Reviews
How to be a Dancer in 72,000 Easy Lessons, Teaċ Daṁsa review - a riveting account of a life in dance
Jenny Gilbert
Anyone who has followed the trajectory of choreographer-director Michael Keegan-Dolan and his West Kerry-based company Teaċ Daṁsa (House of Dance) will know by now to expect the unexpected. Such as a Swan Lake whose storyline, in part a searing attack on the abuses of the Catholic church, bore so little resemblance to the original that you might think you’d come to the wrong theatre until the spectacular finale seen through a blizzard of white feathers.His staging of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (a co-production with English National Opera) is up there with the finest, pitting Irish hare Read more ...
James Saynor
Perhaps only in Japan might it be thought the height of delinquency for a bunch of schoolkids is to spend the night sneaking back to school, climbing in and hanging out in a music room. Happyend, a Japanese teen-rebellion story, shows its central posse of disaffected sixth-formers carrying out just such a wild and crazy stunt near the start.And then a couple of them – the facetious Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) and the moodier Kou (Yukito Hidaka) – pull off a scallywag move that’s positively Dada-ist: they haul the principal’s prized marigold car onto its backside in the parking lot, like a “car Read more ...
aleks.sierz
OMG! I mean OMG doubled!! This is amazing! Or is it? Can Alice Birch’s Romans: A Novel at the Almeida Theatre really be the best play on the London stage, or is it not? Can it be both brilliant and exasperating? At one and the same time? Probably. Maybe. Okay, now you’re in the zone.What’s instantly compelling is the sheer ambition of this dream-like family epic. And I mean epic. Across something like a century and more, Birch shows us what happens to the three sons of Henry Roman, a Victorian gentleman whose brother John is a high-ranking soldier, and whose family live in an English Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Hackney’s Round Chapel is an appropriate venue. Scottish smallpipes player Brìghde Chaimbeul opens her set with “Dùsgadh/Waking.” It has the spirit of a call to prayer: the directness, the insistence, the magnetic quality. All of which draws in anyone exposed to its power. It enchants.As well as beginning this sell-out appearance at the multi-use, horseshoe-footprint nonconformist East London church which opened in 1871, “Dùsgadh/Waking” is the first track on Chaimbeul’s recent album Sunwise. Completing the trio of firsts, this is the opening date on what is billed as the ‘Sunwise’ Tour.The Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Unexpectedly, there’s a sly reference to James Joyce’s Ulysses interpolated into Act One (in case we hadn’t caught the not so sly one, naming a leading character Leopold Bloom). While that’s a nice callback from brash commercial Hollywood to the high art salons of Paris, it also links the works. If Ulysses is the book whose legend persists despite so few people having read it, is The Producers its cinematic equivalent? No matter. Like the chorus of “Yellow Submarine” it’s so embedded in popular culture that it feels like we’re born knowing it. There’s Bloom and Bialystock Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Concerts at the Wigmore Hall offer many types of pleasure, but not often an evening so straightforwardly fun as Monday night’s recital by baritone Benjamin Appl and Lithuanian accordion virtuoso Martynas Levickis. Appl is primarily a Lieder singer – but here dived into a stylistically diverse world of music ranging from Mahler to Copland, via Ravel and Kurt Weill.There were passages of seriousness: Gustav Mahler’s dolorous opener, leavened by the sunny and saucy Alma Mahler that followed, and Reynaldo Hahn’s touchingly ingenuous take on Bach, “À Chloris”. Bernstein’s “Simple Song”, from his Read more ...
Simon Thompson
My colleague Boyd Tonkin visited the Lammermuir Festival for the first time this year. His eyes and ears have been opened to its treasures, but some of us have been in on the secret for years. Importantly, that includes the East Lothian audiences, who have been attending the festival in bigger numbers than ever, ensuring that the festival has sold out almost every concert in its biggest venue, St Mary’s Church, Haddington, and packed out many other smaller ones, too. The festival’s major modus operandi is to build partnerships with artists over considerable chunks of time, so as to Read more ...
Claudia Bull
How do you tell the story of a person’s mind? In the preface to Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark, published this year by Bloomsbury, Frances Wilson points out that biography was one of her subject’s own fixations.Spark’s first full-length book, Child of Light, reinterpreted the life of Mary Shelley by means of a novel two-part structure: half “Recollection” and half criticism. She went on to write several literary biographies and her fiction is populated by chroniclers, libellers, and legacy-obsessed pensioners.In 1992, hoping to counter the “strange and erroneous” accounts of her Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
That difficult second documentary – or if you will, “rockumentary” – seems to have been especially challenging for Spinal Tap, since it arrives no less than 41 years after its predecessor, This Is Spinal Tap. The latter has become renowned as a definitive artefact in rock’n’roll history, a smartly deadpan portrayal of a deeply cretinous British heavy metal band in the throes of a shambolic American tour. Some of its gags, like the amplifier that goes up to 11 and the stage prop of a miniature Stonehenge, ought to be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, even if the band themselves are seen Read more ...
stephen.walsh
So it’s come to this: WNO’s autumn season reduced to two operas, a Tosca borrowed from Opera North and a revival of their own Candide from two years back; then two next spring. a revival of their Valleys saga Blaze of Glory (about mine closures and singers who won’t give up) and a new Flying Dutchman. And – wait for it – Tosca is with a reduced orchestra, not because some bright spark has decided to freshen it up, modernise it, but for a simpler, more compelling reason: there is no money.What can a great company placed in this position by idiot, philistine apparatchiks do? Well, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The Bush is likely to continue its fine recent run of hit plays, with this funny, poignant, culturally authentic and beautifully acted two-hander, about an estranged mother and daughter struggling to heal old wounds. Bridgerton’s Golda Rosheuvel and Black Panther/Marvel alumnus Letitia Wright showcase their stage chops, as Joyce and Erica, who come together to honour their dead matriarch by taking her ashes back to her homeland in Guyana. The journey challenges them not only to repair their own relationship, but break a cycle of compromised parenthood. Writer Emma Dennis- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sometimes, record labels don’t like what those on their roster have recorded. Such was the case with BMG Sweden and Robin Carlsson who, as Robyn, had made three albums with varying success and a raft of home-country hit singles for the label from the mid-Nineties to 2002.She decided that hers would be the reins guiding what would became her fourth album. Up to this point, the credits of her dance-pop records were littered with the names of seasoned producers. Safe hands. Odd tracks had, early on, entered the US charts but that did not translate to a sustained international breakthrough. When Read more ...