted architectural campaigner has, with his statue at St Pancras, one of the buildings he helped save, helped consolidate Read more ...
edward.seckerson
How much familial dysfunction and lust - whether for sexual gratification or revenge - can one take in a single weekend? Salome and Elektra back-to back may on paper seem like a feast of divine decadence but no sooner had one become accustomed to the sickly sweet air of the former when the putrefaction of the latter (I always think that Strauss’ orchestra is in the final stages of decay with Elektra) filled one’s nostrils - and ears. Then there was the little matter of inevitable comparisons, of Salome - with Stemme, Runnicles and his fabulous Deutsche Oper Berlin Orchestra - being one of the Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Everyone loves a homegrown hero – and they don’t get more homegrown than Before I Go to Sleep, the thriller written and directed by Rowan Joffe, son of Roland Joffe, director of The Killing Fields and The Mission. Before I Go To Sleep is, arguably, one of the most anticipated British films of 2014. The script is based on the Faber Academy sensation of 2011, ex-audiologist S.J. Watson’s novel of the same name. Taken on by Ridley Scott’s production company, the high-end cast stars Nicole Kidman as Christine Lucas, Mark Strong as her physician Dr Nash and Colin Firth as Ben, her husband. Read more ...
David Nice
So here’s where I join the ranks of Old Opera Bores by declaring this Salome, Nina Stemme, the best I’ve seen since Hildegard Behrens in 1978, and this Salome as in Richard Strauss’s Wilde opera from Donald Runnicles and his Deutsche Oper Berlin ensemble categorically the most near-perfect. It’s also the first time I’ve had a group of very loud, rude people behind me shouting “sit down” when I stood at the end (and John the Baptist’s God knows I don’t do that often). To which the only answers were “stand up yourselves” and “what does it take?” Most of the arena stalls eventually followed suit Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You didn’t have to wait for the words in the closing credits, “written and presented by”, to know that The Writers Who Shaped a Nation was a project that Andrew Marr was involved with fully. Its sheer broadcasting quality showed it from the beginning. It’s the first project that has taken Marr out of the studio since his stroke, and it confirmed that his agility of mind (and legs, given the amount of mountain walking involved) was as powerful as ever.Simply put, viewers can really feel the difference when a presenter is clearly the master of the script from beginning to end. It’s far from Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
It is the fate of Edinburgh Festival directors to programme their music in the considerable shadow cast by the Proms in London. The undeniable economics of large scale touring means that few orchestras will visit Edinburgh alone, so to attract all-important critical attention the Festival must somehow manipulate a limited touring repertoire to create a unique Scottish event. But on the other hand, the festival must also recognise that for most of their discerning local audience the Proms are little more than a massive irrelevance that serve only to clutter up the BBC schedules for months on Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The 13th Floor Elevators: Live Evolution Lost“I lost control of my body. I looked up and Tommy and Roky were turning into wolves, hair and teeth. And in my mind I was hearing the echo of space, and rays of light were shooting through the roof. All of a sudden there was a vision in light that we were wolves and we were spreading drugs and Satanism into the world. These angels walked into the room and they had light shining on them.”Stacy Sutherland, The 13th Floor Elevators’ guitarist’s subsequent memory of the events surrounding the live show caught on Live Evolution Lost were vividly Read more ...