Reviews
Sam Marlowe
Daniel loves Reg; so does John. Guy loves John; John doesn’t love Guy. Bernie loves Benny, and drives him mad. And as for Eric, he once thought he could fall for Reg – but they only shared one night together, and he never even knew Reg’s name. And anyway, as he points out, unlike the middle-aged others, he’s young – “I’ve got plenty of time.”Time, though, is a slippery commodity in the work of Kevin Elyot. And here, it’s not so much a healer as a killer. The 1994 play, set among a group of gay friends, takes place in the mid- to late-Eighties over several years and three scenes, each divided Read more ...
Jasper Rees
No one knows better than Kay Mellor that people from all walks are brought together by common experience. Being on the game in Band of Gold. Wanting to lose weight in Fat Friends. And no experience is more common than pregnancy. Hence In the Club, a new series focused on an ante-natal class.When Mellor was pregnant, you can guess her cravings. Drama. Lashings of it. Huge great ice cream scoops on burnt toast with extra toppings. We’ve been going for only an hour and we’ve already had a bank robbery, a possibly fatal car crash, unexpected twins, not to mention an unexpected birth, plus a Read more ...
David Nice
Despairing in the depths of the Second World War, Richard Strauss turned to Mozart’s string quintets as well as the complete works of Goethe for evidence that German culture still existed. Vaughan Williams might well have done the same for his native art during the so-called Great War in homaging the music of Thomas Tallis. In fact his great Fantasia was first performed in 1910, not long after Mahler completed his Ninth Symphony – again, not as a premonition of the cataclysm to come but in this instance as a personal, embattled late chapter reflecting on a life he knew was coming to an end. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Depardieu as an imaginary version of Dominique Strauss-Kahn was always likely to be a study in grossness. Add director and co-writer Abel Ferrara, the hardcore extremist behind Driller Killer and Bad Lieutenant, and a white-knuckle night out is guaranteed. Depardieu’s powerful French banker Devereaux is a creature of grotesque and relentless appetites, alright, a bloated sex addict and rapist. But actor and director also insist he is human and shamelessly so, even as he sacrifices others to his desires.There is a sense, too, that Welcome to New York is autobiography even more than biography. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Against the background of the spectacular scenery of Patagonia, Argentinian director Lucia Puenzo creates a tight, subtly unnerving thriller in her third film Wakolda. Its American release title “The German Doctor” reveals its subject more immediately, which is the time spent by Nazi physician Josef Mengele (Alex Brendemuhl) in Latin America after his flight from Europe.But Wakolda is a very long way indeed from the other film that springs to mind on that subject, The Boys from Brazil. Instead it tells a chamber story of how Brendemuhl’s character, travelling under the name Helmut Gregor, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Comics rarely start a show by referencing the ending of a previous one, but Sarah Kendall has first to do a bit of housekeeping to explain the genesis of Touchdown. The payoff for her last show was her dropping the c-bomb on her high-school gym teacher, Coach Harris, but when her mother attended a gig she said to her daughter: “It didn’t quite happen like that, though, did it?”Indeed it didn’t; the punchline was a fabrication for the sake of a good gag, and here Kendall, a London-based Australian, gives the back story in an intricately woven tale about her teenage years. She was a gawky, Read more ...
fisun.guner
We’ve had only two poll tax riots in England. And since England has only twice legislated for a tax on the person, this proves rather a decisive verdict on its popularity. The last lot was in 1991, and though many protesters may have wished for the head of Margaret Thatcher, no one was beheaded.The earlier uprisings resulted in several lopped heads, including that of Wat Tyler, a name that should be familiar to anyone with some passing knowledge of England’s medieval past. The violent uprisings of 1381, led by Tyler, only came to be known as the Peasants’ Revolt in the 19th century. The Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“Another Op'nin', Another Show”. The first musical number of Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate sets the scene for a group of actors and hoofers to brush up their Shakespeare, cross their fingers and hold on to their hearts, and to hope that not too much goes wrong with their show in late 1940s Baltimore. This BBC Proms performance was anything but that kind of on-the hoof creation: it was meticulously planned, ambitiously resourced, staged and choreographed, with costume changes a-plenty.The performance was given in a newly-restored critical edition of the original 1948 staged version, with the Read more ...
David Nice
Saleem (born 1976), having dropped the "Abboud" from his name, is one of the world’s most individual top pianists: his recent disc of Mendelssohn concertos with Riccardo Chailly and the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester is bound to make my “best of year” list. Nabeel, his brother and junior by two years, has served for some years as a violinist in the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, first-rate peacemaking brainchild of Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said. Yet the siblings would surely agree that the bigger picture established by Nabeel, which Saleem has been part of for the past year or so, means more Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
As we approach the anniversary of the beginning of World War I, the television schedules devoted to it are becoming denser and denser. In volume, at least, rather more than insight. We wonder just what more can be broadcast, after all, about the history concerned that has not already been said at some point in the century that has followed the conflict's tragic onset?Jan Peter’s ambitious Great War Diaries answers two questions that remain relevant, namely, just how did it really feel, and then, what was it like for those on the other side(s)? One of the more impressive programmes we have Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
For a dance company, the always delicate balance between preserving your heritage and creating an exciting future becomes especially hard to negotiate when you are the most venerable institution in your field. The Mariinsky Ballet, now on tour in London, have this problem magnified by a general perception (theirs and the public’s) that they are the world’s keepers of the great Russian ballet tradition, which they are expected to represent at its finest. For a cocktail of reasons – a dash of genuine history, topped up with a large splash of public perception, and garnished with the promoters’ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Hadda Brooks: Queen of the Boogie and MoreThe rolling piano is irresistible. Upbeat and swinging, it powers forward with an unstoppable momentum. Accompanied by walking double bass and brushed two-step drums, the right hand suddenly peels off a descending cluster of notes while the left pounds out a solid, repetitive rhythm. Although almost rock ‘n’ roll, this is the sound of 1946 and Hadda Brooks’ “Juke Box Boogie”.“Juke Box Boogie” became the opening cut on Brooks' first album, 1948’s modestly titled Queen of the Boogie. Its reissue brings not only an opportunity to revel in and Read more ...