Reviews
Katie Colombus
Most children's theatre productions are usually either heavily branded (think Peppa Pig's roadshow) or - particularly with dance - saccharine to the point of patronising (think My First Cinderella). It is refreshing then, to see a kid's company that brings contemporary dance in its most organic form, to children. And reassuring to see that they can totally handle it.The story is very simple - a girl enters the woods alone and is by turns excited, frightened, lonely, brave, overjoyed, calm and happy. This is all conveyed through playful physical language made up of a little bit of mime and a Read more ...
David Nice
Anyone who saw or attended this year’s Last Night of the Proms will know that Marin Alsop is a born communicator with a wry sense of humour. Another of those youthful crowds The Rest is Noise festival keeps attracting gave her a hero’s welcome last night, and she responded with easy compering. As a conductor she’s good, with clear, strong gestures plus a bit of shoulder acting – though if we have to talk top women interpreters, as opposed to animateurs, in the profession, my money’s still on Finn Susanna Mälkki - and she has a good orchestra at her disposal, too, the Brazilian first team of Read more ...
graham.rickson
From the strange, stuttering opening to its elegiac, drawn-out coda, this is an exquisite, lovingly realised staging of Britten's last opera. It's so good that it amplifies any doubts that you might have about this peculiar, distinctly unlovable piece.Perhaps we've been spoilt here in Leeds by the concurrent revivals of Peter Grimes and A Midsummer Night's Dream – both vibrant, colourful operas. Death in Venice is a tougher proposition – the score so spare, so parched that you can't help suspecting at times that Britten's inspiration was starting to flag. Thomas Mann's source novella was Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Grand claims and superlatives were not lacking in this examination of The Who's fabled rock opera. "This is a quintessentially important creation," said Des McAnuff, the man who staged Tommy on Broadway and in London's West End. "This might just be the first pop masterpiece," wrote pop critic (and Pete Townshend's pinball-playing buddy) Nik Cohn in his review in 1969.But Townshend himself was not blind to the dangers of Tommy's mystical pretensions. When Cohn, who'd loved The Who's early and frantically wired-up singles, complained that the Tommy concept was too po-faced and quasi-religious, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Brandenburg Concertos Dunedin Consort/John Butt (Linn Classics)Historically-informed recordings of Bach's Brandenburgs are the norm now. Which is a good thing, though exposure to each new set can leave me craving a bit of naughty inauthenticity – those old modern instrument sets by Karajan and Klemperer, with vast string sections chugging along at a sedate pace. You're immediately struck by the sound of the Edinburgh-based Dunedin Ensemble, which is softer grained and a little warmer than you'd expect. This is in part be due to the tuning; director John Butt's sleeve note convincingly Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Adapt a Jane Austen novel for the stage and you have a generous handful of characters and a selection of drawing rooms in which to put them. Adapt a George Eliot novel and you’re faced with a whole town of people – figures from grand houses, workhouses and everything in between. It’s quite a task, but one that Geoffrey Beevers has made his speciality. He’s already tackled Silas Marner and Adam Bede but now, in a new triptych of plays for Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre, he takes on the big one: Middlemarch.In the age of the TV series and the box set, theatre’s claim on literary adaptations is Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
At one point during the show Bill Bailey makes an aside about the last words of biologist JBS Haldane which were, according to the comedian, a comment about God having an “inordinate fondness for beetles". He then goes into a routine about deathbed quotations and the likelihood of coming out with a corker then having a snooze and muttering a mundanity just before you croak.As ever, he combines erudite references with accessible silliness, also reminding us that his most recent media profile has been from appearing in gently enthused wildlife programmes about baboons, or his hero, the ground- Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Former video artist Clio Barnard's second feature - which took Cannes 2013 by storm with its stark and striking humanity - takes inspiration and its title from the Oscar Wilde fairytale. However that's not the film's only, or most significant, influence: The Selfish Giant is, by its director's own admission, a response to the continuing, corrosive impact of Thatcherism, an ideology that put selfishness ahead of societal needs and pushed millions to the margins. And perhaps even more importantly than that, whilst making her first film, the ingenious documentary The Arbor, Barnard encountered Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
In this classical anniversary year we’ve had masses of Wagner and Verdi, plenty of Britten (and still more Britten) but not much has been heard of 2013’s other birthday-boy, the notorious Carlo Gesualdo – prince, priest, composer and murderer. Best known for the extraordinary chromatic contortions of his madrigals and the stark, chiaroscuro beauty of his Tenebrae Responsories, the legend of his private life still dwarfs all. And it’s this story that provides inspiration for Salvatore Sciarrino’s 1998 chamber opera The Killing Flower.An unaccompanied female voice pierces the blackness with Read more ...
Claudia Pritchard
How irksome in some ways for the National Theatre that both the glamour and the accessibility of cinema have bookended its first 50 years, when the company and, latterly, its Southbank home, are essentially driven by and dedicated to live performance. But it was Laurence Olivier’s film career, making him a household name, which helped secure for him the job as first director of the National Theatre in 1963. And it is cinema relays that have taken NT productions to places and people who might never step into Denys Lasdun’s building, despite the company’s national ambitions.The Olivier years Read more ...
Simon Munk
Games provide the illusion of choice, they pretend you interact with them. Really, most videogames simply wait for you to press the right button before advancing one step to the next point where you have to press the next right button. Both The Stanley Parable and Device 6 explore the idea of choice brilliantly.The Stanley Parable was released as a "mod" for Half-Life in 2011 but now gets a full and redesigned release in its own right. This truly bizarre game sees you guiding Stanley, an office drone who one day discovers his fellow workers have simply disappeared, through a maze of choice. Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The comedy of manners is not dead. It’s alive and kicking, often literally, at this north London venue in actor Simon Paisley Day’s new play. Although the title suggests a group of teenagers dancing in a warehouse, the actual subject of the play is a handful of couples who have left their children behind in order to spend three days relaxing in a remote countryside location. Throw in one or two wild cards and this laughter machine is soon turning over.We are in a holiday cottage in deepest Wales. Keith and Briony are a teacher couple from London who have a three-year-old son, Fin. At first Read more ...