Reviews
David Nice
What is the extraordinary, crowd-drawing appeal of a picture collection reunited, for a short time only, with its original surroundings? Well, for a start, this is no modest assembly of old masters, and Houghton Hall's elaborately crafted ensemble rooms constitute no conventional stately home. The feat of remarrying them has been so successful that Houghton Revisited has been extended for another two months, until 24 November.Clearly following in the rear of fashionable London, most of which seems already to have zipped to north Norfolk to see the wonders, I arrived from King's Lynn last Read more ...
David Nice
Rumour machines have been thrumming to the tune of “Rattle as next LSO Principal Conductor”. Sir Simon would, it’s true, be as good for generating publicity as the current incumbent, the ever more alarming Valery Gergiev. But if the orchestra wanted to do something fresh and daring, it would be better advised to take the plunge with Robin Ticciati, a disarming mix of youth - he’s still only 30 - and mastery; his romantic rubato, the freedom with the phrases, already strikes me as more convincing than Rattle’s has ever been, as last night's Dvořák testified.If that more interesting Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?” Surely never before has Benedick’s opening quip cut so close to the literal, nor drawn such a laugh from its audience. With a combined age of 158, the romantic leads in Mark Rylance’s Much Ado About Nothing take the current trend for an older pair of lovers to the extreme. James Earl Jones and Vanessa Redgrave turn Shakespeare’s text on its head. Here nieces are older than their uncles, elderly men challenge duels and declare youthful passions. It’s a reading that goes against the grain, but one that brings a certain friction to a comedy of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sometimes, a little bit of everything amounts to a whole lot of nothing. RIPD features a standard buddy cop caper bolted on to a heaven-can-wait drama channelling a body swap comedy also starring a CGI cartoon element. There’s even a heavy dollop of the old Wild West and a splodge of Armageddon alarmism. You get a grab-bag of half a dozen film styles jostling for attention. It must be like this teaching a classful of needy reception kids with ADD.Hey, that’s the referential world of comics for you. RIPD is the latest graphic novel to move from the two dimensions of the page to the, er, two Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Once you’d got over an initial sense of absurdity at Vinnie Jones as travel guide, to Russia and for National Geographic to boot, a certain logic kicked in: hard country, hard man. Some time after we'd lost count in Vinnie Jones: Russia’s Toughest of how often our guide had described himself as "football hard man and Hollywood tough guy”, something unfamiliar crept into view, namely an element of humility in the face of challenges that boggled the Jones imagination. Thankfully for all concerned, they were later left to those who knew how to cope with them better.Could Jones take us to parts Read more ...
Simon Munk
If you think games are for kids, or not art, or beneath you – read on. Grand Theft Auto V, while flawed in many ways, proves you wrong. The latest in the controversial and 18-rated series has already broken first-day sales records for just about every artistic medium ever. Huge numbers of adults across the UK will be sitting down to play it tonight. Take that, Hollywood. Or, Vinewood, as the game would have it.Vinewood as GTA V is set in Los Santos – a virtual replica of Los Angeles and its surroundings. Like its predecessors it's a "freeroaming" or "sandbox" game. There is a spine of plot- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Build My Gallows High, Farewell, My Lovely: Cold Comes the Night. The cod-profound, slightly tortured syntax of its title is in the lineage of downbeat pulp fiction Tze Chun’s film aspires to. Its strength is its delineation of a working-class world in upstate New York, where single mother Chloe (Alice Eve) manages a motel popular with prostitutes, her sleazily handsome local policeman ex- Billy (Logan Marshall-Green, pictured below right with Bryan Cranston) takes a cut of the action, and she tries to hang on to her beloved young daughter from a social worker convinced she’s being raised in Read more ...
kate.bassett
Having boundaries actually sets us free. So Neil Armstrong's wife argues. She is dogmatically keen to stop her husband rocketing off to the moon in the first scene of The Lightning Child – a groundbreaking show in so far as it's the first musical to premiere at Shakespeare's reconstructed wooden "O", opening last night. Armstrong (Harry Hepple in a space suit) does not agree with his spouse's imposed limits, however. A lunar voyage is, he says, his chance to become sublime.Next thing you know, the 1960s astronaut of Apollo 11 fame has gone peculiarly spacey. Climbing a steel ladder, he Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We know, not least through her own account, of Marianne Faithfull's colourful progress as winsome Sixties pop star, lover of Mick Jagger, junkie on the streets of Soho and her artistic rebirth as gravel-throated chanteuse. Here, her frequently gruelling trawl through archives from the 1930s and '40s helped to explain how she became the artist she is, while throwing up some morbidly fascinating details about the inner workings of the Third Reich.At the core of the film was her mother Eva, whom the young Marianne first came to know while growing up inside her cramped little house in post-war Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Once a staple of British drama, the middle-class family play has recently, after about a decade of being unfashionable, made a remarkable comeback. This current example is the playwriting debut of the award-winning actor Rory Kinnear, a star of stage (Hamlet, Othello), television (Southcliffe) and screen (Skyfall). But although it is an accomplished effort, there is something disappointingly déjà vu about this reunion play.Set in a London suburb, it is the day of Andy’s 21st birthday party. The twist is that he is severely disabled and, as the play begins, his mother, Carol, is phoning his Read more ...
Sarah Kent
While the main gallery is closed for renovation, the Wellcome Collection has taken the opportunity to mount a fascinating upstairs show exploring the way choreographer Wayne McGregor collaborates with scientists.A timeline charting McGregor’s career reveals that it all started back in 1997 when he attended the opening of the Inter Communication Centre in Tokyo and learned that, with their brains wired up to scanners, two people could activate a toy car by accidentally thinking of the same number. This sparked an enduring fascination with the mind and how it acts upon, and interacts with, the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Coming to it fresh, it’s hard to imagine Father Figure as the Radio 2 serial it apparently began life as. The first episode of the six-part series is driven by what some would call "visual gags" or "physical comedy", as if writer and star Jason Byrne was so excited by the new medium that he decided to throw everything he could at the camera to see what stuck.I say "some", because your mileage may vary on the comic potential of a small child, covered from head to toe in chocolate spread, running around the family home chanting “I’m a human poo!”. And I say "everything", because what gets Read more ...