Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
Although overwhelmingly remembered now as a novelist, Somerset Maugham was best known during his lifetime as a playwright. “England’s Dramatist”, as the newspapers christened him, produced more than 20 plays spanning the length of his career, outdoing contemporaries Shaw and Rattigan for popular and critical success. But his was not an enduring fame, and with his work now strikingly absent from the theatrical repertoire, any revival must inevitably face the suspicious question: why?Romping its way through questions of “love, beauty and the economic situation” (with a few theatrical detours to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Art Ensemble of Chicago: A Jackson in Your House/Message to Our Folks/Reese and the Smooth OnesA New Orleans brass band plays a death march. What sounds like a saucepan is tapped steadily. The music suddenly dives into swing. A bicycle horn parps. A group of muttering voices are agitated. Reed instruments parp like angry parrots. Someone grunts and hollers. A trumpet signals a fanfare. Bells tinkle. Sonny Rollins appears to wander in and out. So does Ornette Coleman. The whole is arrhythmic, but bedded by percussion. Melodies come and go in the same piece, but are never repeated.The Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
A severed toe, a shotgun, copious blood, vomit and snot, and a live snake. Sprinkle them liberally with Shake’n’Vac masquerading as cocaine, douse in booze, piss and petrol, set the whole lot alight and you have something of the loud, lurid volatility of this drama by the Scots writer Simon Donald.First seen at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, it transferred to the Donmar Warehouse in 1993 in a production by Matthew Warchus, garnering its author that year’s Evening Standard award for Most Promising Playwright. A forerunner of what came to be known as the In-Yer-Face wave of drama Read more ...
David Nice
Brave old world, that has so much unheard music in it. Not exactly the words of Shakespeare’s Miranda, I know, but that’s how I feel having experienced great things in the concert hall for the first time recently: Tippett’s Second Symphony from Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Symphony Orchestra last night, and earlier in the week more self-styled “musical toys” from overnight sensation as Newcomer of the Year at the BBC Music Magazine 2013 Awards Mei Yi Foo: a gallimaufry of piano miniatures by Bartók, Benjamin, Fujikura, Lachenmann and Unsuk Chin.You’ll note no inclusion there for the London Read more ...
Russ Coffey
If one thing unites James and last night's support act, Echo & the Bunnymen, it’s that they both tend to be underrated. James’s big college rock songs can overshadow the true splendour of their weird, poetic and off-kilter worldview. The Bunnymen’s problem is that, outside their fanbase, too many simply know them for their song “The Killing Moon”, which featured in the film Donnie Darko. Last night, they didn't seem to want to do much to change that.It was only partly their fault. They came on in front of a half-empty Academy with an atmosphere more soundcheck than gig. The way they'd lit Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A new drama series at 9pm on a Friday? How often does that happen, eh? Friday is supposed to be reserved for quiz shows, comedies and BBC Four documentaries about disco music.Whether it should have happened is, for the time being, a moot point. After this first of three episodes (adapted by Kate Brooke from Dorothy Koomson's novel) we're left in that familiar position of having a crime, a victim, and some carefully-manufactured ambiguity about the perpetrator, or perpetratrors. We also have a double time frame, the present day and 1995, which can hardly help but bring on flashbacks to the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
As a self-taught chemist, innovative industrialist, a businessman who exploited and developed new means of distribution and marketing, an anti-slavery campaigner and a man dealing with his own disability, the Staffordshire potter Josiah Wedgwood was an important 18th-century figure, a pioneer whose achievements still resonate. But a genius?The historian, biographer and author AN Wilson has no doubt about this. Presenting this perambulation through Wedgwood’s life and vessels, Wilson began in Burslem – “a muddy village in the middle of nowhere” – and climaxed in the royal palaces of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Cantatas for Ascension Day The Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists/John Eliot Gardiner (SDG)The final volume in John Eliot Gardiner’s mammoth Bach Cantata sequence is one of the very best. Gardiner’s recent BBC2 documentary placed rightful emphasis on Bach’s humanity, his normality. The devout will find plenty of weighty religiosity in the four cantatas assembled here, but they’re also full of zest and vigour. Sample the opening chorus of Gott fähret auf mit Jauschen and smile at Bach’s unerring ability to compose music which exactly reflects the texts he sets. “God is gone Read more ...
fisun.guner
Saloua Raouda Choucair began her career as a painter, initially studying under Lebanon’s two leading landscape artists, Mustafa Farroukh and Omar Onsi. In the late 1940s, she trained in the studio of Fernande Léger while studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Her exposure to art in her native Beirut would have given no hint of the vibrant modernism she would embrace, albeit several decades after Europe had been all aflush with the new. We see its late Middle-Eastern blossoming in the first room of this beautifully curated retrospective, which is, in fact, a world-premier for this 97- Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Is it death that makes us go back to the ballet? The one artform where it is so glorified, so exquisitely reimagined as an experience of regret, hope, ecstasy or bleakest resignation that we will go to drink it in again and again, to preview our own? Maybe that’s it. Opera is about living in the threat of death (all those tubercular arias and declarations from the heart of bonfires). Theatre is all about living, imperfectly. But in ballet, life itself is only a holding position - it exists in a realm that looks forward, erotically and existentially, to death, it forecasts the run-up to death Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The new South Bank Show has glided into its second season with a seemingly effortless profile of multi-hyphenate Tim Minchin. In case we’ve forgotten what exactly we admire him for these days – so varied has been his decade-long career been, through satire, rock, musical comedy, stage performance, to co-creator of the RSC transfer-spectacular Matilda that's now storming Broadway – then this was a good reminder.Self-deprecation may be one of his fortes (not that he doesn’t excel at deprecating others), but Minchin proved a thoughtful guide to his achievements to date, in that beguilingly Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Promised Land is much better than its poster suggests. Winning Special Mention at its premiere at this year's Berlinale, this message movie takes on some extremely sensitive topics with a gentle determination and a relatively unblinking eye: the demise of the independent farmer, waning economics and the controversial concept of fracking – drilling deep into shale to inject high pressure fluid to free natural gas within the rock – that slots very nicely into desperate rural areas that are flailing (and failing) to survive.For anyone who feels even mildly passionate about the environment, or Read more ...