Reviews
Karen Krizanovich
What makes an exciting “genuine” photographer is fairly simple: what do you see in the photographs? Do they compel you to look at them? How evocative are the images? How interesting are the compositions? These are among the criteria which separate the merely good from the truly great – and who would have expected that there are truly great photographers yet undiscovered, or even some that didn’t want to be discovered? This is the backstory of Finding Vivian Maier, an exceptional and exceptionally compelling documentary co-directed by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel.It was Maloof’s own Read more ...
Naima Khan
As far as essential female experiences go, Esther Mills hasn't had many. A 35-year-old virgin living in New York City in 1905, she is destined to go down in history as an "unidentified negro seamstress", to cite the caption on the projected image of her that opens Lynn Nottage's Intimate Apparel in a very fine Off West End staging from the director Laurence Boswell that was first seen in Bath. Now at north London's Park Theatre, this 2003 play from the multi award-winning American dramatist who went on to pen Fabulation (2004) and the Pulitzer prize-winning Ruined (2008) hones this author's Read more ...
fisun.guner
It’s 70 years since Mondrian died in New York, leaving unfinished his last painting, Victory Boogie-Woogie, an ebullient title quite at odds with the buttoned-up asceticism we normally associate with this artist. The Courtauld Gallery showed a small survey two years ago, which paired his flat grid compositions with the paintings and white reliefs of Ben Nicholson, focusing only on his two years in London (1938 to 1940). Though it proved surprisingly illuminating, in its precise, compare-and-contrast way, any exhibition promising a little more depth must be welcome. Now we have two, Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It's a woman’s world at Park Theatre, where an all-female company tackles three American shorts that place the private feminine experience under a microscope. Jack Thorpe Baker’s casting yields mixed results, emphasising the shrewd analysis of gendered thought in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles and Philip Dawkins’s Cast of Characters (both half an hour), though Brooke Allen’s 50-minute study of grief, The Deer, already suffers from character opacity. The Deer is markedly less incisive, providing the evening with a somewhat muted conclusion.Cast of Characters offers dizzying formal experimentation, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Lewis: L'AmourImagine a very subdued Antony Hegarty whispering over the spookiest moments of Angelo Badalamenti’s music for Twin Peaks. Or conjure up a marriage of Arthur Russell’s shimmering World of Echo and John Martyn at his most intimate, but shorn of all but the most necessary instrumentation. To say that L’Amour, the only album by Lewis, is arresting underplays it. This is one of the most direct and affecting series of songs ever captured in a studio. Yet until a few years ago it was unknown and, even then, only available as a dodgy download with added colour from the scratches Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
When the lights go up on Jack Shepherd’s In Lambeth, you could be forgiven for assuming you were looking at a biblical scene. A man and a woman sit naked in the branches of a tree, a tableau straight out of Eden, not south London. She has a book in her lap; he’s picking out a tune on a tin whistle. All is serene.Except this isn’t Eden, and they are not Adam and Eve. This is London in the late eighteenth century, and William and Catherine Blake are reading Milton’s Paradise Lost while sitting in a tree in their Lambeth garden. William is talking to the angel who taught him the tune he is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The most notorious case of the BBC banning a pop record was the episode of the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen" in 1977, which was of course the year of Her Maj's Silver Jubilee. "That was genuinely dangerous," Paul Morley intoned gravely (the record that is, rather than its banning), though as with several of the cases examined here, this one wasn't quite as open and shut as it seemed.The Beeb had been cheerfully - or at least unprotestingly - airing the disc on radio until the moment when the band swore at Bill Grundy on TV. It was Malcolm McLaren's bizarrely-dressed band of urchins Read more ...
graham.rickson
Per Nørgård: Symphonies 1 and 8 Vienna Philharmonic/Sakari Oramo (Dacapo)Per Nørgård's Symphony No. 1 was completed in 1955. A few years earlier, the composer had written a fan letter to the elderly Sibelius – who was flattered to encounter a fellow musician with such a thorough understanding of his own style. There are plenty of nods to the elder composer in this astonishing symphony, including a brief snatch of Tapiola near the opening. Most Sibelian is Nørgård's temporal control; different layers of music seemingly operating at different speeds, often linked by repetitive string Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A May-September relationship is given a winter chill here. When Matthew Morgan (Michael Caine), an American widower in Paris, meets pretty young dance instructor Pauline (Clemence Poesy) on a bus, the ageing male fantasy suggested by the title seems on the cards. A feel-good scene of grumpy, grieving Matthew joining in at Pauline’s dance class also prepares you for a lazy, age-gap romcom. But his puppyish looks towards Pauline as he dances are childishly needy as much as comic, and German writer-director Sandra Nettlebeck has more interesting, unpredictable ideas on old age, youth and Read more ...
stephen.walsh
For my money, The Queen of Spades is one of the great nineteenth-century operas, a masterpiece of dramma per musica. There will always be pure spirits who cry “vulgar” at late Tchaikovsky. But the charge is absurd. Anyone with ears can hear the brilliance and refinement of this music, and anyone with feelings can sense Tchaikovsky’s love of his characters, all of them: the frail, the mad, the villainous, the beautiful and the damned. What more can you ask?It remains, though, essentially a genre piece with supernatural attachments, not very responsive to directorial manipulation. Antony Read more ...
Simon Munk
A minus mark for this puzzle game for cannily, if cheesily, being named to hitch a ride on the wildly-popular MineCraft phenomenon. And another minus mark for its barely-a-concept-at-all of mashing together two massively enjoyable and enduring puzzle game series into one.MouseCraft takes the block shapes from Tetris - literally the exact same block shapes: the square one, the S-shaped one, the long-thin one, the L-shaped one – and adds them to a very slightly reworked version of Lemmings.Here, mice are sent scurrying across a laboratory maze by a fiendish cat scientist. The mice must get to Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Plays about religious belief present something of a problem. How can theatre-makers, who tend to be very secular-minded, convey the mindset of believers without being patronising? And once they involve people from the developing world, how can they avoid being condescending to different views of humanity? Robin Soans’s new play, which starts in Barbados and examines the case of a gay son who returns to his religious family, stages these conflicts with some empathy.Act One is set in the Barbados home, located in Perseverance Drive, of old Eli, a 70-year-old pastor in the Pentecostal church of Read more ...