Reviews
Jasper Rees
Where will it end? Inspector Morse keeled over all the way back in the year 2000. Then the faintly unimaginable happened. Morse’s plodding sidekick Lewis got a promotion and started solving Oxford’s apparently inexhaustible supply of murders himself. When Lewis retired this January, the logical choice would have been to hand the baton on his lanky junior. Hathaway sounds like a series, doesn't it? But no, ITV have long been hatching other plans for the brand that keeps on printing money.A year ago we were spirited back in time to look in on the junior Morse as he made his first Read more ...
garth.cartwright
Remember the Brass Band Battle of a couple years ago? The one that pitted Romania’s Fanfare Ciocarlia vs Serbia’s Boban & Marko Markovic Orkestar on CD and stage? The concert at London’s Koko was great fun, less a "battle" and more a good humoured showcase for two great Gypsy brass bands to tear it up.Balkan Brass Battle was such a success it toured for two years. Then Boban pulled his Orkestar out. He has now broadened the brass battle by lining up against Mexico’s Banda Estrellas de Sinaloa de German Lizarraga. Mexico and the Balkans share a popular brass band tradition that stretches Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The 1988 uprising in the French colony of New Caledonia, in the Western Pacific, is apparently unknown to most French people, let alone we rosbifs, but director Mathieu Kassovitz has used the episode as a scalpel with which to probe issues of colonialism, race and political cynicism. It's something of a return to issues Kassovitz explored in La Haine (1995), following his excursions into the supernatural and sci-fi with Gothika and Babylon AD.The setup is pretty simple. A group of Kanak separatists launches a surprise attack on a gendarmerie on the island of Ouvéa, killing four French Read more ...
Matthew Paluch
In String of Rites, Sadler’s Wells has commissioned three works as a tribute to Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1913 Le sacre du printemps. It opened with the Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre’s double bill, The Rite of Spring and Petrushka. Both scores are by Igor Stravinsky, created for the original choreography by Nijinsky and Michel Fokine respectively. Michael Keegan-Dolan’s Rite is dark, both visually and in emotion, and stems from the same concept as Nijinsky’s - pack mentality and what fate this can project onto the "chosen one". But Dolan’s look is visually different. The 10 dancers are Read more ...
mark.kidel
In spite of a text that feels at times like Shakespeare by numbers, Andrew Hilton’s tightly-knit company has once again pulled off an evening of captivating theatre. As in other productions from Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory, the casting is pitch-perfect and the acting first class, down to the star performance of a hilariously mournful black dog.Two Gentlemen of Verona is an early piece, and although there are plenty of the touches of the genius that will illuminate the bard’s greatest plays, this tale of love, friendship, inconstancy and betrayal is almost too smoothly constructed. The Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sandie Shaw: Sandie/Me/Love Me Please Love MeThe former Sandra Goodrich probably would have emerged in the Sixties as an embodiment of the era. She could have been a model, actress or a TV presenter. But it was music that found her, and it suited her a treat. The reissue of her first three albums – each supplemented by the relevant singles and B-sides – is a powerful reminder of her potency. When The Smiths brought her on board for “Hand in Glove”, it further stressed her pivotal role in British culture.Her naturalness obscured the fact that she was a great singer. Ease of delivery did Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Sunken Garden is described officially as a “film opera”. Two words. Emphatically unhyphenated. No attempt made to neologise or fashion some third-way genre terminology. It’s not a symbol that bodes well for mutually-informed, sensitive interdisciplinary thinking, but in Michael Van der Aa and David Mitchell’s work English National Opera have come one tiny, shuffling step closer to realising that elusive multimedia idée fixe that has so preoccupied the company under John Berry.First we had the atrocity that was Mike Figgis’s Lucrezia Borgia (soft-core rompings on screen and wooden barkings on Read more ...
David Nice
Or, The Lord and Lady Macbeth of the Seizième, as imagined by a bourgeois teenager who fancies himself to be Bougrelas, heir to the Polish throne. That's one way of looking at the concept so dazzlingly carried through by Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod with the French wing of their Cheek by Jowl Company. It’s a chaotic tale told by a big kid, as the 23 year old Alfred Jarry still was when he part-engineered a scandal for the 1896 Paris premiere of Ubu Roi, a platform at last for the savage, potty-mouthed and pot-bellied anti-hero Jarry had dreamed up years earlier in revenge against a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The family can be a knot of hatred as well as a cradle of love. Rather late in this new play by Tanya Ronder comes a scene in which a separated husband and wife try to untangle this knot, and end up by tightening it. And this takes place around a table, which is silent witness to this epic tale which spans more than a century, and uses nine actors to create some 23 participants over six generations.By a happy coincidence, this story of a wooden table takes place in a new wooden theatre which the National Theatre has built in its riverside front yard (pictured below, © Philip Vile) as a Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Does Caroline Aherne hate women? Surely not, but given that there have been plenty of painfully humourless so-called comedies over the years with this heavy a reliance on recurring jokes about older women’s breasts you could be forgiven for hoping that one of the country’s most high-profile comediennes might use her position to produce something a little less puerile than The Security Men.Aherne and Pope's foursome at least seem to be having funThe flimsy hour-long programme was co-written with Jeff Pope, who worked with Aherne on 2009‘s The Fattest Man in Britain. The Security Men reused a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Rachmaninov: Piano Concertos 1-4, Paganini Rhapsody Valentina Lisitsa, London Symphony Orchestra/Michael Francis (Decca)Read the press notes before listening to this double CD and you’d be forgiven for feeling some trepidation; Valentina Lisitsa is a Ukrainian pianist who was catapulted to megastardom via the medium of, er, YouTube. Then you find out that time constraints prevented Lisitsa from meeting conductor Michael Francis before the sessions. He had to make do with emailled video clips. So it’s a delight to report that much, though not all, of the music making captured here is Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Director Joseph Kosinski's second film feels dispiritingly like his first, the bastion of excitement and originality that is TRON: Legacy. That film was an empty shell which at least managed not to be catastrophically irritating. Oblivion stars Tom Cruise, proving yet again that his ego is in inverse proportion to his physical stature. He plays "one of our best" in a soulless film which has the gall to place tangible cultural pursuits on a pedestal whilst clonking you round the head with sterile CGI.The year is 2077 and, yes, Tom Cruise is still an action-man. His Jack Harper bounds about Read more ...