Reviews
Olivia Weinberg
Lindsay Seers is one of the most exciting artists to have emerged in Britain over the last 10 years. Preoccupied with big philosophical questions, her work explores notions of truth, memory, imagination and history. Nowhere Less Now, commissioned by Artangel, is her first new work in London since Extramission was shown at Tate Britain in 2009. It is no ordinary work.Skilfully combining photography, video, performance and animation, Seers takes us on a journey - one that begins inside a rusty corrugated iron chapel off the Kilburn High Road in north-west London. The Tin Tabernacle, built in Read more ...
aleks.sierz
After years spent in the dark alleyways of abuse, where the only optimistic light is the sickly glow of neon, some new playwrights are emerging into the sunnier meadows of romantic comedy. The market leader must be David Greig’s delightful Midsummer (2008), which was also a love letter to the city of Edinburgh. Now, Phil Porter’s quirky romcom has come down from the Edinburgh Festival, ready to set metropolitan hearts a flutter and warm even the most cynical temperament.The boy-meets-girl is marvellously quirky. We are introduced to two loners. Jonah is a young man who was brought up on a Read more ...
Fiona Sturges
Praise be, they’ve kept the title sequence. Dallas, the mama of all American soap operas, is famous for a lot of things – Stetsons, satin sheets, surreal shower scenes, the slow disintegration of Priscilla Presley’s nose – but perhaps the most memorable component in its Eighties incarnation was the opening credits in which mirrored skyscrapers were juxtaposed with the bucolic idyll of Southfork, and split-screens showed JR, Bobby, Sue-Ellen et al pulling panto poses to a histrionic orchestral soundtrack. Such things are sacred.The new show is billed not as a remake but a sequel, the exhuming Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Who says you can't go home again? American actor-singer Anthony Rapp does that, and then some, with his solo show Without You, in which one of the original leads of the Broadway musical Rent relives the passions and pain of an extraordinary time. Quite how the 80-minute piece will register with non-Rentheads (as the show's fans remain known) must be up for grabs.Its narrative is inextricably linked to a city, New York, where the late Jonathan Larson's rock musical became a sensation that registered well beyond arts pages. On the other hand, if the response of the opening night crowd Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Sometimes when we reconnect with the television of our childhood it seems very different from what we recall, usually lesser in some way. This is certainly not the case with the physical violence of The Sweeney. ITV's hour-long special, to coincide with the release of a new feature film, showcased a mass of beatings, snarling assaults, and men taking limb-breaking leaps into quarries rather than face the actors who went on to play Inspector Morse and Minder.It was the roles of Detective Inspector Jack Regan and Detective Sergeant George Carter of the Metropolitan Police Flying Squad that Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
We have been here before: The Killing wasn’t the first crime drama to open with a damsel in distress. This time it’s a schoolgirl who is being chased across the sand dunes at night. She has been stabbed. She falls – conveniently backwards – to the ground. The pursuer is reflected in the dying pupil’s dilated pupil. “I’m sorry,” whispers the girl. Why?The first part of A Mother's Son throws up many more intriguing questions. The second one is why the script editor allowed Chris Lang to repeatedly commit the cardinal sin of letting his characters tell each other what they already know. “My Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
According to US television anchor Stephen Colbert, there are only three ways to end your career as a rock star: overdose, overstay your welcome or write Spiderman: The Musical. Rockers, he says, during a televised interview with LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy, don’t get to walk away - certainly not at the peak of their careers, when every album they release is still greeted with critical adulation and they’re capable of selling out Madison Square Garden.And yet, in April 2011, that’s exactly what the then 41-year-old New York performer and DJ chose to do. The Colbert interview, clips Read more ...
geoff brown
If you’re going to bash a tam-tam for six, the Albert Hall is the perfect place to do it. The reverberation lasts for ages; and everyone in the audience can see you bashing. That must explain in part why Messiaen’s hieratic, gong-crazy Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum has notched up 10 Prom performances in 45 years. Sunday’s was the first, though, to be performed by the historic and wonderful Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, an outfit previously associated more with Bach and Mendelssohn than Messiaen’s idiosyncratic altar cloths in sound.But times have changed since Riccardo Chailly arrived Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Australian director John Hillcoat certainly knows what he likes, and what he likes is lawlessness. It’s the central focus of his brilliantly uncompromising film Ghosts… of the Civil Dead, which saw a high-security prison driven to bloody ruin, and of his scorching western The Proposition. And there it is again in the anarchic dystopia of The Road (less impressive because, despite Hillcoat’s flair for brutality, it perversely shied away from some of the key violence of the source novel). It therefore comes as no great surprise that Hillcoat’s Prohibition-era latest should be lawless not just Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The verdict may still be out on the BBC’s lavish unfolding drama, Parade’s End, but it’s already done one thing: to bring the name of its writer, Ford Madox Ford, back from the (relative) oblivion where it has been since his death in 1939 (not least thanks to a script from Tom Stoppard). The novel for which he is best known, The Good Soldier (with its immortal opening line, “this is the saddest story I have ever heard”), has always hovered on various lists of best-ever books, but often rather in the lower ranks. With Who On Earth Was Ford Madox Ford?, a Culture Show Special fronted by Alan Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
I'd love to see the stats on the last time a Prom was this packed for an afternoon organ recital. Were it not for the fact that organist Cameron Carpenter was sporting spandex trousers encrusted in silver glitter, a wife beater and Mohawk, you could have been mistaken for thinking we were back in the organ glory days of the early 19th century. Even the programme harked backward, offering as it did big, bloated Romantic transcriptions, arrangements and improvisations (pretty much everything in fact except the urtext).Scratch that. We did get two pieces of unadulterated Bach, the Toccata Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
As everybody but the most casual of viewers knows, the titular character in a certain long-running BBC sci-fi series is not “Doctor Who” but merely “The Doctor”. Yet Steven Moffat - showrunner and second most talented writer to come out of Paisley - seems to be having a bit of a love affair with those two words. As the credits roll on Asylum of the Daleks it’s those two words that echo from, well, whatever every Dalek uses to speak; their kind having forgotten the man they called their Predator thanks to a well-timed piece of computer hackery the likes of Julian Assange would kill for.As an Read more ...