Reviews
Mark Sanderson
It is a Hollywood truism that any film that begins with amateur footage of happy, smiling people ends in tears. Our War was no exception: fit young men messed about in the sun and somersaulted into the Med. However, their R&R was soon over and our boys were back in Afghanistan. As one member of Arnhem Company, 2nd battalion Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, so articulately put it: “I wouldn’t come here on fucking holiday.”The company’s nickname is the Lions of England – which immediately brings to mind the First World War phrase “lions led by donkeys”. This turned out to be ominously true. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tam o' Shanter, Assembly Hall ****Scottish schoolchildren are brought up on Robert Burns but other British students aren't so fortunate. We may know snatches of the great man's work – “Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie”, “O, my Luve's like a red, red rose” and so on – but few of us could recite even a stanza of Tam o' Shanter.The long poem, in Scots and English and published in 1791, tells the story of Tam, who stayed too long in an ale house and had a vision of the Devil on his ride home on his mare Meg. In Communicado Theatre's inventive musical dramatisation, devised and Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
In 1994, a boy vanishes from Texas. Over three years later, he is found by Interpol alive in Spain and shipped back to his family in San Antonio. As improbable as this is in itself, it marks the beginning of an even more incredible story revealed in gobsmacking glory by writer/director Bart Layton. This documentary proves not only that truth is stranger than fiction, but that sometimes truth is so strange it makes even the wildest imagination cower in the corner.The Imposter, which opens on Friday in the UK, has done the rounds of film festivals and has earned plaudits for its story and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Although you probably wouldn't want to cast Rupert Penry-Jones as Falstaff or Arthur Daley, point him in the direction of a privileged and successful London barrister and you can't miss. In this three-part adaptation of Blake Morrison's novel, Penry-Jones is instantly in his element as Ollie, metropolitan legal eagle and partner of the glamorous Daisy (Genevieve O'Reilly), a professional head-hunter.However, all is not as it seems, as his old college friend Ian (Shaun Evans ) and his wife Em (Claire Keelan) begin to discover when they join the gilded couple for a weekend in an old house in Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jigsy, Assembly Rooms **** Les Dennis may have started his career as a comic, and then as a presenter of cheesy, family-friendly television game shows, but of late he has been plying his trade as a very decent actor. And so it proves again in Tony Staveacre's one-man play about a washed up Liverpudlian club comic.It's set in 1997 in a Liverpool working men's club, a beast that has mostly rolled over and died these days. Jigsy, florid of face and never seen on stage without a pint in his hand, does his two spots either side of the bingo. He has worked with some of the greats - Ken Dodd, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Ride: Going Blank AgainKieron TylerWhen Oxfordshire’s Ride arrived in the shops via Creation Records, they were the sonic little brothers to label-mates My Bloody Valentine. But their second album, 1992’s Going Blank Again, ploughed its own path, leaving the competition behind. Twenty years on, this smart, book-bound reissue adds most of the tracks from contemporary EPs and teams the album with a DVD of a March 1992 Brixton Academy live show.In the liner notes, guitarist – and future Oasis bassist, and current Beady Eye member - Andy Bell admits Ride were initially an “an amalgamation of the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Magnus Betner, Assembly Rooms **** Here is the news: dismemberment, suicide bombers, industrial-strength Japanese porn, paedophilia and the descent of Julian Assange from hero to zero. The son of a priest and a superstar in his homeland, Swedish comic Betner is drawn to the dark stuff (come to think of it, there’s not much of a leap between Betner and bête noire), and his show latched on to the mood of post-Olympics comedown and held fast.“Show” is really the wrong word. Insisting he would rather die than do the same material every night, Betner places himself firmly as a comic outsider Read more ...
graham.rickson
Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique, Overture ‘Béatrice et Bénédict' Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Robin Ticciati (Linn)Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique needs to sound sweaty and vulgar in all the right places. Over-manicured accounts rarely cohere; you need a conductor who’s willing to let Berlioz’s startling orchestral colours leap vividly off the page. An acid test is to sample the March to the Scaffold. Do the stopped horn notes sizzle at the outset, and do the bass drum thwacks make your speakers shake? Most importantly, how loud are the trombone pedal notes underpinning the cornet-heavy Read more ...
Helen K Parker
Darksiders II **** If you’ve ever wondered what a punch-up between a horseman of the apocalypse and a massive angry ice giant would look like, you need look no further than Darksiders II, which sweeps into the gaming world this week. Death is the equine-straddling quadruplet we are following this time around as he pursues his quest to uncover a plot between deities which has seen his brother War imprisoned and falsely accused of kicking off Armageddon. Unlike the first game, the setting of the game is not Earth but the fantastical Nether Realms of the gods, an opportunity which the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The potential minefield that is the run-up to marriage brings filmgoers back to the altar once again courtesy The Wedding Video, an English romcom that is quite a bit better than one might at first expect. A mixture of pro forma slob comedy (what, no Rhys Ifans?) possessed of a genuinely endearing twist, director Nigel Cole's latest feel-good venture actually does cheer the heart, even if there are ample passages of grimace-and-bear-it shenanigans that have to be got through along the way. Rufus Hound (pictured right, with Lucy Punch) stars as Raif, devil-may-care brother and Read more ...
geoff brown
One chocolate bar, OK. But eating three in a row? Is that altogether wise? Some may feel the same about a concert containing three symphonies by Vaughan Williams: a third of his output in the form. Even the most committed lover of this visionary and still under-appreciated British composer might worry a little at the prospect, as we might at a heavy night of Beethoven or Brahms. Each symphony, to be sure, is coloured with different forms and emotions. But similar harmonies, intervals and rhythmic figurations still recur. "Variety is the spice of life" isn’t a popular saying for nothing.At the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The ever-libidinous Guy (Jason Durr) is "as subtle as a fire engine" when it comes to sex, or so we're told during the course of Volcano, and it's difficult not to feel that this belated Noël Coward discovery could be similarly described in theatrical terms. Never performed during Sir Noël's life, the 1956 play will constitute essential viewing for completists of the Master who want a further sense of how this protean talent's singular career evolved. And yet it's hard not to feel that the keenly aware critic in Coward would have taken a blue pencil to some of the play's more pulpy, banal Read more ...