Reviews
Veronica Lee
Andrew Maxwell (****) tells the Scots in the audience that he’s going to “rip the shit out of everything they hold dear” in Hubble Bubble, his take on the independence referendum. He doesn’t quite do that but it’s a witty and thoughtful take on the issues surrounding the vote.Maxwell points out that the people of the British Islands are about 90 per cent genetically the same – “the rest is just flavourings” – and the show’s title suggests the Irishman finds nationalism a heady, dangerous brew. He says that Northern Ireland may be less than happy to wake up on 19 September to find Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jorge Grundman: A Mortuis Resurgere Susana Cordón (soprano), Brodsky Quartet (Chandos)Spanish composer Jorge Grundman was a vocalist and keyboard player in two bands in his teens, and he’s now a professor of audio engineering at a Madrid university. His website includes this disarming statement: “I consider myself a writer of music more than a composer. I just try to tell stories through the music narrative. I do this in the simplest, almost naive way possible. I want people to find my music sentimental and moving and also, as far as possible, to fancy listening to it again.” I read Read more ...
edward.seckerson
All kinds of narratives were at play in this Prom from the BBC Symphony Orchestra and its Principal Conductor Sakari Oramo - and perhaps the truly adventurous programmer might have double-deployed Rory Kinnear, dispassionately chronicling Stravinsky’s Oedipus rex, and taken us beyond the Overture and into the melodramas of Beethoven’s Incidental Music to Egmont. Mind you, that overture will more than suffice as a self-contained drama when it is as boldly drawn as it was here with a daring expansiveness in the lowering F minor Introduction and equally impulsive and defiant allegro with John Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
It comes as no surprise that this sequel, based on the Channel 4 TV series of the same name, which saw four awkward male teenagers bond over their insecurities, offers little more than a shitstorm of juvenile humour and one-note female characters who are presented as objects to lust over. Lowbrow comedy doesn’t get any lower, and writers Damon Beesley and Iain Morris (who also take on directorial duties) predictably push the limits of acceptability which makes for occasionally funny viewing.The Inbetweeners 2 offers its most laddish character and pathological liar, Jay (James Buckley), the Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Wayward Souls is an action role-playing game in the mould of Nintendo (NES & SNES) classics like Secret of Mana and Legend of Zelda. It also manages to incorporate elements from that most voguish of retro formats, the roguelike. What this means is that you get a fast-moving action game that puts you in the role of a lone adventurer, battling his or her way through dungeons, mines, castles and all the other trad RPG locations in search of loot. There are six characters to choose from (three must be unlocked by clearing specific areas) and each has a unique load-out of weaponry and Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Mounting a contemporary dance show together doesn’t seem like the best way to get over your ex, even if you are (or rather, were) ballet’s most fabulously marketable couple. But whatever their real-life relationship, audiences will always be keen – as last night’s packed Coliseum proved – to see Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev, the electric, magnetic young Russians whose performances with the Bolshoi and the Mikhailovsky provoked such devoted fandom that they even got their own shorthand: Vasipova.The show they are mounting now is Osipova’s brainchild. Her determination and focus are Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Only connect!” E M Forster’s life-wish is reprised in Cambodian-born, London-based director Hong Khaou’s powerful debut feature Lilting. However, it’s not the hope for connection between lovers that his film explores, but between strangers after love, bound together in grief, in this case those who were closest to the film’s object of love. The connection is stretched by cultural differences, and only exaggerated by differences (and therefore misunderstandings) of language.Lilting moves between a loose, if undefined realism, and a certain kind of hallucination. That tone is set in its Read more ...
David Nice
A full day began and ended with Elgar the European, or rather the citizen of the world. After all, the Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, played with panache by 180 young musicians in a morning meet-up, owes its swagger to the "Cortège de Bacchus" from French petit-maître Delibes’ ballet Sylvia, while the First Symphony can hold its head high alongside very different masterpieces from the early 1900s by Mahler and Sibelius – though it needs a lift and a shape, which it got in excelsis from the consummate Mark Wigglesworth (****).It’s good to be reminded how Elgar lavished orchestral and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We call it the First World War, but in Western Europe at least, most of the scrutiny is confined to what happened to Britain, France and Germany (with a side order of Russia) from 1914-18. The writer and presenter of this two-part series, David Olusoga, seized the opportunity to emphasise the full global scope of the conflict by throwing fascinating light on the contributions made by troops from the French and British colonies, uncomprehendingly transported from India and Africa to the mud, blood and horror of the Western Front.Beginning with the revelation that the first shot fired by the Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
In her book How To Be a Woman, Times columnist Caitlin Moran explains the difference between strip clubs and burlesque shows, and why the latter are perfectly acceptable to feminism. “In burlesque, the power rests with the person taking their clothes off, as it always should do in polite society.” My Stories, Your Emails, which opened last night in the Purcell Room at the Southbank Centre, is cabaret artist Ursula Martinez’s way of making exactly the same point. Martinez was subjected to an unwanted level of exposure (sorry...) some years ago, when a video of her clever little striptease Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The symphony – that structural pillar of classical music – found itself under siege last night at the Proms. Both Berio’s Sinfonia and Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony assault and subvert, reshape and reimagine the genre, puncturing the Victorian smugness of the Royal Albert Hall with doubt. It was particularly poignant on this, the day after the anniversary commemorations of World War I, that the orchestra of the European Union should perform two works born, however differently, from the conflicts of this tumultuous century – one unable to see beyond the darkness of oppressive rule, the other Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Now that the shock and dismay over Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death has subsided, we have the chance to see his final performances and recall an actor like few others. I can’t think of many who managed to emit so much power and convey so much human complexity without an iota of visible “acting”.His spy thriller A Most Wanted Man is released later this year, followed by what he’d managed to get in the can for the final instalments of The Hunger Games. And that will be that. First, there’s God’s Pocket, whose other notable credit is that of John Slattery, the actor best known for his suave and Read more ...