Reviews
graham.rickson
"The Sage Gateshead is in the top five best concert halls in the world." So thinks Lorin Maazel, and he should know. Attending concerts here is a real pleasure. The audiences are unfailingly friendly. The architecture is inspiring, and the views over the adjacent River Tyne spectacular. The main hall's acoustics are better than anything you'll find in London. Credit is due to a far-sighted Gateshead Council who paid for the building's construction. (They point out that the value of the money ploughed into the local economy since The Sage's opening ten years ago amounts to six times the cost Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There really was astonishing talent on display in The Brits Who Built the Modern World (*****), as full a television panorama of the work of the five architects whose careers were under examination – Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Nicholas Grimshaw, Michael Hopkins and Terry Farrell – as we’re ever likely to get. Peter Sweasey’s three-film series, fascinatingly rich in archive footage, was supported by the Open University and produced in partnership with the Royal Institute of British Architects (which has published an accompanying book), emphasising that it’s once-in-a-lifetime project.The Read more ...
Matthew Wright
With their self-conscious blend of flamenco, Latin and pop creating the improbable-sounding Catalonian rumba, the Gipsy Kings, who played to an ecstatic Royal Albert Hall last night, are one of the pioneers of the world music genre. Their contribution has just been recognised by the Grammys, where they shared this year’s World Music prize (with Ladysmith Black Mambazo) for their new album Savor Flamenco.Formed from two groups of brothers, the Reyes and the Baliardos, who celebrate 25 years together this year, they now live in Provence, but both families are originally from Spain. The Reyes’ Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Well! Just when you think you’ve constructed a nice tripartite schema for dance styles based on their relationship with the ground, along comes a company which tears up that rule book entirely.Last week I theorized that contemporary dance goes down to the ground, ballet aims up off it, and Tanztheater Wuppertal walks, magnificently, on it. Then I saw Circa, an Australian contemporary circus ensemble, who on last night’s evidence can apparently dispense with the ground altogether and just fly through the air instead.Ok, I exaggerate. But not all that much: Circa’s performers Read more ...
Steve Clarkson
It takes a particularly hard heart to fail to be moved by the sheer scale of community fragmentation around the time of the Miners' Strike – for many, the single most devastating period in the north of England's social history. But maybe, just maybe, this Brassed Off play is not quite as stirring as it should be.Adapted by Paul Allen from the classic 1996 film, the story about a colliery and its brass band has been revived at York Theatre Royal to mark the strike's 30th anniversary year. Pulling the strings is Damian Cruden, an award-winning director of such vision and skill that his Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Over many months, the release of stills and teaser trailers from Nymphomania, as well as the poster showing the faces of its stars (presumably) faking orgasms, have maximized press speculation on the nature of Lars von Trier's hardcore-laced saga about the life of a female sex addict.Would it be a garden of delights, earthly and unearthly? Would it be to 21st century global culture what the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover was to British society in 1960? Would it be yet another film made by the provoking Dane, in the misogynistic spirit of Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Avoid: Sensory Overload is a racing game without a race. A litle bit of Wipeout, a dollop of Temple Run, a dash of Zaxxon and a hint even of Flappy Bird, it is a test of reaction times and nerve. At least, it is after a certain point.The first few levels of Avoid are almost absurdly easy. If you have played any kind of racing game or endless runner, or even if you have ever walked in a straight line at speed then you will likely ace the first few stages and even feel like you are playing in slow motion. This is a temporary state of affairs and if you push through (or just cheat and select a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A new series about a team of London firefighters? Probably a bit like Casualty meets The Bill, with added smoke and cats stuck in trees. But no - writer Lucy Kirkwood (of Skins fame) has created a raw chunk of contemporary drama which isn't afraid to rip up a few preconceptions.The scene you're likely to remember most vividly from this opener was the bit where Kev Allison, the hero-fireman back at work after a long recuperation from injuries, pulled his trousers down at an official Fire Brigade awards ceremony to reveal the full extent of his burns. He'd had more than a few drinks and was ( Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The lakeside beach that is the only scene of action in Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake is a concentrated crucible of desires. The sense of languid summer and the limpid beauty of the lake itself, beautifully and compellingly caught throughout in Claire Mathon’s widescreen cinematography, are deceptive: this gay cruising area is a place of urgent, largely silent action, and deadly undercurrents, where sexual fascination can become potentially fatal.The film opens with the arrival of the goodlooking Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), who parks his car, strips down, and goes into the water. Read more ...
joe.muggs
Ever since becoming a parent – given that it's my job to look at how music connects to its audience – thoughts about what gets children engaged with it have rarely been far from my mind. It brings home a lot of questions about how much of our reactions to music are learned and how much instinctive, about the functions it serves in our lives, about whether old platitudes about music bringing people together carry any weight and so on. And occasionally it makes me listen with fresh ears too.In particular it's been fascinating to see how the visceral appeal of certain types of grassroots music Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Drenge certainly pull in a diverse crowd to their shows these days. Prior to the band coming on stage for this sell-out gig, there was a group of 40-somethings in fairly new-looking leather jackets to my left, talking about Tom Watson MP (who famously recommended the band to Ed Miliband in a resignation letter), and to my right a group of teenagers, sniffing from a bottle of amyl nitrate and trying not to puke.By the end of opening song, “People in Love Make Me Feel Yuck”, these two groups had very definitely moved apart. The teenagers had gravitated towards the stage and were throwing Read more ...
Naima Khan
“Consider the donut!” One might have assumed that a significant chunk of Tracy Letts’s Superior Donuts would be a heartfelt ode to the fried dessert cake itself. In fact Letts’s play, set in a donut shop nestled in an economically and culturally diverse borough of Chicago, dwells on the personal and political make-up of the shop’s most dedicated staff. All two of them.It’s a look into the ways we can evade life, skip its hardest tests and sink fast without the buoyancy of hope. But while the author of the play and film of August: Osage County gives us a very different sort of script, in the Read more ...