Reviews
Mark Sanderson
Mid-September: the nights are drawing in and, to quote that well-known costume dramatist John Milton, the period detail is as “thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Vallombrosa”. Downton – praise be! – is back. However, before the third series even gets into its penguin-suited stride it seems that paradise is about to be lost all over again. Lord Grantham has blown most of his wife’s fortune: the Canadian Trunk Line Company has hit the buffers and gone bust. While the crusty aristo refuses to be a failure his dependents have far more important things on their tiny minds. Lady Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” It is a truth less universally acknowledged that a married woman in possession of a rich Victorian husband must be in want of a vibrator.Ismail Merchant, James Ivory and Richard Curtis walk into Ann Summers… It’s not the setup for a joke but it is essentially the starting point for Tanya Wexler’s Hysteria – a film the director herself has dubbed “the vibrator movie you can take your mum to”. Wexler gamely takes on the true story of this Victorian medical innovation, folding Read more ...
Russ Coffey
In the summer of ’86, The Cult’s Ian Astbury invited The Mission on tour with them. Mission main man, Wayne Hussey, had recently fled the role of guitarist in The Sisters of Mercy to lead his own band. Goth fans had high hopes for them. Some thought they would eventually become bigger than the Cult. Over the next few years, though, both career paths defied expectations.The Cult became a stadium-metal act, and The Mission gradually drifted into making good albums that few listened to. But the Cult’s success was not to last. A row in 1995 saw them go their separate ways. Doldrums and solo Read more ...
fisun.guner
A Dancing Satyr leaps into the air, his head thrown back in ecstasy. His alabaster eyes appear like two pinpoints of illumination in the dimly lit gallery. The bronze figure, which is the first work you encounter in an exhibition spanning 5,000 years of bronze sculpture, is believed to be the work of the famous Greek sculptor Praxiteles, who was active in the second half of the fourth century BC. Having lain on the seabed for millennia, the reveller, now with only one limb intact so that he appears suspended in balletic mid-flight, was recovered off the coast of Sicily only in 1998.Bronze, a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On the 35th anniversary of the year punk met the mainstream, it’s to be expected that retrospection and nostalgia are in the air. Television has had a go, albums are being reissued and old soldiers are telling their stories. By its very nature an anniversary suggests that things were cut and dried, that 1977 was a beginning or a marker in the sand. But the exhibition Someday All the Adults Will Die: Punk Graphics 1971-1984 at the Southbank’s Hayward Gallery Project Space and the publication of the related book Punk: An Aesthetic both underline that things aren’t and weren’t so clear.Both the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Now here's a thing. Why would you invite one of his generation's most acclaimed classical actors, who is also a huge star of popular culture, to make his debut as a light entertainer in that most clichéd role, a quiz-show host? Well, when that individual is David Tennant, a brilliant Hamlet and a former Doctor Who, you are guaranteed to attract some new viewers and it gives a neat reboot to what is a very tired format: a bunch of comics answering soft questions (in this case about the history of comedy) but in actuality being given a chance to trot out jokes and anecdotes.So is he up to the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It's been eight years since San Francisco Ballet were last here, charming us with their finesse and their smiles - welcome back. They offer a boost of spirit to the gloomsters of ballet over here. This small city which punches many times above its weight in the cultural world owes a vast amount of its self-confidence and charisma to its mixed ethnic roots, so the range of dancers from the Far East via North Europe and the Latino Americas is representative. But only a gifted, purposeful artistic director, which Helgi Tomasson evidently is, can fashion eager youngsters from such varied cultures Read more ...
howard.male
Marc Bolan’s voice was as inseparable from his songs as the sheen and shimmer of one of his Biba satin jackets was inseparable from the jacket itself. That unique faux-posh phrasing, singing whimsical, surreal lyrics, became texturally essential to every T Rex song. Because his voice was such an integral aspect of his music, I had mixed feelings about last night’s tribute concert in aid of the PRS for Music Members Benevolent Fund. Would the diverse mix of artists try to mimic the Bolan warble, or take the wiser course of putting their own spin on his material?On the whole things went Read more ...
graham.rickson
Fans of the Leeds International Piano Competition argue that this triennial event, now in its 49th year, has done more to raise the city’s profile than any other local institution. Supporters of Leeds United would doubtless disagree, but Dame Fanny Waterman’s long-running contest has grown into an influential, internationally renowned affair. Dame Janet Baker awards the prizes. Lang Lang is now the competition’s Global Ambassador along with Honorary Ambassador Aung San Suu Kyi. Waterman, now an improbably spritely 91, is still very much in control of proceedings.Perusing the names of winners Read more ...
theartsdesk
Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros: Global A Go-Go, StreetcoreLisa-Marie FerlaAs well as marking the 10th anniversary of Joe Strummer's death, 2012 would also have been the year the legendary Clash frontman turned 60. The reissue of these two albums, recorded with his last band the Mescaleros, is therefore doubly timely.The band's three albums built on the very best of the globe-trotting, more experimental themes that had begun to sneak into The Clash's work before they disbanded in 1985, but did so in a way that kept them vital and accessible to those of us raised on three-chord punk Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In the non-Olympic sport called “Name Britain’s greatest living playwright”, most of the contestants have always been men. Nowadays, that is all changed and the odds-on favourite would be Caryl Churchill, who has been creating provocative and boundary-busting drama for four decades. Her plays Top Girls, Cloud Nine and Serious Money are curriculum classics, and her recent work — Far Away, A Number and Drunk Enough To Say I Love You — triumphantly proved that her originality remains unimpaired with age.The same can just about be said of her latest. The play has no named characters, and consists Read more ...
David Nice
Updating Chekhov is nothing new, despite the preliminary flurries about this production. Yet the singular directorial take can only highlight the master’s modernity in the bigger issues. If Australian iconoclast Benedict Andrews had continued as he seems to begin, with a Stanislavsky-like realism for today, passing anachronisms like the optimism for a better life in centuries to come, the idleness of a servanted household and a shockingly abrupt duel might jar. But phantasmagorical moments keep breaking through until the tenuous security of the three sisters stuck in a provincial Russian Read more ...