Reviews
Matt Wolf
If ever an Oscar ceremony pointed to the fundamentally schizoid nature these days of Hollywood’s defining love-in, the 86th annual Academy Awards was it. On the one hand, you had an out-gay host in Ellen DeGeneres taking selfies, ordering pizza, and generally trying to treat the crowd at the Dolby auditorium as an extension of her own funky, vaguely edgy persona.On the other, you had a running theme about heroism in the movies that landed as limply as leading actor Matthew McConaughey’s cringe-making acceptance speech, an extended paean to God and to the actor himself that seemed utterly Read more ...
Matthew Wright
A series about the bizarre shenanigans of a family of ludicrous aristocrats would seem an unlikely hit for 21st-century Sunday night telly. It worked for ITV’s Downton Abbey, though, and while that’s off air, BBC One is glueing over five million to the settee with Blandings, its adaptation of PG Wodehouse’s tales of the dotty Lord Emsworth, and his prize sow, the Empress. We're already well into the second series, with quite a roster of comic acting talent visiting Blandings Castle and threatening each week to destroy Lord Emsworth’s patch of bumbling, piggy Eden. In places, it’s a lot of fun Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
On paper this sounded promising: a gothicky song-cycle of historical London and the dark, seamy side of the city, performed a stone’s throw from where they do Jack the Ripper tours. Lead performers were Marc Almond, whose distinctive voice we have loved for 30 years, ever since his pervy soul debut with Soft Cell, and John Harle, a more than useful jazzy classicist who is often original and known for his TV theme tunes. Thown in the mix was some Iain Sinclair psycho-geography. An intriguing combination with a positively reviewed album The Tyburn Tree, of which this show was a presentation. Read more ...
Naima Khan
From the creators of the much-lauded The Oh F*ck Moment comes I Wish I Was Lonely, a participatory look at modern communication and the human psyche. Flouting the rules of mainstream theatre, this by turns poetic yet provocative piece encourages the audience to keep all mobile phones on (imagine!), to answer whatever calls may come through, and even to use Twitter and Facebook to our hearts' delight. And having provided our mobile numbers on a piece of card, we receive the number of an anonymous member of the audience in return. So begins a newly fragile, temporary connection to a stranger we Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
“Goya!” I scribbled enthusiastically in the first moments of La Pepa. “Dos de Mayo! Art as witness to history!” Despite the clichéd use of flickering strobes and a stock “chaotic” soundtrack of shouts and crashes, this opening scene purporting to represent the Spanish War of Independence (1808-1812, known in Britain as the Peninsular Wars) reminded me of the Spanish painter’s testimonies in oil to the horror and grandeur of that war; as shafts of yellow side-light pierced the blackness, unknown arms were flung up in the pose of the Tres de Mayo's doomed revolutionary before a firing Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Telling a story through an exhibition can be a bad idea, partly because it seems a little pedestrian but mainly because it runs the risk of using art as illustration, glibly treating paintings as if they were objective visual records. In its title, The Great War in Portraits makes very plain its use of portraiture as a lens through which to view this earth-shattering conflict, but any anxieties about its handling of such a tricky approach are quickly assuaged.The exhibition begins with Jacob Epstein’s Torso in Metal from The Rock Drill, 1915-16 (pictured right), a sculpture that still shocks Read more ...
philip radcliffe
It’s the thought that counts. That’s what we say about presents. But when the gift is a song by Richard Strauss it is that and more. He made a habit of gifting songs, particularly to his wife Pauline. Several of the Six Orchestral Songs on offer here, as the two-month Strauss’s Voice series marking the 150th anniversary of his birth nears its end, are taken from groups originally celebrating occasions such as their wedding day (10 September 1896).It was Sir Mark Elder’s turn to step up for his first appearance in the series, and he drew some glorious sound from the Hallé, while being Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Beyoncé is a fascinating tangle of mixed messages. She stirs people up and, most especially, she confuses men. On the train back from the first concert of her six-night stand at the O2 a group of blokes who heard we’d been to see her rabidly objected. She was, they said, just “selling her pussy”, and selling it cheap. Ire roused, they became very heated. They were lashing out fiercely, apparently under threat, for Beyoncé’s career exists at the populist vanguard of contemporary sexual politics. She gets it wrong some of the time, as in the black’n’white Helmut Newton-esque softcore of her Read more ...
David Nice
If they asked me, I could write a book about the way one number in Richard Jones’s ENO production of Handel’s Rodelinda – the only duet, after 18 arias, and nearly two hours into the action – looks, sounds and moves. Because it doesn’t happen often in opera that all the elements combine for total musical theatre that stuns: in this case, two great voices – Rebecca Evans’s soprano and Iestyn Davies’s countertenor – at what sounds like the peak of their stylish careers, an orchestra under the exceptional Christian Curnyn totally fused with what’s happening on stage, and an ingenious set from Read more ...
emma.simmonds
For those who haven't seen it, the funny face of the title belongs to Audrey Hepburn. As preposterous as that seems for someone so iconically gorgeous and although when others fail to notice her beauty it seems insane, Hepburn was famously insecure, so when her character Jo Stockton says, "I have no illusions about my looks, I think my face is funny" it doesn't sound insincere.The ravishing, Technicolor-ed Funny Face sees an independent woman turned into a bride, an intellectual transformed into an obedient beauty. Hepburn plays Jo, an employee of a "sinister" Greenwich Village bookstore Read more ...
Andy Plaice
In its infancy back in 1997, Jonathan Creek felt fresh and inventive, with clever little swipes at the entertainment industry and a new take on crime drama: not who or why, but more of a howdunnit. Its star Alan Davies, he of the duffel coat and the tumbling hair, was rather good at narrowing his eyes and staring into space while we let our hot chocolate go cold waiting to discover not only who carried out one of those incredibly theatrical murders, but to see its baffling mechanism unpicked.And now he’s back for series five, doing rather nicely in marketing and with his days as a deviser of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Few anniversaries have got off to such a strong start in our current culture as that of the outbreak of the First World War. This new play by Peter Gill, which opened last night, is original in that it focuses not on the start of the conflict, or on life in the trenches, but on the end of the war — and the peace negotiations in Paris in 1919, which led to the Treaty of Versailles. But does it draw connections between that time, so long ago, and life in this country today?Act One and Act Three take place in the drawing room of the Rawlinson home in Kent. The atmosphere is positively Edwardian Read more ...