Reviews
bruce.dessau
It is probably not unreasonable to argue that all of the original Monty Python's Flying Circus team – including lovely Michael Palin – were, and are, a complex bunch. But none were as complex as the late Graham Chapman. Gay, alcoholic and partial to smoking a pipe and playing authority figures such as army officers, there is more than enough meat there for a colourful film about his life.In keeping with Chapman's unorthodox career, A Liar's Autobiography, which has been doing the festival rounds since last year, is a pretty unorthodox film. Directors Ben Timlett, Jeff Simpson and Bill "son of Read more ...
David Nice
How’s a good time girl to bare her beautiful soul when a director seems bent on cutting her down to puppet size? It doesn't bother me that Peter Konwitschny shears Verdi’s already concise score by about 20 minutes to shoehorn it into a one-act drama; what goes is either inessential or among the usual casualties of standard Traviatas. The spare and economical idea of layered curtains to symbolise the characters' constriction or emancipation is good in principle, too. But so impassioned is American soprano Corinne Winters’s Violetta that to rob her of any meaningful relationships with the man Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
After last week's spectacularly unconvincing foray into saving Africa (usually the last refuge of a doomed statesperson), Birgitte Nyborg returned to the centre of Denmark's political life for the concluding pair of episodes in series two. Back amid themes of political infighting, media skulduggery and personal relationships under pressure, Borgen had, amid sighs of relief, come home to where it belonged.Immediately, crisis loomed. Birgitte (Sidse Babett Knudsen) had to bite the bullet and accept that her anxiety-stricken daughter Laura (Freja Riemann) needed more than phone calls and a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Marcos Valle: Marcos Valle/Garra/Vento Sul/Previsão do TempoIn 1968, having already done time in Sérgio Mendes & Brazil 66, Marcos Valle was selling bossa nova and samba to America, appearing on The Andy Williams Show in a blazer and roll neck. By the year’s end he was back in Brazil, which at the time was ruled by a fully-fledged dictatorship. Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil would go into exile but Valle wilfully chose the opposite path. His music and appearance changed: the former moving away from popular Brazilian styles and incorporating outside influences; the latter becoming Read more ...
carole.woddis
The walls of the staircase to the Finborough Theatre off the Earls Court Road are lined with framed awards. Downstairs for the umpteenth time, the café/restaurant has gone bust. But no other London fringe theatre has achieved such stellar success as this tiny pub theatre under the helm of its restless, irrepressible artistic director Neil McPherson, who has made a cottage industry out of discovering forgotten gems.This time, in cohorts with Tricia Thorns’s excellent Two’s Company, they’ve come up with an absolute charmer, John Van Druten’s London Wall. Van Druten’s claim to fame rests mainly Read more ...
philip radcliffe
I’ve seen some double acts in my time, such as the Oistrakhs and the Torteliers, but none quite like that of Storgårds and Hardenberger. Best friends, they took it in turns to conduct the BBC Philharmonic and to take over the soloist's spot. First one mounted the rostrum, while the other gave us a UK premiere as soloist. Then they switched roles, producing a second UK premiere.John Storgårds, the BBC Philharmonic’s Principal Guest Conductor as well as being Chief Conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic back home, is also a virtuoso violinist, his first calling. Håkan Hardenberger we know as Read more ...
joe.muggs
Feast aims high. Very, very high. Steered by experienced and much-lauded director Rufus Norris, five playwrights and one choreographer seek to make a fusion of physical theatre, dance, onstage music, straight drama, abstract poetic dialogue, projected animation and knockabout comedy to tell no less a story than 350 years of the history of the Yoruba people of west Africa. It spans four continents through recurring manifestations of a group of their “Orishas”, or gods, a series of meals, and an ongoing quest for eggs. Yeah, that old chestnut. It has the potential to be a glorious creation, one Read more ...
graham.rickson
John Cage 100 Various artists (Wergo)Wergo’s handsomely produced box set was assembled for last year’s John Cage centenary. Fans will lap it up, and one hopes that curious newcomers will take the plunge and open their ears to this extraordinary, approachable music. Joshua Pierce’s 1970s album of the Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano still sounds definitive. Cage’s Table of Preparations is included in the booklet, listing in alarming detail the position, size and orientation of every bolt, washer and screw inserted in Pierce’s piano. Inevitably, you start to wonder if the bell- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We know Sylvester Stallone didn't do this movie for the money, since he's surfing the career revival wrought by the astounding success of The Expendables. Perhaps he wanted to work with Walter Hill, here directing his first movie in over a decade. Perhaps Sly just prefers working to loafing around the pool in between bouts of weight-lifting.Derived from a graphic novel by French author Alexis Nolent, Bullet to the Head is a strange beast, cynically and relentlessly violent but leavened with some incongruously smart wisecracks. It has a decent cast, but they're offered next to nothing in the Read more ...
Simon Munk
They were there at the beginning of video games, now it seems adventure games are back. After all, with so many mainstream releases reducible to running down a corridor shooting, it's hardly surprising there's an audience for a more interactive alternative.The Cave is a side-scrolling adventure game from two maestros of the point-and-click Lucas classics of the Nineties. Ron "Monkey Island" Gilbert and Tim "Grim Fandango" Schafer. Their names together on a bill mean so much to fans of the genre that their next title, codenamed Double Fine Adventure, has been Kickstarted to the record-breaking Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
This production of Old Times is a big deal. It’s the first of Harold Pinter’s plays to be performed in the theatre renamed after him; it marks the reunion of director Ian Rickson and Kristin Scott Thomas, after their exhilarating Betrayal; and it feels like a seminal reading, involving a casting conceit that makes a rich work even richer, even more mesmerising.First produced in 1971, like Betrayal this is regarded as one of the playwright’s “memory plays”. But both could just as easily be called “marriage plays”, since Betrayal essays the infidelity that helps to end a marriage, Old Times the Read more ...
Steven Gambardella
Bruce Nauman is a great synthesizer of art forms, melding the language games of conceptual art with the physicality of post-minimalist sculpture and performance art. Where the minimalists duplicated the serial and repetitive industrial world around them, Nauman’s use of repetition and order have a linguistic basis. Inculcation, jokes, paradoxes and puns form the logic of much of Nauman’s work and these games grew out of his choreographed minimalist performances. Given this trajectory, the psychoanalytical angle taken in this exhibtion feels grafted on.Filling one of Hauser & Wirth’s huge Read more ...