Reviews
David Benedict
Faced with an unfamiliar play, it’s usually hard to spot exactly where the writer stopped and the director started. Not here. This is one of those occasions where a director’s voice is considerably and almost constantly louder than the playwright’s. You might think you’re seeing Rodney Ackland’s Before The Party but what you’re getting is Matthew Dunster’s assault upon it.Ackland’s 1949 adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s short story is a subtle evisceration of upper-middle-class manners. Living in post-war comfort, the highly respectable Skinner family are dressing for a local garden Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is an arresting moment towards the start of In the House when a character looks the camera – and by extension, the audience - directly in the eye. A warm trusting face and a slight squint hint at vulnerability (see clip below). His name is Rafa, and he is the best friend of Claude, who regularly visits Rafa's house after school to help him with his maths. But we soon learn that Claude’s furtive intention is to infiltrate an ideal suburban home as part of an observational writing assignment.Among the piles of vacuous contributions from his classmates, Claude’s account of what he did on Read more ...
Simon Munk
We're at a moment of change in games – new consoles, new ideas, new ways of playing. And what better game to usher out one era and in a new one than BioShock Infinite?This first-person shooter is still wedded to the core mechanics of traditional big-budget console gaming, but layered on top of a core of classic run-and-gun is a series of innovations in terms of character, script, gameplay and scope of theme that point to exciting potential future directions for the next generation of games.The result is both hugely satisfying to play from a hind-brain, hand-eye coordination point-of-view, but Read more ...
Louise Gray
It’s not often that a performance’s technological properties leaves you simply slack-jawed. Robert Wilson’s very long Swedish-language version of Strindberg’s A Dream Play did – at the same venue, though this time in 2001 – when the surtitle machines broke down (the audience gave an audible gasp of horror and then settled to its collective fate), but that was for altogether different reasons. Compared to what Ryoji Ikeda and his team are capable of, even the beautiful crispness of Kraftwerk’s stage shows fade into the realm of the bland.In superposition, the Japanese installation artist – now Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais have decamped from their usual perch next to the House of Lords to cosy up to the work of Henry Moore. They can be found at Moore’s home and studio at Perry Green in Hertfordshire, in a tellingly succinct anthology of the towering giants of modern European sculpture. At first glance Rodin’s extraordinary evocations of energy and sensuality, literally embodied in the models he studied so intensively, and Moore’s semi-abstracted helmet heads and upright motives, don’t have much in common. But the compare-and-contrast thrust of this wide-ranging compilation, also Read more ...
Veronica Lee
How do we know Jesus Christ was a Jew? He was still living with his mum at 33 and she thought he was God Almighty. Are you offended? I sincerely hope not and profuse apologies if you are, but that was the first religious joke I remember from my Catholic childhood, and which managed to take a swipe at two religions for the price of one.I also remember - and on my occasional forays into church still do - hearing priests crack jokes about God and the Pope from the pulpit. Maybe it's a Catholic thing, because I have never heard a left-footer make the complaint that Ann Widdecombe - former Read more ...
aleks.sierz
“My honest instinct,” says Jim, the hero of Bruce Norris’s The Low Road, “is one of resentment.” And while this contemporary fable of industrious bees, aka capitalist speculators, is set in the past, and is full of good jokes, it is also laced with emotions that are a tougher sell. Here a humorous tale of a life of entrepreneurship comes hand-in-hand with some satire that is bitter as well as being funny.Beginning, like so many 18th-century English novels, with the finding of a foundling child, the play starts with a snapshot of Massachusetts in 1759. The parentless baby (sired by one G Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In his 1970 television documentary for Granada, I Was a Soldier, British filmmaker Michael Grigsby was one of the first to look into the experience of US soldiers returning home from Vietnam. “Vietnam syndrome” may have been a few years away from any formal diagnosis, but Grigsby caught the mood of three young Texans – David, Dennis and Lamar – back from the conflict and struggling to re-engage with a society that has become alien to them.Grigsby returned to the town of Brady and its Texas environs 40 years later, and the result is his new film We Went to War (co-directed with Rebeka Read more ...
judith.flanders
When the Bolshoi’s wunderkinder, Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev, suddenly left the company two years ago, the dance world played endless guessing-games as to where they would end up. It was like Claude Rains in Casablanca: round up the usual suspects. The last company anyone expected, however, was the Mikhailovsky, St Petersburg’s junior company to its senior world-class sister, the Mariinsky.What drew them? Well, the company has an extraordinary Soviet heritage, playing host to some of the great names of 1930s experimental dance. It probably helps, too, that it is now funded by an Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
As the second series of Zooey Deschanel-starring US sitcom New Girl gets underway on E4, it’s an interesting exercise to revisit first impressions. I note that when the pilot originally aired, theartsdesk was not as harsh as I was on a show which, over the course of its first year, quickly became one of my favourites. In her remarkably prescient conclusion, our Veronica Lee suggested that by toning down the central character’s kookiness and the stereotypes the show made of the rest of the characters, New Girl could turn out to be great.The strength of the show is in its ensemble castIn the Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
It begins with two gunshots. Lee Marvin is a guy who just wants his $93,000. "I want my money" is the mission statement for Point Blank, a film that is as timelessly entertaining as it is influential. But putting it that way doesn’t grab the sensation of watching a film that is so exciting you may forget to breathe for all 92 minutes of it.Beginning as a film editor and then moving up through TV, Boorman, who also made Deliverance, Excalibur and Hope and Glory, wrote in his 2003 memoir Adventures of a Suburban Boy about the “essential mysteriousness of movies” - and Point Blank is an Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
What becomes of children “born out of sadness and loneliness”, exiled from Wonderland or Neverland, longing for remembered golden afternoons, but forced to confront the chilly twilight of adulthood? This new play by John Logan brings Alice Liddell and Peter Llewelyn Davies – the real-life inspirations for Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and JM Barrie’s Peter Pan – face to face, not just which each other, but with their creators and their fictional selves. Like the repressed, incomplete men who created them, they hopelessly pursue happiness, along topiary-lined avenues, across mermaids’ lagoons Read more ...