Reviews
Saskia Baron
The Nature of Love joins a recent spate of films where older women enjoy what a mealy-mouthed columnist would describe as an inappropriate relationship. Whether it’s Olivia Colman bedding a much younger black colleague in Empire of Light, Emma Thompson hiring a sex worker in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, or Anne Hathaway shagging a boy-band singer in The Idea of You, the scenario allows for smooching and soul searching in equal measures. This time the risk-taker is a French-Canadian philosophy lecturer in a pleasant but passionless marriage. Sophia (Magalie Lépine- Read more ...
caspar.gomez
SUNDAY 30th June 2024It’s late. But not really. Not by the standards of this place. Photographer Finetime and I are in Block9 in the South-East Corner. The so-called “naughty corner”. We take turns juggernauting quomble off a pinecone. Finetime’s right eyelid is twitching. This tic developed today. Nearby is a gigantic head. About the size of a large Victorian house. It’s at an acute angle to the ground. Instead of eyes it has a kind of welders’ mask blitzing white-noise light. Like the haunted, detuned television in the 1982 film Poltergeist.We all know what happened to the little blonde Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
NMC Recordings has spent 35 years promoting contemporary music by British composers, and this commitment to both emerging and established voices was represented at this birthday concert in London last night, part of the Spitalfields Festival. From their emergence in 1989 in a different musical and technological world (“NMC” standing for “New Music Cassettes”) my early days of CD buying were guided by NMC’s developing catalogue and they are still a go-to for finding interesting new things. The audience at the Dutch Church in the City of London was garlanded with composer royalty of all Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
I’m sitting in the Olivier waiting for the show to start, comfortable in the knowledge that I’ve seen the original production of Mnemonic, one of Complicité’s most lauded plays, in 1999; but I struggle to remember anything about it, the detail is fuzzy. A play about memory is challenging my own faltering apparatus.Who did I see it with? Where? What was that audience participation? I sift through the gears, opening mental doors in an attempt to find a clue as to whether I did actually see it, after all. Meanwhile, the magnificent Kathryn Hunter, stalwart of the Complicité troupe, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Ukraine’s history is complex and often bitter. The territory has been endlessly fought over, divided, annexed and occupied. From 1917-20 it enjoyed a brief period of independence before being swallowed up once more by the Soviet Union after a vicious three year war – an example that Vladimir Putin is copying with his monstrous invasion.Now Ukrainians are being forced to fight, once more, for independence is an appropriate time to reveal that many artists of the so-called Russian avant-garde were actually from Ukraine. Famous pioneers of abstract art such as Kasimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The Academy of Ancient Music, which celebrates its “golden anniversary” this season, got going just as Handel’s operas began to leave the library at last and reclaim the stage. There they continue to flourish, dazzle and move – which makes any concert performance of them a slightly bittersweet pleasure.At the Barbican, the AAM’s Orlando boasted sumptuous luxury casting, headed by countertenor Iestyn Davies as the love-maddened warrior, and adorned by four other hugely gifted singers along with the savoury period sounds produced by director-harpsichordist Laurence Cummings and his crew. Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The reinvigoration of Andrew Lloyd Webber continues apace. New York is now hosting a ballroom culture, drag-inflected Cats, and the Olivier-laureled Sunset Boulevard, a breakaway hit last year on the West End, hits Broadway in the autumn.And here is Lloyd Webber's 1984 large-scale caprice, Starlight Express, reinvented for the era of Power Rangers and Transformers, with women inheriting men's roles and the entire thing feeling as if the audience has landed inside a video game itself on overdrive.I was at the 1984 West End press night of the original Starlight, as it happens, and vividly Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This luminously persuasive, radically inventive performance of Shostakovich’s music begins – quite literally – at the end. Beneath a slowly revolving monochrome moon, a lone musician delivers a plangent rendition of the Moderato and Allegretto from the final viola sonata the composer wrote before dying of cancer in 1975. From the shadows an accordionist emerges as the accompanist, eking out the understated melancholy from the shifting harmonies. It’s a deceptively simple, elegiac introduction to the wonderfully daring ninety minutes that ensues.The electrically compelling Finnish violinist Read more ...
Katie Colombus
If the holiday season has been lacking in sun so far in the UK, Sza bought the heat to the first Saturday of the iconic London summerfest in Hyde Park, set up by a strong afternoon of support acts from Sampha, Snoh Aalegra, Elmiene and No Guidnce.On a stage smattered with rather phallic looking stalagmites, stalactites and huge silver crystals as if the set were her very own fortress of solitude, the boundary pushing R&B singer showcased songs from both her 2017 album Ctrl and 2022’s SOS, teasing to her brand new collection Lana, asking the crowd “New album, are you ready?”Opening with “ Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The death of Marilyn Monroe is a wet dream for conspiracy theorists. Like the assassination of JFK in the following year there is plenty of material in the official accounts that doesn’t quite make sense – which opens the door to free-form speculation.Intrigued by the numerous theories about Monroe’s demise, actress Vicki McKellar and Olivier Award-winning West End and Broadway director Guy Masterson have teemed up to create The Marilyn Conspiracy, which was first staged at the Edinburgh Festival in 2018 and now comes to the Park Theatre in north London. The result is a cogent thriller which Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There was a point in this stadium spectacular when P!nk gave her fans two choices. They could either “make out with their partners or go queue for a beer” she suggested, prior to one of the first slow-paced numbers of the evening, but the latter choice was a dangerous one. Few shows, even among big pop jamborees, feature as much going on as Alecia Moore’s current Summer Carnival jaunt.The stunts, choreography and pyro were relentless, to the extent that my friend pondered if every single number would feature fireworks accompanying them. It wasn’t far off that, and the overall result was an Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Yorgos Lanthimos continues to navigate a highly distinctive, daring, one might even say sly path for himself. After attracting more mainstream audiences with his crowd-pleasing period romp The Favourite, and the gothic feminist fable Poor Things, he now returns to the bleak, discomforting and strange worldview of his earlier films. And for the more recent fans, the uninitiated to the director’s roots, Kinds of Kindness may be something of a shock. Regardless, it’s very refreshing to see a filmmaker mix it up in this way, finding ways of realising his sensibility Read more ...