Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
“You don’t put yourself into what you write, you find yourself there.” It’s a maxim that has guided a writing career that, insect-like, has made itself at home among the lived detritus of autobiography and memoir. In Alan Bennett’s 2001 Hymn and his latest short-play Cocktail Sticks the author sets out in search of himself once more, finding on his quest not only his own history but that of a generation and an age at an ever-increasing remove from our own. It could be cosy, it could easily be glib, but for the most part it’s just funny, and terribly, terribly poignant.To anyone familiar with Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In the early years of the talkies, they sure did a lot of talking, and no actor mastered the tricky art of gabbling on screen quite like the young James Stewart. The Shop Around the Corner (1940) was a perfect vehicle for the versatile but somehow always gawky all-American everyman who had starred most recently as Frank Capra’s leading man in You Can’t Take It With You (1938) and Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939).And it's all talk here. Ernst Lubitsch took a frothy 1937 stage play by Hungarian-born naturalised American Miklós László, known in English as Parfumerie, and turned it into a Read more ...
David Nice
Much more regularly than the seven years it takes the Flying Dutchman's demon ship to reach dry land, the Zurich Opera steamer moors at the Southbank Centre. None of its more recent concert performances up to now has branded itself on the memory as much as its 2003 visit, when chorus and soloists stunned in Wagner's Tannhäuser. This one will, though: and the wonder of it is that Bryn Terfel's surely unsurpassable Dutchman, condemned to the seas for all eternity unless saved by the faithful-until-death love of a good woman, had other singers to match him.In the first act, the great Wagnerian Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I hope it isn't giving too much away for iPlayer catcher-uppers to say that in the end Sarah Lund never did get that undemanding desk job. Instead, the third outing for this ferociously gripping Danish series dragged us screaming and biting our nails right down to the wire, and managed to reach a conclusion simultaneously shocking and saddening yet, in a way, satisfying too.From the start, the third series has been drenched in the anguish of loss and the pain of separation. The running theme has been the hunt for the kidnapped girl Emilie Zeuthen and the man who took her, but, apart from the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
All roads start from Rome, and so it proves in this challenging exhibition put together from the holdings of the Royal Academy’s art collection, archives and library. It features 17th-century Italian paintings – some of the grandest by the French artists who settled in Rome, and took inspiration from the surrounding campagna – brought back to Britain by the Grand Tourists who, in the midst of their various adventures, amassed substantial art for their stately homes.The images by the likes of the two Poussins (Nicolas, and his brother-in-law Gaspard Dughet, so often confused), Claude Lorrain Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There are oodles of comedy DVDs released for the Christmas market - here's a selection of the best.Dara Ó BríainCraic DealerIn more than a decade of watching him work, I've yet to see the hugely likeable Irish comic doing anything less than a very well put-together and gag-filled show, and this is no exception. Filmed at the Edinburgh Playhouse, it shows him at the top of his form and displays one of his great strengths - interacting with the audience and creating great comedy on the spot from it. He also talks about adult alternatives to Nativity plays, how the modern Irish diaspora is so Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Prodigy: The Fat of the Land 15th Anniversary Expanded EditionThomas H GreenAlmost a decade after acid house changed the landscape of British music, it seemed rave culture was finally about to take over pop. The Chemical Brothers hit the top of the charts, assisted by Noel Gallagher, in Autumn 1996 with “Setting Sun”, Goldie led a wave of drum & bass eagerly signed by major labels, 12” singles were selling by the ton and, leading the charge, The Prodigy topped the single’s and album’s charts in mid-1997 on both sides of the Atlantic with “Firestarter” and its parent album The Fat of Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Flanked by the wonderfully weird tagline, “If this picture doesn’t make your skin crawl…it’s on TOO TIGHT”, 1974’s Black Christmas is amongst the first fully formed slasher pics. Based on a series of murders that took place in Quebec, this Canadian contribution to the festive canon is dripping with seasonal cynicism. From director Bob Clark, Black Christmas sees a psychotic prank caller offing the residents of a sorority house during the Christmas period, and is most famous for the chilling line, “The call is coming from inside the house”.Black Christmas boasts a seriously impressive cast: Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Philip Glass is sufficiently famous that his 75th Birthday celebrations have been going on all year (he was actually 75 in January) and the year saw two of the absolute highlights of his career presented at the Barbican. His first opera Einstein On The Beach and last night, the soundtrack to his first film score Koyaanisqatsi, performed alongside the film itself, with Glass on keyboards. More of his “greatest hits” will be performed at the Union Chapel in Islington tonight.There will be those who remain implacably opposed to what they see as his facile repetitive argeggios and are inclined to Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Here’s a rancid little hors d’oeuvre for the holiday season. The deliciously loathsome Gothic horror film What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 50 years old and back in cinemas, never ceases to amaze as director Robert Aldrich’s strychnine-laced missive to Hollywood – his second, following 1955’s The Big Knife – and as a psychodrama of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis’s unfeigned hatred for each other.The movie opens in 1917. The junior vaudeville star Baby Jane Hudson simpers through her vomitous song-and-dance numbers onstage and, enabled by her unctuous accompanist father, rules her family with Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Scandinavian countries can duke it out amongst themselves as to which of them Santa Claus is from, but this Finnish claim for being the whiskery fellow’s true home neither makes you want to enter his grotto or sit on his knee. A bizarre and wonderful fantasy, Rare Exports nods to old northern Europe’s Saint Nicholas, the mythical figure meting out punishment to children rather than doling out presents. This is a Santa Claus to be avoided at all costs. And unlike the traditional Saint Nicholas, he’s after all children not just the naughty ones.Set in the far north-east of Finland in Read more ...
Heather Neill
’Tis the season to be jolly. ’Tis also the season to dust off the stories of the Grimms and Perrault and present them as drama, sometimes transmogrified into panto. There are sometimes attempts to go back to source and eschew the tawdry delights of transvestite dames, sparkly leotards and lame rhyming couplets. The source, of course, is often really quite frightening.At the National Theatre, Katie Mitchell directs a sort of half-way house by Lucy Kirkwood “developed at the NT studio”. In this Hansel and Gretel There is no cartoonish dame with a suffocating bosom, but – the cast being small - Read more ...