Reviews
howard.male
The last time we reviewed Krystle Warren on theartsdesk one reader responded by suggesting that it couldn’t be long before this Missouri-born singer-songwriter was as big as Beyonce (although he didn’t use that exact phrase). Yet even a 2009 performance on Later with Jools Holland didn’t have the effect it sometimes has in being the first big step up for both an artist’s sales and credibility. Having said that, in the current climate Warren is probably just happy to still be making records (this year’s Love Songs – A Time You May Embrace being both her most accessible and accomplished to date Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The political thriller may be alive and well but in recent years it has been spending time abroad. Elements of government conspiracy are intense flavourings of, for example, The Killing and Homeland, while back in Blighty there has been little to trouble the scorers since Paul Abbott’s State of Play nearly a decade ago. Why? British drama has been too busy scoffing at Blair and Brown, Cameron and Clegg to worry itself with shady Whitehall cover-ups. So it’s not exactly a surprise that the crafty and pulsating Secret State harks back to the distant yesteryear of A Very British Coup.Chris Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Taylor Wessing Photographic… well, you get the drift. It's quite a long title for what is now one of the most fascinating and wide-ranging exhibitions of photographs mounted in London, and which goes out on tour nationally next year. It is described as a snapshot of contemporary portrait photography, and this is one of the strongest iterations yet, 60 photographs selected from an international submission of over 5,000 images from more than 2,000 photographers, all taken within the last year or so. Each has been chosen blind, as the photographer was not identified during the Read more ...
David Benedict
Confession time: I’m a sucker for a romantic reunion. When lost-presumed-dead twins Sebastian and Viola finally rediscover one another alive and well at the end of Twelfth Night, you’ll find me in tears. And, yes, the late, great Nora Ephron’s New Year’s Eve climax in When Harry Met Sally works every time. All of which makes me more than well-matched for the musical-theatre version of the epistolary romance Daddy Long Legs. Dear Reader, I remained dry-eyed.For their musical version of Jean Webster’s 1912, Anne of Green Gables-tinged bestseller, composer/lyricist Paul Gordon and bookwriter/ Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Sligo Live is Europe’s most westerly music festival, and its mix of indie and traditional is unique. For four nights and days, cracking traditional players fill the town’s many excellent pubs - Kennedy’s, Foley’s, the Snug, Mchugh’s and Hardagan’s - with the headliners: Wallace Bird, Lau, accordion queen Sharon Shannon, Joan Armatrading. But one name stood out on the marquee, that of Van Morrison, coming to Sligo with the promise of a very different kind of show – “Lyrics and Poetry: Emphasis on Words”, with readings of his own work and that of Yeats.As it was, any hopes the audience filing Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Over the past couple of years, since my husband’s first book was accepted for publication, I have had the dubious privilege of becoming intimately acquainted with the behind the scenes day-to-day workings of the crime novelist. For that reason Miranda Harvey, the long-suffering wife of Ian Rankin, is now something of a hero of mine. As she tells Imagine’s Alan Yentob, she is now so used to her husband’s writing patterns she can predict the “pause” that will hit, around page 65, when the UK’s most successful crime writer has run out of notes and has no idea what to do next.As a documentary, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It’s all becoming a bit “water is wet“, isn’t it, saying how brilliant Lau are. But what else to do? Their name means “natural light” in Orcadian, which seems about right, except their vaulting, endlessly innovative take on contemporary chamber folk evokes every conceivable shade of darkness, too, and all the colours in between. Last night in Edinburgh they were simply extraordinary.The trio are in the foothills of a national tour in support of their third album Race the Loser. On record Lau are never less than compelling, but live they operate at an entire other level. And it wasn't Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Three hours is a testing length for any film. Directors may stretch to that because they’re telling a huge story with plenty of plots and characters, but in Aurora, Romania's Cristi Puiu pares down plot, such as it is, to an absolute minimum. Elements of semi-documentary set in, as we watch his hero Viorel (played by Puiu himself in his first screen role) move disaffectedly through contemporary Bucharest. He takes the first half to bring himself to action, the alienated coldness of which, when it comes, leaves us stuck in his troubled soul – and, by extension, the soul of his city.The only Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
John Bunyan’s Christian, hero of The Pilgrim’s Progress, may have been putting his feet up in the Celestial City for the better part of 350 years, but for Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Pilgrim it has been a rather different story. Languishing in the Slough of Despond after an unsuccessful first run at the Royal Opera in the 1950s, the composer’s lavish “Morality” The Pilgrim’s Progress, with its patchwork biblical libretto, vast forces and uniquely blended combination of opera and oratorio, has never since established a secure place in the repertoire.A new production at English National Opera – Read more ...
bruce.dessau
It is not exactly Rock 'n' Roll Babylon, that's for sure. When Mercury Prize-winning quartet Alt-J assembled onstage at the Electric Ballroom last night it was more like a group of cool-looking choirboys gathering for practice with the vicar than music's hottest properties playing the final lap-of-honour gig of their current tour. After a modest "thank you" to the audience from guitar-cradling vocalist Joe Newman they were off and running.This is a venue where I'd previously seen The Clash at full cannonball tilt and Nick Cave in total self-destructive gonzo mode and Alt-J were never going to Read more ...
David Nice
Hot on the heels of the latest English uncle over at the Vaudeville comes Dyadya Vanya from Moscow, bringing with it no samovar or old lace. Rimas Tuminas, the Vakhtangov Theatre's artistic director since 2007, has chucked out the Stanislavsky tradition of Chekhovian naturalism and in his own singular attempt to render what he thinks the characters feel as well as say serves up a stylised ritual that nearly suffocates the humanity of the drama.There's no problem in daring a radical re-think: Benedict Andrews's contemporary take on Three Sisters at the Young Vic mostly made sense on its own Read more ...
judith.flanders
No one ever accused of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker of thinking small. Or not thinking, for that matter. Her international career began with a bang, when with only her second work she created Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich. And Reich’s music, filled with repetitive figures, harmonic rhythm and canons, is not a million miles – even if it’s 600 years – away from the ars subtilior of Avignon, De Keersmaeker’s new musical focus.A type of 14th-century polyphony, the songs of this mannerist style are highly complex technically: difficult to perform, they are more like 20th-century Read more ...