Reviews
Kimon Daltas
Before curtain-up on the opening night of this revival of Penny Woolcock’s production of The Pearl Fishers, ENO's head of casting arrived on stage with a microphone. No doubt delightful company in person, he was an unwelcome sight here. Sophie Bevan had a stomach bug, he explained – the disappointment was palpable. But she'd be bravely singing anyway – grateful applause broke out. In the end, our goodwill was not called upon in the least, since Bevan's voice in her debut as Leïla was as strong and agile as ever.As the overture plays this production offers its most visually arresting moment, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s statement of intent to open your first British headlining show with a 15-minute version of an album track which lasts a minute and three-quarters – from an album which itself lasts barely more than 30 minutes. And then to riff on it, incorporating elements from a debut album which barely anyone beyond your native country has heard. In taking her current album No Deal’s “I Feel You” and merging it with A Stomach Is Burning’s “A Stomach”, Belgium’s Melanie De Biasio could have alienated an audience who had never seen her before. Instead, the sold-out Purcell Room gave her standing ovation. Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Miss Violence opens with an 11th birthday party whose brightly coloured balloons, pointed party hats and forced family jollity might seem unremarkable if a little girl hadn't chosen to stick Leonard Cohen's "Dance Me to the End of Love" on the stereo - not only Cohen at his most sinisterly sensual but a song inspired by the Holocaust. He wrote it after learning orchestras were a feature of some concentration camps, and that they were sometimes pressed into playing through brutality, so that their music became horribly anomalous accompaniments to punishments or violent death. Given the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There is a saying that dogs have owners but cats have staff, and it's an axiom forcibly borne out by this new three-part series. The felines in question are Sumatran tiger cubs rather than primped and pampered household pets, but they're so rare, and so prone to the tigerish equivalent of infant mortality, that Australia Zoo's tiger expert Giles Clark decided to rear them at his family home.Like a first-time father, he was soon looking gaunt and haggard on three hours sleep a night, worn to a frazzle by leaping up to tend to the faintest mew or gurgle from the celebrity kittens. At first Read more ...
David Nice
What a red letter day it is when a work you’ve always thought of as problematic seems at last, if only temporarily, to have no kind of fault or flaw. That was the case for me on Sunday afternoon with Britten’s penultimate opera, Owen Wingrave, launching this year’s Aldeburgh Festival with an ideal cast fused as one with the young Britten-Pears Orchestra thanks to the self-evidently intensive collaboration of director Neil Bartlett and conductor Mark Wigglesworth.Britten always demanded the highest standards of artists he could trust (and, as movingly described in a programme article by Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Shanghai director Fei Mu’s final film Spring in a Small Town appeared at the end of an era, coming out in 1948, a year before revolution engulfed China. The subsequent upheaval saw the director branded a “rightist”, or reactionary (he fled to Hong Kong. where he died three years later, aged only 45), and Spring… was shelved for almost three decades, only returned to audiences when a new print was made at the beginning of the Eighties. You can understand why the director’s emphasis on the intimacy of private worlds, and sense of a society looking backwards rather than forwards, didn’t exactly Read more ...
Naima Khan
If you've been rolling your eyes at the rash of articles hailing London's ever-increasing number of dry bars, allow writer-director Ché Walker to convince you of their amatory relevance. In his new musical drama, smooth-talker Klook and hard nut Vinette fall for one another over a long tall glass of carrot juice, with just the right kick of ginger. The Park Theatre's 90-seat studio space here gives us two sexy strangers who meet randomly in the grimy health club where Klook works, only to find that the two are craving a metaphorical detox. Walker, drawn once more into the American noir Read more ...
geoff brown
Judging from the photos used to publicise Anna Prohaska’s new album – one of them is dancing merrily above this review – this gorgeously gifted soprano should have been singing this spin-off recital wearing an army great coat. She compromised with a severe black tunic and trousers with military references and a slight science-fiction cut: she could almost have been a futuristic soldier from the old Korda film Things to Come. In her case the things that came were the complete tracks of her Deutsche Grammophon CD Behind the Lines: songs from around Europe and America about war and the pity Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
What a difference a change of cast can make to a show. On Wednesday night I saw Tamara Rojo and Carlos Acosta as the titular lovers in English National Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Albert Hall (see below for that review). Last night it was the turn of ENB’s other Royal Ballet emigrée, Alina Cojocaru, and guest star Friedemann Vogel of Stuttgart Ballet.Rojo and Acosta impressed me with their star power, and the intensity of their partnership, but left me feeling curiously un-tragic. Cojocaru and Vogel, on the other hand, had me spellbound like it was the first time I’d ever seen the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Gary Lineker has been honing his marketing schtick for several decades now, selling us a spud-based product that promises to make us feel great, only to fill us with self-loathing as soon as it’s finished. Yes, the England football team, seemingly made of potato, slickly packaged, but ultimately unsatisfying and undoubtedly bad for your health. (The crisps, I hear, are much healthier than they used to be.)Of course we lost. We lost to Italy in the European Championships in 2012, and haven’t beaten the Azzurri in the World Cup since 1977. They’ve won it four times, most recently in 2006, when Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Dead Moon: In the Graveyard, Unknown Passage, DefianceAfter a few notes of barbed-wire, bent-string guitar, a descending riff kicks in. It’s a relative of the uptempo version of “Hey Joe”. The voice starts. It’s high-pitched, as if Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant had only Love’s Arthur Lee and The 13th Floor Elevator’s Roky Erickson as an influence. The lyrics are hard to make out but touch on mean days and a girl who turns the singer cold. He might as well be dead and in a graveyard. The momentum is tempered by a break borrowed from The Elevators' “You’re Gonna Miss me”. The production is Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Sam Walters, Britain's longest-serving artistic director of a theatre (43 years!), looks to the past as well as the future with his Orange Tree swansong. This varied festival features nine plays and six world premieres across two programmes, all of them staged by returning graduates of the Richmond venue's trainee director scheme. The diligent Programme One viewer will spot a number of recurring subjects, including science teachers and astrophysicists, the resurfacing in adulthood of childhood dynamics, and constant grappling with faith and mortality.The thematic throughline lends the evening Read more ...