Reviews
aleks.sierz
“Welcome to motherhood, bitch!” By the time a character delivers this reality check, there have been plenty of laughs, and some much more awkward moments, in Richard Molloy’s The Harmony Test, which premieres in the Hampstead Theatre’s Downstairs studio space.As directed by the venue’s Associate Director Alice Hamilton, this promises to be an evening of taboo- as well as rib-tickling comedy, and certainly something a bit more serious: the play’s title comes from the DNA-based blood screening test for the most common chromosomal abnormalities, including Down’s syndrome.Set in the kitchen of Read more ...
Guy Oddy
When the Lovely Eggs’ married duo of Holly Ross and David Blackwell took to the stage at the recently rebranded XOYO in Birmingham on Bank Holiday Monday, they looked like they should be playing for two completely separate bands. She was looking glam, dressed like a guitar wielding Rόisín Murphy, with a blonde bob and orange and black tiger print dress, while he slid behind his drum kit in a washed-out tour t-shirt and a Johnny Ramone haircut.Once they burst into the speedy, buzz saw guitar powered “Death Grip Kids”, however, any ideas of a musical mismatch were immediately dispelled. The Read more ...
aleks.sierz
When does creativity become mannered? When it’s based on repetition, and repetition without development. About halfway through star director Katie Mitchell’s staging of Margaret Perry’s adaptation of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets – despite the casting of the always watchable Ben Whishaw – I had the horrible feeling that this 80-minute show was on repeat. Moody words, repeat, moody visuals, repeat, moody mood, repeat, repeat, repeat.Which is very sad because Bluets is the first offering from Royal Court’s new artistic director David Byrne, hyped up as, in his words, “the path of maximum adventure”. Read more ...
David Nice
“Saint-Saëns: The Renaissance Man” proclaimed the big screen at the first remarkable programme I attended within the 2024 Sheffield Chamber Music Festival. The same epithet could be applied to this year’s curator, Steven Isserlis, so remarkable a cellist that one forgets until coming face to face with his other talents what a unique speaker and programmer he is.Sheffield's resident live wires in Ensemble 360 anticipated the generosity by granting his requests, among other things, for the showing of a silent film, probably the first (1908) to have a live score by a major composer (Saint-Saëns Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Tate Britain’s Now You See Us could be the most important exhibition you’ll ever see. Spanning 400 hundred years, this overview of women artists in Britain destroys the myth that female talent is an exotic anomaly.We were led to believe there’d been no great women artists until, searching the archives, female art historians were able to reveal the genius of Artemisia Gentileschi whose Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura), c.1638-1639 (pictured below right) kicks off this brilliant survey.How I wish I’d known of this powerful painting when I was a student at the Slade! It Read more ...
Matt Wolf
One of Shakespeare's longest plays gets gets served up fast and filleted courtesy the director of the moment Jamie Lloyd, who is second to none when it comes to revealing the hidden performance strengths of various (and very varied) stars.Last year, his shivery Doll's House on Broadway brought Jessica Chastain a deserved Tony nod (she should have won), and his furiously dystopian Sunset Boulevard, starring an entirely revelatory Nicole Scherzinger, rightly swept the Olivier Awards last month, and will hit New York in the autumn. If Lloyd's alchemy doesn't work quite the same magic on the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Kudos to the Wigmore Hall for continuing to make efforts to diversify its roster of performers and repertoire. Last year I reviewed the Kaleidoscope Collective, and noted how the different profile of their players attracted a younger and less universally white audience to the hall, and the same happened again last night when the American Sphinx Organization were given the stage. Make no mistake, the Wigmore Hall remains a bastion of Beethoven and a haven for Haydn, but an effort is being made and that should be noted and applauded.Sphinx is a Michigan-based, multi-faceted “social justice Read more ...
India Lewis
Last night’s Travels Over Feeling: The Music of Arthur Russell (a concert in part accompanying the recent publication of a book about his life by Richard King) was a brilliant way to honour the legacy of a fascinating, challenging, and sublime musician who, largely unrecognised in his lifetime, is now loved by many. The tribute was truly moving (reader, I cried twice), but a tonal shift towards the end, whilst enjoyed by many, was a little jarring.Starting the night, Russell’s former partner, Tom Lee, was brought onstage. Lee brought Russell’s music to a wider audience after his death from Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Jon Savage's The Secret Public How The LGBTQ+ Aesthetic Shaped Pop Culture 1955-1979 accompanies the titular author/historian/journalist’s book of almost the same name. The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture (1955–1979) and this 41-track double CD each track exactly what their titles say, drilling into what has often paralleled or underlain yet repeatedly influenced a constantly evolving mainstream.Little Richard is seen on the cover of the book and the compilation. Other figures crop up twice on the CD set: British producer and songwriter Joe Meek (with Joe Meek Read more ...
David Nice
Catchy even when the lyrics are at their cheesiest, the Jerry Herman Songbook serves up a string of memorable tunes: you’ll probably find that, like me, you recognize about 80 per cent of the material in Jerry’s Girls. But is it enough when you (read I) have fallen in love with productions of Dear World and La Cage aux Folles but haven’t yet seen Hello, Dolly! or Mame on stage? The appetite still needs gratifying.All’s well that ends well in Hannah Chiswick’s decent staging. But the first stretch will be a vexation to some spirits. It’s an over-extended tits-and-teeth mélange which has you Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ten years after their last tour Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis are back on the road with We Are Not a Robot. It comes after their long-running The Now Show on Radio 4 has ended and, reassuringly for their fans, is more of the same affable humour, with the occasional barb that they can throw in now they no longer have to answer to BBC producers.They know their audience – although a running gag has it that Punt and Dennis take a note of lines that don't get the response they're expecting in order to excise them from future shows – and they give them what they want; a few sketches, affectionate Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
In the way of Batman being overshadowed by his villains, in his last outing, Mad Max: Fury Road, the erstwhile hero of George Miller’s dystopian action series had to take a back seat (literally and metaphorically) to the shaven haired, one-armed, kick-ass powerhouse that was Furiosa. Apparently, Miller had plans for a Furiosa origin story even before he shot Fury Road, correctly predicting the popularity and immediate icon status of the character he’d created. With Anya Taylor-Joy taking on the role from Charlize Theron (true to the spirit of his filmmaking, Miller has eschewed Read more ...