Reviews
Adam Sweeting
No brilliant new ideas? Well then, let's just boil up a compilation of a few old ones. Result? The Blacklist, a slick and surprisingly brutal spies-and-black-ops drama from NBC that speeds along blithely without an original thought in its head.A chubby-looking James Spader plays Raymond "Red" Reddington, the so-called "Concierge of Crime" who has been in heavy rotation on the FBI's Most Wanted charts for years. He turned to the Dark Side after once being a darling of the US defence establishment, where at one stage he was even being groomed to become an admiral.These days he brokers megabucks Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Jazz singer Jacqui Dankworth’s fifth album Live to Love is, on the face of it, an unlikely forum for appreciation of quantum physics or the heroic plight of Pakistani campaigner Malala Yousafzai. This new release, launched at the 606 Club, contains both, but not because she has morphed into a fearsome amalgam of Tom Lehrer and Billy Bragg. Dankworth unified her eclectic subject matter by demonstrating a multifarious, magnificent facility for empathy.Vocal quality and delivery were excellent. Dankworth radiated an irresistible, sensuous warmth, each word a little boat on her river of honey and Read more ...
David Benedict
In a moment of scalding intensity at the climax of Ghosts, terrified Oswald sees the sun. Throughout the rest of Ibsen’s celebrated drama about the sins of the past, light is fairly absent. Merely cataloguing the disasters that befall its heroine Mrs Alving would certainly indicate a play living up to Ibsen’s bad reputation as the leading dramatist of doom and gloom. But that categorisation misses the excitement created by his ceaselessly taut plotting – it’s nothing less than a five-hander thriller – and the audience-grabbing pace of Richard Eyre’s steady-burn production.Much of the tension Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A young man eaten up by fears of inherited disease, a mother who hid the facts of her awful marriage from her son to spare him, but is rewarded with even worse pain: the emotional plotlines of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts are huge. While the plot ticks off taboos - incest, rebellious women, euthanasia - deep at the heart of it is an atavistic fear in all of us that we will die in fully conscious agony, eaten up by a madness wished on us by someone’s selfishness or stupidity.Ibsen's play was meat too strong for its 1881 public, and the private stagings that managed to get past the first decade’s- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There will be some who will sneer at this film, but ignore them. Director Dexter Fletcher has fashioned a wonderfully enjoyable movie from a play by Stephen Greenhorn (who also wrote the script), in which a good-natured story about family, love and friendship is set to the music of The Proclaimers.Davy (George MacKay) and Ally (Kevin Guthrie) are lifelong friends, squaddies returning from a tour of Afghanistan in which one of their friends was killed and another seriously injured. But this isn't a film about trauma or loss, as we see the two burst into a song-and-dance routine as they skip Read more ...
philip radcliffe
A “world premiere” of music written by Benjamin Britten just over 70 years ago? Whence this treasure trove of long-lost musical gold? Well, under the title of An American in England, in 1942 Britten wrote the score for a BBC/CBS co-produced series of six radio drama documentaries for transatlantic transmission to make Americans appreciate this country’s war effort. It was jointly commissioned by the War Office and performed by a 62-piece RAF band in full dress uniform.To kick off their new season, the Hallé burrowed into the archive and focused on three of these broadcasts: London by Clipper Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The life of Margaret Thatcher seems to draw sympathetic writers like wasps to a particularly sweet jam. In 2011, playwright and screenwriter Abi Morgan gave us a portrait of the first female prime minister in her film, The Iron Lady, and now Moira Buffini — whose film Tamara Drewe was a hit in 2010 — offers her take on the relationship between Britain’s top two women — Maggie and Elizabeth the Queen. And it comes hot on the heels of Peter Morgan’s The Audience, which also featured the two rival queens.A shorter version of Handbagged was staged at this venue in 2010 — for its Women, Power and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There's no denying the allure of a well-crafted legal drama, and there's also probably a hefty swathe of fans pining for the return of Maxine Peake in Peter Moffat's superior Grays Inn yarn, Silk. They will have found plenty to cheer in Suranne Jones's thumpingly enjoyable performance as Lila Pettitt in Lawless [****], one of the female-centric pilot shows in Sky Living's new Drama Matters series.Lila has just been appointed the country's youngest-ever female recorder (a judge by any other name), and is pitched head first into the Lewis Carroll-esque maelstrom of life on the bench. Read more ...
Simon Munk
"The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance," wrote Aristotle. And you know what, the old Greek geezer knew a thing or two. While this downbeat stealth/platform game delivers a pure aesthetic thrill, it sadly fails to follow through in a cohesive theme or thrilling play.A boy ends up chasing a mysterious and ghostly girl in a rainy European city – something happens and he, like her, is trapped in a darkened, Escher-esque version of that city, permanently engulfed in darkness and rain. Like her, he now is only visible in the rain – under Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Not long ago James McAvoy finished a brutal run as Macbeth, and he’s back in Filth as another manic Scotsman hurtling towards self-destruction. The setting is Nineties Edinburgh, and his character, dodgy policeman Bruce Robertson, has a Machiavellian genius for getting one over on his copper colleagues, until his addiction-fuelled luck runs out, and he comes crashing down. He’s the first-person narrator for most of the story, and though repulsively believable, his grip on the narrative starts separating from reality.It’s a compelling performance that pulls out all the stops, and then some, Read more ...
fisun.guner
I read someone recently describe Sarah Lucas’s sculptures as “aggressive”. Perhaps being greeted by a roomful of huge plaster cocks, mechanised wanking arms and greasy doner kebabs with two fried eggs in an abject arrangement of the female sex can feel a little confrontational, but aggressive? There’s surely something deflecting and bluntly one-note when it comes to the merely aggressive. “Aggressive” rarely lets other emotions in, and Lucas’s work is a many shaded affair.There’s lots of humour for a start. And like all the best humour, at least British humour, behind the slapstick there's Read more ...
David Nice
Interviewed live just before his Proms performance of Britten’s Serenade, Ben Johnson was asked the usual question as to whether the composer wrote especially well for the tenor voice. “He writes amazingly for every instrument,” came the reply. If we needed a single-programme testament to that special genius, this all-Britten celebration from Vladimir Jurowski and his London Philharmonic Orchestra was it. In addition to the two billed soloists, there were at least a dozen from within the orchestra who proved the point. And what sounds, what textures, whether Britten was writing light or dark Read more ...