Reviews
Graham Fuller
A visually dazzling, fiercely acted psychological drama with a manic comic edge, Hoard channels an 18-year-old South Londoner’s quest to lay the ghost – or reclaim the spirit – of her long dead mentally ill mother through her sexual pursuit of the 30-ish man she’s infatuated with. If the premise sounds like a recipe for a clichéd coming-of-age story, the film’s taboo imagery – magical but malodorous refuse, food muckily splattered on flesh during bouts of prolonged foreplay – imparts Freudian meanings to Luna Carmoon’s debut as writer-director. Originating in a story Carmoon wrote Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
It’s hard to imagine that The Arches – a string of stylish glass-fronted units in prime city centre location, housing boutique bars, high-end eateries and stylish salons – were once a bunch of old storage units which were opened up a decade ago by a volunteer-run, grassroots arts festival calling itself Hidden Door.Over the past 10 years Hidden Door has revitalised myriad disused spaces across the city including office blocks, a derelict cinema, a sealed-up theatre and an old gas works. So when the venue for their 10th birthday party was revealed as a car park in an upmarket shopping centre Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Programme notes for Mahler’s monumental symphonies will often blithely chat about the works’ epic struggle between life and death, creation and destruction, joy and dread. In a comfy hall with a slick orchestra and a polished maestro, all of that can feel abstract and remote. Not last night at the Barbican. In 2021, Michael Tilson Thomas – conductor laureate of the London Symphony Orchestra – was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain tumour. Recent outings for the San Francisco Symphony have been greeted almost as farewell performances. Yet, despite his obvious frailty Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
If there’s a feeling of déjà vu, it isn’t detectable. Conchúr White played St Pancras Old Church in April 2016 with County Armagh’s Silences, the band he fronted. This evening, a mention of having been here before is absent. Nothing in the body language suggests any familiarity with where he’s playing.Perhaps paying no heed to history is understandable. Conchúr – pronounced Conor – White is in London following the January release of Swirling Violets, the follow-up album to his 2021 self-issued solo debut. He, presumably, views where he is now as a clean break with a past which doesn’t need Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director Cesar Diaz’s debut feature film was made on a modest budget and confines its running time to a crisp 78 minutes, but its impact is like being hit over the head with a sandbag. We frequently hear the word “genocide” being bandied about, but Our Mothers revisits a monstrous specimen of it which most of the world has forgotten about.It occurred during the 1980s, as the civil war in Guatemala ground remorselessly on and the indigenous Mayan people were subjected to systematic extermination. Their villages were destroyed, more than 200,000 people were “disappeared”, and 1.5 million Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Rhod Gilbert is disarmingly honest about his thought process when he received his diagnosis of head and neck cancer in 2022. Following quickly from his fears about his possible imminent death, another thought flashed through his mind: “I can get a show out of this.” And it is that trademark cheeky humour that runs through his latest show, Rhod Gilbert and the Giant Grapefruit, which begins with an affirmative “I'm alive!”Some will know the Welshman's cancer story through the moving documentary A Pain in the Neck which aired on Channel 4 last year. For the uninitiated he starts here by riffing Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
By midway, things are cooking. “Can U Dig It?”, a post-modern list-song from another age (Ok, 1989), boasts a whopping guitar riff. Keys-player Adam Mole, his ushanka cap’s ear-covers flapping, leaps onto his seat, waves his synth aloft. Frontmen Graham Crabb and Mary Byker fly up’n’down the stage-front, launching airwards for chest-bumps, staccato-firing rapped lyrics about the Furry Freak Brothers, Renegade Soundwave, Bruce Lee, DJ Spinderella and, of course, how writer-magician Alan Moore “knows the score”. At the end Crabb segues briefly into an obscure sliver of Boys Own Bocca Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Gesualdo was, in the words of New Yorker critic Alex Ross – “irrefutably badass”, a double murderer, sado-masochist and black magic enthusiast who also found time to write music that was – according to some – centuries ahead of its time. He was the El Greco of sound, a rebel against perfectly balanced Renaissance proportions, who went on to influence cultural figures ranging from Stravinsky to Werner Herzog.In Renaissance Moderns, performed by Britten Sinfonia and The Marian Consort, the 16th century Neapolitan composer was the dark beating heart of a programme that ranged from the 15th Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The name, Caron and Michelle Maso explained to Los Angeles radio DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, was a literal description. “We’re both like five feet. We’re all grown up, but we’re still little.”Little Girls, the band the Maso sisters formed and fronted was active in Los Angeles over 1980 to 1985. On vinyl, though, the evidence for their existence was limited. In 1981, they contributed a track to the compilation album Rodney On The ROQ Volume 2 – named after Bingenheimer and KROQ, the radio station he worked for. Two years on, there was the six-track, 12-inch EP Thank Heaven! Finally, in 1985, a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Planet of the Apes is the most artfully replenished franchise, from the original series’ elegant time-travel loop to the reboot’s rich, deepening milieu. Director Wes Ball again offers serious sf, just as much as Dune, considering the consequences of another species’ dominance, and outraged humanity’s resistance.We are unspecified centuries after Matt Reeves’ War for the Planet of the Apes (2017), with Caesar’s reign now a font of vaguely remembered ape faith. Human civilisation – and its weaponry – has fallen away, leaving a green world, with mysterious skyscraper skylines sheathed in Read more ...
Jane Edwardes
Who is Sappho? What is she? Not much is known about the influential Greek poet who was born some 2500 years ago. Her poetry was celebrated during her lifetime, but very little has survived. Those fragments that do exist speak of love, passion and longing. Her name lives on, not just because of her poetry, but because both she and Lesbos, the island she lived on, have given their name to the love of one woman for another. And so Wendy Beckett’s glitzy, short comedy celebrates the life of the poet through the prism of gay love today.Although most of the cast are dressed in Greek tunics of the Read more ...
David Nice
No soloist gets to perform Shostakovich’s colossal First Violin Concerto without mastery of its fearsome technical demands. But not all violinists have the imagination to colour and inflect the Hamlet-like monologue of its withdrawn first movement, or the madness of a 20th century Lear in its poleaxing cadenza, a movement in itself. From her first, deeply eloquent phrases, Karen Gomyo told us that she was one of the few who could.It’s vital not to have one violin sound, however impressive, for the kaleidoscope of sadness, rage, despair and manic exultation Shostakovich gifted to the great Read more ...