Reviews
Ismene Brown
When the public “got” or did not “get” the original Rite of Spring of Nijinsky and Stravinsky exactly 100 years ago this week, they couldn't call on emotional logic or aesthetic familiarity or symbolic recognition to help. Only imaginative reflex could cause some people to describe in words (the “fearful regrouping of the cells”) or pictures (Valentine Gross’s vivid, instant pencil sketches) what the iconoclastic piece felt like to experience.That, in a sense, holds good for every dance work. Even story-ballets should repel instant verbal description or understanding (or they’d be poetry, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The life of the stand-up is a balance, often precarious, between those stage moments when things seem to be going just right, and the ones which look like they're about to go very wrong. The hero of Tom Shkolnik's debut feature The Comedian, Ed (Edward Hogg), seems to be making decent progress with his club appearances, but when the chance of a new relationship comes along it puts the previously settled balance of his life right out of kilter.There's something immediately attractive, almost provocatively downbeat about Shkolnik's film that announces a director who knows what he Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Don't Starve is a game about survival. Deposited in a strange land rendered in a playfully creepy style like an Edward Gorey cartoon come to life, you - or rather the intrepid Gentleman Scientist, Wilson - must gather resources, craft tools and find food while avoiding the various nasties that lurk in the dark. “Don't Starve” is both the title and your most immediate task but there is more than just a rumbling tum out to do you in - poisons, werepigs, spiders, tentacles and worse all want a piece of you. The game's real bottom line is a much more broad “don't die”.If you read the above and Read more ...
David Nice
There are Handel operas where you wait impatiently for the handful of truly original set-pieces to light up the action, hoping the singers are equal to their challenges. One such is surely Siroe, Re di Persia, bravely staged at the Göttingen Handel Festival the other week. Others like Imeneo sparkle with genius and personality in virtually every number, musically if not dramatically the equal of a Shakespeare late romance.It’s a pleasure to sit through a reasonably animated concert performance like this, cast regardless, when the strings of an unshowy orchestra dart like little cupids around Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The show which Ute Lemper brought to the Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of the London Literature Festival - “Pablo Neruda: A Song Cycle of Love Poems” - is brand-new; the six-piece band (with which she has just recorded it, and which will be touring it) was performing it live for the first time. This Neruda project, a series of 12 love poems, is different from Lemper's most recent Charles Bukowski venture, which she succinctly described to Samira Ahmed this week on Women's Hour as "very garage, jazz-influenced, open, theatrical and dirty". As a continuous piece, the Neruda is also a departure Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Did they get the president? That’s the benchmark question viewers will ask of any new film from documentary house par excellence Brook Lapping and producer Norma Percy ever since they secured an interview with Slobodan Milosevic for their landmark The Death of Yugoslavia. Their strike rate has rather dropped off lately. Even though – or because? – he was the subject of the outfit’s recent Putin, Russia and the West, that wasn't enough to convince the current master of the Kremlin to participate.Brook Lapping's new three-parter, The Iraq War, has a similar dearth of the number-one men: George Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Writer-director Régis Roinsard's feature debut is a perky French rom-com which brings together the talented, easy-on-the-eye trio of Déborah François, Romain Duris and Bérénice Bejo. Set in the late 50s it contains oodles of delicious period detail along with shades of the much-loved Amelie and the adorable 60s TV series Bewitched. It should be likeable; it should be full of fun. So why doesn't it work? Two words seal its fate: speed typing.The year is 1958 in the small town of Saint-Fraimbault and - against the wishes of her conservative shopkeeper father - Rose Pamphyle (François) is Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Even the most committed lover of long odds would not have bet on Depeche Mode still being this big when they first tinkled their way into the charts over three decades ago. The smart money would probably have been on them now playing, at best, to a medium-sized Marc Almond-style devoted audience or, at worst, joining nostalgia packages alongside one-time fellow hipsters ABC. Yet here they were selling out two nights at the O2 Arena to a positively ecstatic, if possible arthritic, largely middle-aged audience.It is also a surprise that Dave Gahan is still around at all, after drug addiction Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
They say that the most important part of any drama is the journey that it takes its leading characters on. Whatever events have taken place - and after 139 episodes and nearly a decade, this show has had a lot of them - you can expect them to have shaped the characters, who will likely have learned valuable life lessons and evolved. Despite this, it is no great surprise to see Shameless patriarch Frank Gallagher (David Threlfall) begin the show’s final episode from jail - where he has spent three months for benefit fraud.Shameless has experienced diminishing critical returns as the years have Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The idea of the celeb as fictional life coach is not new. In Play It Again, Sam Humphrey Bogart dispenses tips on wooing to Woody Allen’s schlemiel. Eric Cantona offers gnomic pearls to a put-upon Man U fan in Looking for Eric. And then there’s the altogether more category-resistant Being John Malkovich. But they’re all up on the big screen. Luisa Omielan consults her chosen heroine for therapeutic guidance right there in front of you onstage, and a hilarious, life-affirming, mood-enhancing job she makes of it.What Would Beyoncé Do?! sits somewhere between a bootleg jukebox musical and a self Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In an average lifetime a human being sits in front of the television for around 29,035 hours. Why? Because it’s there. OK, so the precise statistic is a guess. The figure, like the answer, is more correctly associated with the great outdoors. George Mallory, explaining why he wanted to conquer a mountain nowadays measuring at 29,035 feet, responded with pithy insouciance. If you happened to be parked in front of the gogglebox as his story was told in Words of Everest, this was one hour not wasted.It’s a simple idea to take historic testimony written by the intrepid men of yesteryear, lob in a Read more ...
David Nice
Down Whitehall, the English Defence League had been making ripples, and at 7.40pm some of its packs were still roaring round Trafalgar Square. At that moment, Berlioz’s March to the Scaffold from the Symphonie fantastique drowned them out in one big va t’en which you could have translated into a hundred languages.For here was the music of a Frenchman conducted by a Russian, played by an orchestra of many nationalities to a packed-out crowd of many more and every creed, made up of adults, children, babies and dogs. As in last week’s horrific murder, for every minus, however gross, more than a Read more ...