Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Boldly not going anywhere near things like Grange Hill or Teachers, Big School is more like a throwback to the St Trinian's of the 1950s. Co-writer and star David Walliams plays a man known only as Mr Church, Deputy Head of Chemistry at Greybridge School (the nod to Billy Bunter's Greyfriars presumably being the whole point). He's repressed, uptight and sexually inept, and more than a tiny bit reminiscent of Rowan Atkinson playing the title role in Simon Gray's Quartermaine's Terms.A few grudging scraps have been thrown to the prevailing -isms of 21st century education, like a pupil Read more ...
geoff brown
Jeremy Paxman’s beard may have been a wonder and a talking point for five days, but Michael Tippett’s opera The Midsummer Marriage beats it by almost 60 years. Ecstatic, visionary, energetic music, yes indeed. But, oh, the composer’s libretto! The Magic Flute, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, English folk lore, Greek myths, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Carl Jung’s archetypes of the unconscious mind, wafts of wisdom from the East: all get crammed and overheated in the pot, cooked by someone with a soaring lyrical musical gift but only a talent for awkward verbiage when it comes to writing words. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sandra, 14, has worked out what it will be like if she marries One Direction’s Harry Styles. “His morning voice would be amazing,” she says, thinking forward to when the first thing she hears each day is the croak with which he greets the morning and her. Pop groups with fans are nothing new, and with them come ranks of the obsessive. Crazy About One Direction's twist was to explore the fresh landscape of Twitter-aided, light-speed-connected fandom of girls and young women under the spell of One Direction, the world’s most popular boy band.The film wasn’t really about the X Factor-created Read more ...
Veronica Lee
John Lloyd, Underbelly Bristo Square **** John Lloyd is a comedy god to any aficionado of the art form. He has written or produced some of the best radio and television comedy of the past 40 years, including (and these are just brief highlights) Just a Minute, The News Quiz, Not the Nine O'Clock News, Spitting Image, Blackadder and QI. He was with the Cambridge Footlights but hasn't performed live for more than 30 years, yet in Liff of QI you wouldn't know it – he's a naturally gifted raconteur.Standing behind a lectern, he delivers a sort-of lecture, which is a very funny collection of Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Hardcore First Person Shooter (FPS) fans have their own preferences for controlling their favourite 3D action games. This usually boils down to the little/big-endian dichotomy of analogue thumbstick controller or mouse+keyboard combo (WASD for movement and strafing, space to jump, click to fire. Obviously.) Rarely will you see anyone coming out in favour of mobile or tablet touchscreens as the One True Way and there is an excellent reason for this - without physical feedback, controlling an FPS using a touchscreen is almost always a frustrating experience marked by a lack of precision.The Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s the women who keep things together in Umut Dağ’s debut feature Kuma, and you can see the weight of the burden that matriarch Fatma (Nihal G Koldas) has been carrying etched on her face. Fatma’s latest endeavour to preserve balance in her Vienna-based Turkish family goes further than before, and provides the first surprise in Dağ’s film.Opening with the colourful atmosphere of a village wedding in Turkey, we assume that Fatma and her husband Mustafa (Vedat Erincin, below right, with Koldas) have married off their good-looking son Hasan (Muruthan Muslu) to the innocently youthful country Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
For their first visit to the UK, Shanghai Ballet have brought a narrative ballet based on a Chinese theatrical version of Jane Eyre. It focuses on Bertha Mason, Mr Rochester’s mad wife in the attic, whose fate has often troubled readers, though the Shanghai narrative does not ask about the economic and social conditions of exploitation, the colonialism and sexism that have trapped her.Instead it presents Bertha, Jane and Rochester as three troubled souls in a kind of eternal love triangle. But Charlotte Brontë's classic is not a novel about a timeless dilemma, it is about a specific character Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Clocking in at a comparatively lean 102 minutes, 2 Guns is a speedy and rumbustious buddy movie in which Bobby Trench (Denzel Washington) and Stig Stigman (Mark Wahlberg) form a wisecracking, fast-shooting duo forced to abandon their mutual suspicion and pool their wits to battle swarms of double-crossing bad guys. The two leads don't quite fizz like Butch and Sundance - Wahlberg as light comedian is like inviting Vladimir Putin to host Celebrity Masterchef - but there are several perfectly serviceable gags, while these days you can put ol' Denzel anywhere and he looks as comfortable as a cat Read more ...
Toby Saul
There was an unmistakable trend within Modernism to try and record absolutely everything about ordinary life. Think of Joyce and his attempt to set down all of Leopold Bloom’s thoughts, or the cubists and their use of even the tiniest scrap of newsprint in a collage. The Photographers’ Gallery has had the excellent idea of revisiting Mass Observation, the movement from the Thirties and Forties that wanted to document the mundane to an unprecedented degree. Formed in 1937 at the height of totalitarianism, Mass Observation sounds like it might have been a tool of the police state. Instead Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is there such a thing as a gay play? As opposed to a play by a gay writer, or one which has some gay content or is about gay characters. The programme to this atmospheric and moving revival of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s 2008 play contains Edward Albee’s complaint that the gay play is “such an imprecise term”. You can see his point. Whether The Pride is gay or not matters less than the fact that it is an excellent account of self-knowledge, emotional truth and personal honesty.Set in two time zones — the 1950s and the present — the play tells the stories of two love situations, both involving two Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Carey Marx, Gilded Balloon **** Carey Marx couldn't come to the Fringe last year, because of the small matter of having a heart attack. But, looking on the bright side, the experience has given him his new show, Intensive Carey, in which the comic tells his story without a trace of self-pity and with a keen sense of the absurd.He's wonderfully honest about the lifestyle that led to the illness – during which we learn another use for a pair of socks when staying in hotel rooms – and the effects the procedures and medications may have had on his sex life (although he managed to masturbate Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
With this sequel to director Matthew Vaughn’s action-comedy based on the comic book by Mark Millar and John S Romtia Jr, writer/director Jeff Wadlow has done his best to make Kick-Ass 2 into a two-part franchise. It certainly doesn’t help that its release date puts it into a piranha tank of action films with bigger budgets and ideas.Following on from the original, Mindy Macready (Chloe Grace Moretz - soon to be the new Carrie) is living with responsible surrogate father Marcus (Morris Chestnut), the best friend of her late crime-fighting father. Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is no Read more ...