Reviews
Kimon Daltas
Comebacks may be all the rage but Elvis Costello just keeps on going. It's the third year running that he has taken his band The Imposters on the Revolver Tour, featuring The Spectacular Spinning Songbook: a giant carnival wheel of songs which audience members are brought on stage to spin and dictate the set list.Not everything is left to chance, however, and the evening began with a rollicking medley of “Welcome to the Working Week”, “No Action”, “Strict Time”, “Accidents Will Happen” and “Next Time Round”. In what was the middle of three consecutive nights at the Albert Hall, you might Read more ...
David Nice
On most of her London visits, Elisabeth Leonskaja has been an unassuming high priestess of the mysteries and depths in core sonatas by Beethoven, Chopin and Schubert. This time she applied her Russian-school style of orchestral pianism, tempered as always by absolute clarity, to burning the mists off Ravel, Debussy and the French-inspired Romanian, Enescu. She went on to give us colossal enlightenment in what must be the greatest work ever composed by a 19-year-old, Brahms’s Third Piano Sonata in F minor.If Brahms was the last of the titans, Leonskaja embodies the twilight of the gods. We Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
They say that you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but I began to grow bored with Love and Marriage about halfway through the opening credits. What seemed like endless pairs of smiling, photogenic couples swung onto the screen against a twee, brightly-coloured backdrop, and I realised I was already struggling to care. I mean, get it, okay? Different branches of the family tree and all that? The new six-part comedy drama revolves around the trials and tribulations of the Paradise family, but the big problem with Love and Marriage is that there are too many characters, and very few Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The party's over in more senses than one in Behind the Candelabra, the Steven Soderbergh film dedicated to the proposition that all that glitters is most definitely not gold. It charts the downward spiral of the relationship between the American king of piano-playing glitz, Liberace, and his onetime "chauffeur" and companion, Scott Thorson. The movie finds two major Hollywood names, Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, in head-turning form, only to wed them to a drearily predictable and none-too-illuminating script that is itself as pro forma as the personalities it deals with are singular to a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Although originally commissioned by the Royal Opera House, Benjamin Britten’s opera Owen Wingrave was always intended to be an opera-for-television. Perhaps it’s this unusual pedigree that has scared off potential performances of this little-seen work, perhaps it’s the piece’s awkward drama and barely digested polemic. Either way it’s a shame. This late score is full of Brittenish melodic fragments and orchestral colours, and if the opera house wouldn’t exactly be the poorer for its absence the concert hall certainly would.Why the inherently naturalistic medium of television should have Read more ...
Heather Neill
There was a sense of nervous anticipation in the Maria, the Young Vic's studio space. Ninety minutes of torture was on the menu, and I'll admit to feeling some trepidation. But this show - and "show" is the right word - turns out to be a revelation. Writers Nicolai Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada, co-founders of Belarus Free Theatre, have pulled off an astonishing coup: their feast for the senses, directed by Khalezin, tells horrific stories without melodrama, without overstatement or buckets of blood - and it is all the stronger for its brilliant mix of matter-of-factness and lyricism.Acclaimed Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Githa Sowerby's play, written in 1912 and a huge hit at the Royal Court and then in America, has been described as having qualities of Ibsen or Chekhov, and its themes certainly echo those writers' examinations of emotional claustrophobia and thwarted ambition.How much of this is in the original, edited and translated by Blake Morrison and directed by neuropsychologist Jonathan Miller I confess I don't know, but if this is wholly her work then she was remarkably prescient; obsession with class and worker-owner strife, as well as a horribly dysfunctional family, are here. It could almost be Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
For certain types (yes, I was that serious-minded teenager) in the late Seventies Rod Stewart made a convenient hate figure – a coke-snorting dinosaur with interchangeable blondes on his arm who, having made some decent records, was now making banal ones like “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” (and that was one of the better ones). Last night, the only moment Rod looked slightly embarrassed was singing that travesty of Disco, at 68. Even Rod now admits discs like 1980’s Foolish Behaviour were “a pile of shit”.But, in a curious twist, having spent the last decade doing covers, Rod seems to be on a Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
“My three men,” declares the deeply compromised heroine of this 1928 experimental drama by Eugene O’Neill. “I am whole.” Nina Leeds – hungry for love, ruthless with her own heart and those of others – burns like the sun at the play’s centre. She is given a portrayal by Anne-Marie Duff, in this fine production by Simon Godwin, so scorching that she all but self-immolates, while her men circle her like planets, helpless to alter their course. It is an impressive achievement – even if the work itself remains unwieldy and unsatisfying.Designs by Soutra Gilmour, intricate yet breathtaking in their Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Previous series of Mad Dogs have seen the quartet of middle-aged geezers embroiled with the Serbian mafia and tangled up in drug deals, conspiracies and murder. For this series three opener, the curtain rose on our bedraggled lads caged up in a derelict prison camp. They were wearing Guantanamo-style orange jumpsuits. Having expected to go to Barcelona on a container vessel at the end of series two, here they were banged up under a shrivelling Moroccan sun.Much of the piece was taken up with the quartet being baffled and bamboozled, amid some tight-lipped wiscrackery, as they tried to work Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Patrick Caulfield (1936-2005) is the greatest late 20th-century British painter the international art world has never heard of. This quietly magnificent exhibition of about 35 paintings, most of them very large, may at last bring about a satisfactory reversal of fortune. Although some of the paintings are 50 years old, they could have been painted tomorrow. Their style, wit, irony and melancholy, tempered by contradictory moods of quiet cynicism and sensual pleasure in the observed world, seem utterly contemporary.The images are theme and variations: flatly painted blocks of bold colour – Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Titling their long-delayed second album The Second Coming meant The Stone Roses had run out of religious metaphors for their 2012 reunion. They already had a song called “I Am the Resurrection”. Still, with super-fan director Shane Meadows on hand to capture their return, actions spoke louder than words. At their homecoming concert in Manchester’s Heaton Park, he caught their singer Ian Brown touching the outstretched hands of the faithful, anointing them with his mystic power.To some, the return of The Stone Roses after their messy demise in 1996 was tantamount to a spiritual rebirth. Read more ...