Reviews
Florence Hallett
At the risk of sounding crass, I can’t help feeling that had Winifred Nicholson painted fewer flowers she might be better represented in the annals of art history. Of course, being a woman hasn’t helped, but as a woman flower painter she was ever destined for the footnotes. As is often the way with female artists, Winifred was highly regarded in her lifetime, and at the outset of her career she outsold her husband Ben Nicholson, whose reputation, posthumously, has almost entirely eclipsed her own.Next to the white reliefs and austere abstract paintings that have secured her husband's Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The practical considerations and limitations of choosing a work for a student showcase can lead to some wonderfully original programming. It doesn’t get much more original than a pairing of Thomas Arne’s ballad opera The Cooper with Stradella’s oratorio San Giovanni Battista, currently being staged by the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.The new Milton Court Theatre is the natural home for something like the Arne – an intimate, close-quarters space where you can see your neighbours’ reactions as well as the action on stage. Which makes it all the more odd that the work’s broad comedy never Read more ...
Simon Munk
A detective ghost story with virtually no violence – Murdered: Soul Suspect is an odd construction. It is part point-and-click adventure game, part interactive fiction and part stealth-adventure – none of which are massively successful elements.While investigating The Bell Killer, a serial killer working his way throughSalem,Massachusetts, your clichéd cop comes off the worse for an encounter. Thrown out of a high window, then shot, you come to as a ghost. Now, in order to be head off into the light, you must find out who your killer is.As a ghost, of course, you no longer have access to guns Read more ...
geoff brown
Of all the epithets you could pin on that roast beef of Old England, William Boyce, “gamechanger” is one of the more unlikely. Like any good 18th-century Englishman, this composer followed the widespread Italianate model of the late Baroque, infused it with Handel, and a swig or two of Purcell, and just got to work. Latterly he spent far too much time setting toadying odes for Britain’s Hanoverian kings; no chance for revolution there. But “Gifted Conservatives”, unlike “Gamechangers”, wouldn’t today be an enticing name for a concert season’s thematic link. So there he was, Boyce the Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
In creating Mr Burns, Anne Washburn was trying to answer a question overlooked by most purveyors of dystopian fictions: what would happen to pop culture after an apocalypse? The physical and emotional challenges of life after civilisation have been endlessly explored, but very little attention has been paid to the fate of the ever-evolving collection of stories that we carry inside our heads.As its title hints, this play deals with one particular set of stories: plots from The Simpsons, Matt Groening's landmark animated sitcom about a dysfunctional American family, which first aired in 1987. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Karen Gillan’s first Hollywood leading role finds her in the surely unusual position of not liking what she sees in the mirror. After five years as Doctor Who’s regularly killed and resurrected companion Amy Pond, life doesn’t get any easier for the now LA-based actress in this low-budget horror, as her character Kaylie Russell tries to outwit the malevolent mirror which caused her parents' death a decade earlier.Director Mike Flanagan’s elaboration of his 2005 short of the same name tips one wink to Who fans, when statues seem to move in the mirror, much like the Stone Angels who haunted Amy Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Two years ago Penny Woolcock was at the heart of Birmingham street gangs in her documentary One Mile Way; that one was titled after the fact that two of the city’s competing outfits were separated only by the distance of the film’s title. In Going to the Dogs, she's back in the same 'hood, this time investigating the city’s dog-fighting scene, with the help of one of the earlier film’s lead protagonists, Dylan Duffus, who proved here a very able narrator-presenter.Tracking down, and ensuring the cooperation of the participants for Dogs… looked like it proved more challenging. No surprise when Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Some days, I feel very sorry for playwrights, especially those that become notorious through no fault of their own. If their most famous play causes enough controversy, it can take decades before people forget it. So now, 10 years since Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s early play, Behtzi (Dishonour) caused violent protests at the Birmingham Rep because of its depiction of a rape in a Sikh temple, I can’t think of any other way of starting this review of her latest without mentioning it.Khandan (which means family) is a co-production between the Royal Court and Birmingham Rep (where the play premiered Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The Eventim (Hammersmith) Apollo, where Pat Metheny’s Unity Group last night gave a spellbinding, if sometimes baffling, performance, has hosted a goodly range of gigs in its time. Few of these can have offered such diversity within a single evening. Piece after piece left last night’s audience whooping with exhilaration, though Metheny’s fondness for mechanical innovation briefly threatened the audience’s otherwise adoring reception.Metheny opened with a solo on his 42-string Pikasso guitar, a Hydra-headed invention with a very delicate harp-like upper register. Watching him grapple in the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Sadly the battle to shape stories from a female perspective, or even to tell stories about women is far from over. The Centre for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University recently found that women represented only 15 percent of protagonists in the 100 top-grossing films of 2013. If we look closer to home the most recent BFI statistics put the percentage of female directors working in the UK at just 8 percent (that's based on films released in the UK in 2012) - meaning this is even rarer than you'd think. So for a film to be directed by one woman and to Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Two knotted horrors stained West Memphis, Arkansas in 1993. Three 8-year-old boys, Stevie Branch, Christopher Byers and Michael Moore, went cycling on a sunny spring afternoon. Their torn, bruised and in Byers’ case castrated bodies were dragged from a stream the next day. Three local teenage boys, black-garbed outsiders Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, Jr., were then tried for the crimes with a carelessness, incompetence and prejudice which seemed actively malicious. This “West Memphis Three” sacrificed 18 years in jail, as authorities who had in some cases risen to power Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Brian Friel’s affinity with Russian writers, notably Chekhov and Turgenev, is central to his work, the playwright seeing similarities between their tragi-comic characters, hanging onto “old certainties” despite knowing in their hearts that their time is up, and people of his own generation in Ireland. The correspondences go beyond theme, of course; he’s not known as the Irish Chekhov for nothing.Yet this production of Friel’s 1987 play Fathers and Sons, adapted from Turgenev’s novel, doesn’t produce the frisson one might expect. It’s elegantly mounted and entertaining; but considering the Read more ...