Reviews
Caroline Crampton
Is there such a thing as a human right to forgiveness? Nicholas Wright's riveting play about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in post-apartheid South Africa circles around this question, never flinching from revealing the atrocities perpetuated by that vile regime, never quite fully exposing the characters' motivations. As spectators, it demands answers of us. What is the price of your forgiveness? Where is the line between humanity and evil?A production by the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town and directed by Jonathan Munby, this play was first seen at the Hampstead Theatre in May Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It takes a brave opera company indeed to stage Peter Grimes this summer. Benjamin Britten’s 2013 centenary celebrations took us to “peak Britten”, with performances of all his major works as well as the unprecedented, outstanding Grimes on the Beach. Then, this January, David Alden’s production of the opera returned to the Coliseum: direct, theatrical and if anything more potent than five years before. How then, could Grange Park – a David to the Goliaths of the Aldeburgh Festival and ENO – possibly compete?The answer, in Jeremy Sams’ quietly inventive production, is very well. Sams takes us Read more ...
aleks.sierz
New writing for British stages has recently delivered several punchy plays that, having made their points, don’t hang around for long afterwards. With a running time of 70 minutes, Evening Standard prize-winner Rachel De-lahay's Circles is one of these. Set in the playwright’s birthplace, Birmingham, most of the story takes place on the upper deck of a bus — the number 11 circular service — that is one of the longest urban routes in Europe. The full round trip takes about two and a half hours, but De-lahay doesn’t keep us that long.It’s on top of the number 11 that posh young Demi, a mixed- Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites is a special and very particular opera. There is nothing else quite like it. Just as the drama - set to the composer’s own libretto - teeters between fear and faith, so too does Poulenc’s score, an extraordinary apposition of austerity and lushness where belief is harmonically consonant, festooned in seraphic harp glissandi and warmly homogeneous middle-voices. But fear is omnipresent in the shadows punctuating the score with a succession of precipitous dissonances and the alien sonorities of instruments like the piano.Robert Carsen’s beautiful staging has Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The third Emulsion Festival, curated jointly this year by Trish Clowes and Luke Styles, turned out to be more of a collage of original colours, when the second day of programming concluded at Village Underground last night. Yet the varieties of performance all shared a commitment to novel combinations of sound, technique and feeling, and drew collectively on inspiration from Rihanna’s “Only Girl in the World” to the classical chamber ensemble to create an absorbing spectacle of multi-genre music that was both emotionally and technically compelling. The Village Underground itself was the Read more ...
Simon Munk
Heralded as the first true "next-generation" videogame, Watch Dogs has either been hugely overhyped or the imaginative leap required for a true new generation of videogaming is entirely absent from mainstream games. Because this cyberpunk-inflected hacking action-adventure offers virtually nothing new.The original Deus Ex in 2000 remains the template for combining dystopian science fiction themes, multi-angled approaches to missions and cyberpunk human augmentation and hacking. This simply attempts to mix that formula with the huge open world and freeroaming chaos of Grand Theft Auto V and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Big Society. Not to be confused with other Bigs: the Big Bang, Chill, Sleep, Easy, Lebowski, Fat Greek Wedding, Trouble in Little China etc. History records that David Cameron’s sizeable brainwave vaporised on impact with reality around the time of the last election. Its only visible remnant is the office of Police and Crime Commissioner. This is the new post that anyone – even former deputy PM John Prescott - can stand for without previous knowledge of policing. Voter turnout in 2012 was on the low side.But what does a PCC actually do? Step forward into the headlights, Ann Barnes, a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
When he's not investigating terrorism and the security services, Peter Taylor can usually be found probing into the tar-dripping innards of the tobacco industry. He's made a string of documentaries about it since the 1970s, as well as writing the book Smoke Ring: The Politics of Tobacco.He has even become part of its historical archive, and we saw him here in a 1975 clip when, as a keen young reporter, he stood up at Imperial Tobacco's AGM to ask the chairman how he much he knew about the impact of smoking on health. This new two-part documentary brings the story of the industry's dogged Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
It's always a bit of a thrill descending to the Linbury Studio Theatre in the Royal Opera House. A black box deep buried in the ground, it feels far away from all the glamour and glitter, but also the prices and pressure, of the main stage, plus the Linbury's steeply raked stalls bring the audience amazingly - excitingly - close to the dancers. Last night, Dutch National Ballet’s Junior Company arrived as part of the Linbury’s Springboard series of shows featuring young or development companies, a way so simple and brilliant of bringing together dancers in need of experience and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
For an artist who famously can't travel to America, Roman Polanski would appear to have an unstoppable passion for filming small-cast Broadway hits. On the back of Death and the Maiden and Carnage, both of which diminished their stage sources, along comes Venus in Fur, adapted from the David Ives play that had no fewer than three separate New York runs, making a star of its husky-voiced young leading lady, Nina Arianda, who won a 2012 Tony for her work.And in that same role as an actress who gives her director considerably more than he bargained for, Emmanuelle Seigner (aka Mrs Polanski) Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Denmark’s Broken Twin take the lead in the latest of theartsdesk’s regular round-ups of the new music coming in from Scandinavia. Debut album May is melancholy. Minimally arranged, with lyrics addressing the pain brought by the passing of time, bleakness in the form of metaphorical references to weather and what happens after death, this is an affecting album. The sense of a lonely despair is reinforced by the defeated, distant voice of Majke Voss Romme – who is Broken Twin. May might fit clichés about Nordic chill, but the album draws from and sits proudly alongside landmark works of the Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Nodding to John Ford, Shane and almost every other western ever made, baby-faced writer/director/producer/lead Seth MacFarlane (Ted) replaces the shocking genius of Blazing Saddles with swearing and jokes about bodily functions in a fast, funny, get-it-or-get-out comedy that will divide friends, ruin families and make a lot of people laugh. Whether you’re one of them, you’ll have to watch and see.MacFarlane is Albert Stark, a frontier nerd whose refusal in a gunfight loses his girlfriend (Amanda Seyfried). Distraught, he takes comfort in the friendship of unmarried Christian couple Edward and Read more ...