Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
1866 was a crucial watershed in Henrik Ibsen’s writing career. As a man he may have come of age some 20 years earlier, but it was only at almost 40 that his writing attained brooding, bearded maturity in Brand, the first in the sequence of plays that we now accept as the Ibsen canon. It’s a brave director indeed who delves into the playwright’s juvenilia, but so numerous are the early works and so exotic their prospect (for who could resist the enticements of The Burial Mound or indeed Lady Inger of Oestraat?) that they are becoming an increasingly well-trodden – or at any rate frequently Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Jam: The GiftThomas H GreenGiven his continued artistic renaissance, it’s currently rather unfashionable to suggest Paul Weller was never better than with The Jam. Nonetheless, a trawl through their back catalogue will assure most this was the case. Musically, it’s arguable but lyrically it’s definitive. The Gift was The Jam’s sixth and final album, released in the spring of 1982. The trio were at the peak of their powers, riding chart success that melded punk’s snarl with Weller’s suburban angst, including, in “Going Underground”, one of the greatest and most furious songs ever to hit Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
What a year for great British institutions. Sixty years of Elizabeth II, 50 years of James Bond, and a half-century of the Rolling Stones. To recycle an even older cliche, we will never see the like of any of them again.Brett Morgen's Crossfire Hurricane is a chronicle of the Stones' career, assembled from a wealth of news, documentary and home-made footage stretching back to their earliest days as a scraggy west London blues band. The commentary, other than that supplied by various interviewers and TV anchormen glimpsed across the passing decades, is provided by the Stones themselves, who Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Speaking about the Requiem he composed in 1990 in memory of the London Sinfonietta’s long-time artistic director Michael Vyner, Hans Werner Henze always talked as a believing atheist. “Paradise is here or ought to be,” he insisted, “not later, when nothing else happens;” and “In this world there is no hereafter, only presence: you can meet angels and devils in the street at any time.”So it was a surprise to find a lot more spiritual power radiating from the three movements of the Requiem that Christoph Poppen conducted in this concert by the Welsh National Opera Chorus and Orchestra than from Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Susan Calman's star has risen of late - the Glaswegian lawyer turned stand-up has been an Edinburgh Fringe favourite for some while now, but in the past two years she has become an established Radio 4 presence through the likes of The News Quiz, and has been seen acting on television on shows such as Sharon Horgan's comedy drama Dead Boss.If I had one criticism of Calman's stand-up before, it was that the woman was hidden behind comedy that was accomplished but felt rather impersonal. That's not a cavil to be made with This Lady's Not For Turning Either, however; as its nod to Margaret Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Make no mistake; this is dancing of the highest order. The classically trained members of Wayne McGregor's company Random Dance demonstrate such exceptional mastery of technique that their movements should have one drooling in admiration. And since they wear little more than vests and pants for this production of FAR, every muscle in their perfectly honed bodies is visible as it tenses and releases, flexes and extends. Rather than being entranced by the beauty and fluency of their limbs, though, I found myself watching with cool dispassion. And soon, I realized I was thinking of the dancers Read more ...
carole.woddis
Nick Payne has already made quite a mark. In 2009 he won the George Devine award for Most Promising Playwright with the intriguingly entitled If There Is I Haven’t Found it Yet at the Bush. Wanderlust followed at the Royal Court and now with his second Court commission, transferred to the Duke of York's from Upstairs at the Royal Court, he’s come up with bees and multi-universe theories, love and death.It’s funny how bees and quantum physics seem to go hand in hand. Charlotte Jones’ Humble Boy buzzed along similar lines with huge success a decade ago. So it proves again in Payne’s dazzlingly Read more ...
fisun.guner
There’s no attempt to romanticise the hero of Nick Dear’s new play about the Anglo-Welsh poet Edward Thomas. Thomas, who died in action in the Battle of Arras in 1917 after enlisting at the age of 39 – far too old to have had to fight – is played by Pip Carter as prickly, petulant and with an alarmingly misogynistic streak. He tramples over the feelings of his adoring wife Helen and displays an unattractive physical cowardice when ambushed by an angry gamekeeper on one of his long country rambles. Thomas was a depressive with suicidal tendencies, but it’s his wife who gets the most Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
There is something so otherworldly about Shingai Shoniwa, the vocal powerhouse who fronts Noisettes, that it is unsurprising to see the band play on it. Shoniwa arrived onstage in a blaze of light, in a spinning gold-hooped skirt that seemed to mimic a flying saucer in the chaos, before launching into a storming rendition of the band’s “I Want You Back”. The illusion lasted as long as it took her to kick off her towering gold high heels and attempt a terrible Scottish accent at the end of the first song.Although built around a duo - Brit School graduates Shoniwa and Daniel Smith, the band’s Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Each episode of Southland – the best American cop show since The Shield – begins frenetically and never lets up – except for a freeze-frame in the first minute which the rest of the show spools back to explain. In this first part of the fourth season, one of LA’s finest is out of his black-and-white and chasing a suspect within seconds as his partner careers down the back alleys of South Los Angeles.These signature car chases are one of the reasons that adrenalin junkies love it so. The suspect leaps a chain-link fence: the officer known as Hollywood (a rich kid with a pretty face and a big Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
A photograph from 1858 shows a feeble and frail octogenarian who happens to be the last Mughal emperor. Bahadur Shah II (pictured below right), reclining in his wretched prison in Delhi, awaiting trial, is about to be exiled to Burma. Many of his family and his retinue would be summarily executed, the civilian population murdered, and a number of the great Mughal monuments of Old Delhi ruined. The British were on the rampage, finally quelling the 1857 Indian mutiny which had spread through the sub-continent. It was both a tragic and a pathetic ending to one of the greatest dynasties the Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
If the subtitle - The Life and Near Death Story of Patty Schemel - didn't make it clear enough, Hit So Hard was never going to be your average "rockumentary". At about eight minutes in, before the titular drummer properly establishes us in the 1990s US grunge scene that forms much of the backdrop to her story, Schemel is already speaking openly and frankly about the addictions to alcohol and drugs that cost the lives of friends, her role in a platinum-selling rock band and very nearly her own life.To get the obvious out of the way first: Patty Schemel is, almost probably, the greatest rock'n' Read more ...