Reviews
fisun.guner
You might phrase the question rhetorically: “just what do artists do all day?” Or you might ask it in the spirit of genuine enquiry: after all, to many, the artist is an exotic creature whose mystery is still to be fully penetrated. Either way, it’s pretty clear that though it may not be “a proper job”, artworks don’t make themselves. The title was enticing, but, in fact, What Do Artists Do All Day? turned out to be, well, just another low-key television profile of an artist: the relatively little-known Royal Academician Norman Ackroyd. But it’s good the title didn’t suggest any of Read more ...
howard.male
How much more of a melancholy experience walking round this exhibition would have been if its subject hadn’t just sprung a new album on us that’s so suffused with energy and life. It’s meant that the exhibition's title - David Bowie Is – feels like a genuine statement of fact rather than just wishful thinking, at least in the literal sense. However, metaphorically speaking, the title would have still held since Bowie's influence as a multifaceted creation is still everywhere in our culture. There is much – in fact almost too much – to enjoy in this show. But let’s get a couple of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When the NASA space shuttle Challenger fell out of the Florida sky on the morning of 28 January 1986 after 73 seconds, killing all seven astronauts, the Nobel-winning theoretical physicist Richard Feynman was the only independent scientist appointed to the investigating panel. He duly made a nuisance of himself, asking awkward questions, ignoring protocols, disobeying instructions and generally making damn sure the appliance of science would dig up the truth protected by vested interests. Feynman has been portrayed onstage by Alan Alda, and on the radio by Alfred Molina, but when you want Read more ...
judith.flanders
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from a troubled dream, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.” In one of the most famous opening lines in literature, Franz Kafka gives birth to a startling hallucinogenic premise. And Arthur Pita’s very clever dance drama produces something of a similar jolt in its precision and strangeness.Simon Daw’s sparely elegant set presents the two halves of the Samsa household – on one side Gregor’s clinical white bedroom, looking like the “before” picture in a German Expressionist film of an insane asylum; on the other, the Samsas’ kitchen Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Zipangu. What a name for a piece of music. Such a strange and suggestive collection of vowels and consonants. Such a musical string of sounds. A fascinating name. The name, in fact, the programme told me, for Japan during the time of Marco Polo. The life of the composer of the work, Claude Vivier, is fascinating, too, in a grisly way. While completing an opera about a young man who stabs a stranger to death, Vivier was murdered in his Paris flat by a rent boy. Incredible story, incredible-sounding work; you can see why programmers are increasingly attracted to Vivier. I just wish I enjoyed Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This story is mostly familiar from Alfred Hitchchock's 1938 movie, starring Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood. Among the things it's best remembered for are the comic double act of Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, playing the cricket-obsessed Charters and Caldicott trying to get home to England from somewhere in pre-war Europe to watch a Test match, and Dame May Whitty as the titular missing person, Miss Froy.This new BBC version, dramatised by Fiona Seres, lacked fanatical cricket supporters, though it was more faithful to Ethel Lina White's original novel, The Wheel Spins, which didn't Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In Post Tenebras Lux (light after darkness, in Latin) Mexican writer-director Carlos Reygadas casts a spell which transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. The human condition is eye-poppingly explored in this ambitious, sometimes puzzling work of visual poetry, buoyed by the innocence of children and mired in the contrasting anxieties of their parents. Whether it's sexual neurosis, the natural world, or kids at play it's all too beautiful. Confounding, intoxicating and hugely rewarding, Post Tenebras Lux won Reygadas Best Director at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This is cinema as Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
I must confess that I do not understand the zombie as pop culture phenomenon. Why otherwise sensible people would dress up as shuffling, mindless automatons interested only in the consumption of human brains for an annual “zombie walk”, or why somebody would rewrite Jane Austen to give the undead a co-billing is beyond me. As far as the former is concerned, certainly, it seems as if the zombie meme is a satire that has eaten itself.There are also very limited ways that the zombie narrative can play out - we’ll see how Brad Pitt handles it in the big screen adaptation of World War Z when it Read more ...
David Nice
Like Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges and Puccini’s Turandot, Wagner’s first opera – The Fairies in English – has its roots in a “theatrical fable” by the 18th century Venetian playwright Carlo Gozzi. There the resemblances end. Only Prokofiev follows Gozzi’s playful mix of commedia dell’arte and fairy-tale characters. The 20-year-old Wagner has one moment of fun – cut in this performance – but a mere handful of musical gestures and plot devices prophesying greatness to come rises to the surface in this gloopy mess. You’ve got to admire the ambitious scope of it, but inspiration is Read more ...
Laura Silverman
Staged in 1931, The Man Who Pays the Piper appealed to women who had gone to work (and become the master of the house) while men were fighting in the First World War, but were subjugated once they returned. The protagonist, Daryll, starts work during this time and gets hooked on the money, the independence and the buzz of her job at a fashion house. She enjoys being able to keep her siblings and kindly but inept mother in luxury. But when her father is killed, she realises she could be funding her family indefinitely. This is not what she wants.The strength of GB Stern's rarely seen play lies Read more ...
David Nice
“I do not believe in miracles,” scoffs Herodias in Oscar Wilde’s - and Richard Strauss’s - Salome. “I have seen too many.” I know how she feels. So it was a bit of a shock to find the highest-kicking of today’s composers, John Adams, and his inseparable genius director Peter Sellars, taking the raising of Lazarus seriously in the first part of their latest opera-oratorio (my term, not theirs, and also applicable to El Niño, Adams’s millennial take on Christ’s birth and its concomitant hazards).What that meant in practice, for me at any rate, was to sit through Act One compelled by every Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bernard Herrmann: Vertigo and Music From the Films of Alfred HitchcockGreat film soundtrack music can have a tough time being accepted as thus. There’s the test of time: does the music continue resonating? Is the music a sympathetic foil for the visuals? Can it live away from the screen and still create its atmosphere? The questions are endless, but the music of Bernard Herrmann will always pass any test. With Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo declared the greatest film ever in last year’s Sight and Sound poll, Herrmann’s music for it was, by association, also cast as an all-time great. Previously, Read more ...