Reviews
Veronica Lee
My, what an entrance Jack Whitehall makes on the last night of his first arena tour. The 25-year-old - not that long ago making his Edinburgh Fringe debut - rides into the arena on a Segway with music blaring and fireworks. But he may have overreached himself, however, as a whole tier was curtained off and the remaining two were by no means full.Whitehall has made his name as a posho comic who is always wrongfooted by his accent and his upbringing in a thoroughly middle-class household, and he continues to send himself up in Jack Whitehall Gets Around to great comedic effect. With his writers Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
It's unusual for a play to be political without being preachy, or dull, or both. As obsessed as we are with class distinctions, we aren't as good as we should be at pulling them apart. Invincible is therefore something rare, for it turns social distinctions into compelling comic drama.Alan Ayckbourn is generally considered to be the master of this kind of writing. Given that, it is perhaps unsurprising that Invincible's writer, Torben Betts, has worked as a resident dramatist at Ayckbourn's famous stomping ground, the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough.If Invincible has a flaw it is that Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Like his father Ivan (Ghostbusters) Jason Reitman has shown himself to be a sure hand at helming comedy, and his less commercial sensibility has resulted in films as spiky and interesting as Young Adult, Juno, Up in the Air and Thank You For Smoking. With his fifth feature - staring Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin - Reitman Junior tries something different, something initially more dramatic, but ends up back in comic territory anyway, albeit unintentionally.Set in 1987 during the titular US holiday weekend and narrated by Tobey Maguire (who seems to do this a lot - see also The Ice Storm, Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
In a Q&A at the London Screenwriters' Festival last year, Welsh writer/director Caradog James and producer John Giwa-Amu already had fans. If that Q&A is any indication, the team at Red & Black Films have a brilliant career ahead of them, all thanks to The Machine, a dark science fiction tale of artificial intelligence and human scheming that is finally released this week. Described by some as a 90 minute sci-fi Pygmalion, or a hybrid of Blade Runner and Frankenstein, The Machine is stylish and fantastic in the original sense of the word – slick enough to be impressive but not too Read more ...
David Nice
A voyage around Beethoven by Ives and John Adams, and then beyond him by Berlioz, added up to a vintage San Francisco Symphony programme from its music director Michael Tilson Thomas. Forty years on from his first concert with SFS, he’s still youthful in demeanour, still flapping with seagull (or albatross) like flamboyancy. But is there a chill behind the showmanship? I ended up feeling that way despite what should have been the ultimate cataclysm of the Frenchman’s concluding infernal orgy.The sound of the orchestra is still sleek and bright. That paid dividends in a Bruckner concert I Read more ...
fisun.guner
Addressing a crowd of journalists gathered at the press launch of her major retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Yoko Ono begins by telling us how cynical she is. It’s quite a claim considering it’s just about the last thing you’d ever think to call her. Perhaps she’s finally tired of being dismissed as a naive idealist. But no, it’s just a roundabout way for her to express her astonishment at the extraordinary architecture of Frank Gehry’s glinting, titanium-clad masterpiece, which opened 16 years ago in this Basque city of northern Spain. Being “naturally cynical” she hadn’t, she said, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Jane Birkin: Mes Images Privées de Serge / Françoise Hardy: Message PersonnelThe bond between Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin still resonates. They met while on the set of the film Slogan in 1969 and were soon a headline-grabbing couple. Although they separated in 1980 and he died in 1991, Birkin still recorded his songs and continues to do so. Françoise Hardy’s public profile was more measured, but she was and is central to the fabric of French culture. The coincidence of these two releases being issued in the UK at the same time is about more than each being French. Gainsbourg also wrote Read more ...
David Nice
The big message of The Woman Without a Shadow, brushing aside the narrower, moral majority preaching that you’re incomplete without children, seems clear: fulfillment can’t be bought at the cost of another’s suffering. Yet the path towards that realization in this "massive and artificial fairy-tale", as an increasingly alienated Richard Strauss called it, is strewn with magnificent thorns in both his complex, layered music and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s elaborate symbolic libretto.Stagings tend to have gone either for a series of pretty, unconnected fairy-tale pictures to throw light and colour Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
We have already seen a lot of World War I on television this year, and clearly we’re going to be getting a great deal more before it's out. Whether it’s a “celebration” season, or the diametrical opposite, or just that looser term, commemoration, is something each individual viewer will have to decide for themselves.Much of it will be, to some extent, extrapolation, and little will reach the sheer, concentrated power of I Was There: The Great War Interviews. If you didn’t like Jeremy Paxman’s Britain’s Great War, in which that Newsnight timbre dominated, even belittled its subject – can Read more ...
emma.simmonds
As she proved in her exquisite debut Love Like Poison, French director Katell Quillévéré has an astonishing knack for delicately told stories which, in their sensitivity to character and credibility, pack a weighty emotional punch. And so it goes in her follow-up Suzanne, an aesthetically sunny story of unconditional familial love and the grand, gut-wrenching folly that comes from being romantically entangled with a dubious character.It's a tale that's likely to be quickly taken into your affections, for it’s one that delights in childhood. We first meet Suzanne Merevsky as a little girl ( Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
The Husbands is set in a feminist utopia – or so it appears at first glance. Shaktipur, the place the characters call home, is a rural matriarchal community in which women are leaders and may take multiple husbands to address the demographic imbalance between the genders caused by the killing and abandoning of girl-children in other parts of Indian society. Their belief system is structured around giving women choices, and they prize baby girls as a sign that their goddess is pleased with them.At an individual level, though, this system is not quite so straightforward. The action of the Read more ...
graham.rickson
William Alwyn: Piano Music Mark Bebbington (Somm)William Alwyn was a Suffolk-based composer who died in 1985. He dabbled in painting and writing, and held the post of Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music for nearly 30 years. His output included a cycle of symphonies and the music to several well-known British films. Curiously, he was related to the actor Gary Cooper, even providing the score to Cooper's final screen appearance. Alwyn's piano output, as represented here, more than deserves an occasional hearing. Mark Bebbington gives us graceful readings of Alwyn's 11 Read more ...