Reviews
Sebastian Scotney
Miklós Perényi makes the listener re-think how a cello should sound. Forget the huge tone of the Russians - think Rostropovich or Natalia Gutman, or the attention-grabbing of Americans or even the flamboyance of the French. No floppy hair, no vanity or mannerisms here. Perényi plays with simplicity and accuracy, but with phenomenal craft and musicality. He dosn't force the tone, yet knows exactly how to project right to the back row of the hall. Technique, which is there in abundance, always seems to serve musical ends.Perényi has been a cello teacher at the Liszt Academy in Budapest since Read more ...
fisun.guner
Adapted by Linnie Reedman and with music by Joe Evans, Oscar Wilde’s only novel – the more scandalous original version serialised in 1890, which Wilde himself later expurgated – finds a new lease of life narrated by one of its minor characters: theatre impresario and Sibyl Vane’s manager Mr Isaacs. In this production he may not be “fat” but, scraping and bowing at every turn with “pompous humility”, he is certainly played, uncomfortably at times, as stereotypically Jewish, albeit in not quite so heightened a manner as most Victorian portrayals. Yet the anti-Semitism clearly signposted Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There might seem to be a world of difference between Israeli director Eytan Fox’s last film, the coming-out-of-grief, intimate drama Yossi, and his new movie, the delicious, prove-what-you-can-do comedy musical Cupcakes. But both are about moving towards a better place, and overcoming the obstacles encountered along the way, with a little help from your friends.Cupcakes is about camaraderie as much as anything else, in this case a group of neighbours who have a tradition of getting together every year to watch UniverSong (as close to Eurovision as it comes – we presume that the latter name Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Oi felt a darrrkness creepin' overrr me," said Mary Yellan's voice-over as we launched into the second night of the BBC's festival of contraband, squalor and smuggling. Mary, ensconced in the stygian titular dwelling on Bodmin Moor with her subhuman uncle and cowering aunt, had been having another of her nightmares about drowning, flailing helplessly as towering green waves crashed over her. "Whateverr innocence oi 'ad left would soon be lorst," Mary lamented.This was true, though it's fortunate that Mary (Jessica Brown Findlay, sorely lacking guidance in elocution and deportment from Read more ...
aleks.sierz
How careless are we about the details of our private life? Well, unsurprisingly the answer is “very”. To make this point, playwright James Graham explores the subject not only by means of verbatim testimonies from public figures, but also by involving the audience, taking a look at how members of the public leave a digital footprint on Facebook and Twitter, as well as the personal details we all share when we buy anything online — like theatre tickets. Oh, and yes, there’s also some dialogue.When you buy a ticket for Privacy you get an automated email from Graham in which he says that “I’ll Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Comedians offer rich pickings to dramatists – whether they fall into the crying clown category, or the nice bloke on stage and complete arse off it, or the side-splittingly funny performer who is as boring as watching paint dry in real life. So no surprise then that Tommy Cooper (1921-1984) is the latest funny man to get a television biopic, following in the wake of Kenneth Williams, Tony Hancock, Frankie Howerd and Hattie Jacques.It's a good thing that, like those other comics, Cooper (David Threlfall) is dead (he famously died on stage live on television), for Simon Nye's drama was a warts- Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Home is truly where the heart is in writer-director Joanna Hogg's extraordinarily astute and artistically alive third film, which takes in the minutiae of a marriage. Exhibition is the story of two artists as they prepare to move out of the beloved home they have lived in for the best part of two decades and it imaginatively illustrates how where we live can challenge and define us. The star of Hogg's previous films (Unrelated and Archipelago) Tom Hiddleston - who has since gone stratospheric - sportingly cameos as a smarmy estate agent.The couple in question, known simply as "H" and "D", are Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
We see the harshness of everyday life in Danis Tanović’s An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker first in its snowy, subsistence landscapes, as hero Nazif goes out to the forest to bring in whatever wood he can find to keep the family home warm. But by the end of the film, which took the Jury Grand Prix at last year’s Berlinale, we have seen, much more chillingly, the harshness of human behaviour.Nazif and his wife Senada are from Bosnia’s Roma community, living with their two young daughters in a remote village. Home life is happy, even if sparse in comforts, and Senada is pregnant. Nazif Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
Usually, to describe a play as "of its time" is a criticism. It is suggestive of drama that hasn't aged well, that doesn't work quite as well for today's audience as it did for the original crowd. First performed in 1847, Dion Boucicault's The School for Scheming seems at first glance to fall into this category, with its mannered language, twisting plot and moral overtones.But, as this revival demonstrates, pre-emptive assumptions of staleness can be confounded by a production that is all witty observations, sly mimicry and sarcastic asides. As the title would suggest, the action Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There's always room on top for another TV anti-hero. After Tony Soprano, Breaking Bad's Walter White and Mad Men's fatally flawed Don Draper, here's Martin Freeman as Fargo's Lester Nygaard, a downtrodden failure of a husband as well as a second-rate insurance salesman. It could have been worse - they could have made him a journalist or an estate agent.Freeman has quietly blossomed into the little guy who could, a seemingly innocuous presence who's suddenly capable of holding up his end of the screen against all-comers however stellar, whether it's Benedict Cumberbatch or Sir Ian McKellen. In Read more ...
fisun.guner
If you’re not already familiar with at least some aspects of Chris Marker’s work, this exhibition will feel overwhelming, if not confusing. You may have to pay a second visit to get the most out of it, or even make sense of it. It’s certainly a demanding retrospective of the influential French filmmaker, and an immersive "surround-screen" gallery survey probably isn’t the best introduction.Still, I feel compelled to commend the ambitions of the Whitechapel Gallery in bringing Marker’s work to wider public attention and doing its best to highlight themes across a life’s work (“career” is a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
From the balcony overlooking the mosh pit you get a good idea of how long a band has been going. Last night at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, The Men They Couldn’t Hang celebrated their 30th anniversary while a small kinetic cluster of mainly bald 50-year-olds pinged into one another like shiny billiard balls. A fiver says a sheepish accountant or two will have had some explaining to do this morning in A&E.The Men could and should have been contenders. For the second half of the Eighties, they were. Forged in the crucible of Thatcherism, they quickly established themselves as England’s Read more ...