Reviews
fisun.guner
“We should pity the age which finds its reflection in this ‘art’”, wrote one critic in 1911, after seeing too many Vienna Secession paintings. From the quotation marks, we see the despairing critic was attacking the art rather than the age. Nonetheless one is inclined to agree: with the Hapsburg Empire on the brink of collapse, with war on the horizon, and Vienna itself a hotbed of neuroses and anti-Semitism, we should indeed pity the age, and the society and the artists that reflected it.Its bared row of tombstone teeth exactly resembles the killer-trap mouth of a de Kooning womanIt is a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sex in a box, in a nutshell. That was the concept. Not literally in a nutshell, as that might have been difficult. But a big white cuboid thing in a studio. Designed – this is an educated guess - by Ikea, being tacky and easily assembled. Couples enter the box and, with luck, each other, and then come and talk about it, in front of a panel of sexperts. What could possibly, in the United Kingdom of embarrassment and irony, go even slightly wrong?The foreplay was bang on the button. Mariella, the one with the blonde streaks and succulent larynx, telling us exactly what she was going to do to us Read more ...
Matt Wolf
One of the joys of autumn is the seasonal return to films about - and intended for - grown-ups, and movies don't come much more crisply and buoyantly adult than Le Week-End, at once the latest and best from the director/writer team of Roger Michell and Hanif Kureishi. The abundant wisdom of the pair's third screen collaboration within 10 years surely reflects the growing awareness that comes with age of the derailments, large and small, that lie scattered along life's way.But whereas one might expect a gathering dourness from this excavation of marital fissures as they are laid bare Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Is this the real Homeland, or a different series with the same name? The original, and fascinating, hook for the show was the question of whether Marine Sergeant Brody had been brainwashed into becoming a fanatical jihadist during his years in captivity. Then came the story of Congressman Brody, a lethal sleeper agent at the very heart of the US administration.Both of these angles have now been dumped into the shredder of history (along with many of the original cast, all blown up at the end of series two), and there's a lingering sense that neither was explored as fully as it might have been Read more ...
fisun.guner
School kids today could probably tell you a thing or two about mummies in ancient Egypt, Romans and how they built straight roads and aqueducts, and possibly, at a stretch, even a few things about the British Empire. But the Ottoman Empire? Name me a sultan. Give me the year the Turks conquered Constantinople, or the year they took control of Islam’s third holiest site – Jerusalem? The Ottomans: Europe’s Muslim Emperors began by asking why the story of the world’s last Islamic empire, which ruled across three continents and was presided over by just one family over its 600-year Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There’s been a lot of backslapping over the success (so far) of The Rest is Noise festival, the Southbank’s year-long trawl through the music of the 20th century. They’re particularly pleased about the numbers of ignorant musical souls they’ve managed to convert over the past half a year. I hate to break it to them but getting a return on the music of the first half of the 20th century (which has included a surprising amount of barely 20th-century Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Strauss and Sibelius) is the easy bit. Last night we reached the 1940s and 1950s. It’s here that things traditionally get Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This 3D film lets you see the whites of Metallica’s eyes. Filmed live last year, the band are already gurning and grinning sufficiently to project their exuberance at playing their songs of rage and pain to the biggest hall's back without video assistance (singer James Hetfield is pictured below). Nimrod Antal’s cameras anyway let you experience US metal’s biggest and most enduring band as if you’re on-stage with them. It functions like one of Elvis’s concert movies, letting Metallica get to you on-screen if you can’t get to them on tour. It also tacks on a post-apocalyptic tale outside the Read more ...
Steve Clarkson
Never before has “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players” been a more fitting opening gambit. This sprawling wartime spectacle knew few bounds as it marched across York’s cobbled streets for an evening that produced watery eyes, open mouths and, admittedly, tired legs.Treading the ever-narrowing waters between theatre and cinema was a travelling audience that followed the action through the city centre while listening on headphones. From the starting point in Exhibition Square, where young lad George (Luke Adamson) and his sweetheart Maisie (Edith Kirkwood) were Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Charity gigs, by their very nature, are usually jolly affairs, and Brighton Comedy Festival’s opening gala at the Dome was no exception. It had a stellar line-up, but also the advantage of being hosted by Alan Carr (the patron of The Sussex Beacon, in whose aid it was given) who was, like most of the guests, on cracking form.Carr, who will be touring next year, was running out some new material, but it was when he was just riffing with the audience that he was at his best, talking about his new boyfriend – “a nice mix of masculine and feminine. He could enjoy a dog fight but appreciates Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
National Wake: A Walk in Africa 1979–81South Africa’s National Wake would be noteworthy enough even if their music wasn’t. The mixed-race group emerged in 1978 in a country where the establishment and institutions were directly opposed to what they represented. In this compilation’s booklet the band’s Ivan Kadey recalls a typical show: “We were greeted by a promoter informing us that he had applied for permission for us to perform, and that it been denied. He wanted us to withdraw and go back to Johannesburg. I told him to shove it and that we were playing whether he liked it or not. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Mark Thomas is telling us how he organised a large gay rights comedy gig outside the Russian consulate in Edinburgh (where this show was part of the Fringe), how it was a huge success, how the local police chief affably arranged for the street to be blocked off to traffic, and how the comedian Stephen K Amos raised a huge cheer of support for the cause to which one policeman on duty responded with enthusiastic and heartfelt applause. Such behaviour, Thomas commented, after a suitable pause, had the potential to ruin his livelihood.That’s the thing with Mark Thomas, he’s defiantly political Read more ...
mark.kidel
Neil Bartlett, as he has demonstrated in his earlier Dickens adaptations of Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, knows how to make gripping theatre out of a complex work of fiction. His Great Expectations rattles through the twists and turns of Pip’s coming of age with a pace that rarely lets up, so much so at times, that there is perhaps not enough space for reflection and the emotional complexity of Dickens’s mature doesn't fully come through.Bartlett has a command of storytelling through the transformation of everyday objects, the surprise and mood-changing potential of light and Read more ...