Reviews
Tom Birchenough
You might wonder whether Kristin Scott Thomas is doing Paris arrondissement by arrondissement. Last time we saw her was in Pawel Pawlikowski’s The Woman in the Fifth, where she was reincarnated in that district. In Lola Doillon’s In Your Hands (Contre toi in the original), she’s moved to the Eighth to undergo a bit of living hell.Or at least that’s where her character Anna Cooper begins, as a soon-to-be middle-aged surgeon, a professional, living alone, and very likely a bit lonely. Her mother at the end of the telephone, and conversations with hospital colleagues, seem the closest she gets Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s as well to be ready. There will come a time when our civilisation may enter a period of darkness which will be known, self-explanatorily, as After Attenborough. May it not arrive any time soon, or even ever. But if, or more likely when, it does, it won’t matter anyway because we’ll have already spit-roasted most species into extinction, as Sir David has been direly warning these past few years. By then, the familiar larynx will have described the life and times of more or less every creature who ever wandered in front of a lens (give or take the odd million subspecies).On this occasion Read more ...
Laura Silverman
“I'm here because I'm concerned,” says scientist Stephen Emmott in direct, measured tones. “I'm concerned about the state of our planet. I think the situation that we're in right now can rightly be called a planetary emergency, an unprecedented planetary emergency.”Emmott, 52, a professor of computing at the University of Oxford and head of Microsoft's Computational Science Laboratory in Cambridge, takes to the stage alone in director Katie Mitchell's latest project. Billed as “a new kind of scientific lecture”, Ten Billion examines the state of our planet when the population Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
You now have two choices when you roll down to the bottom of the Turbine Hall's slope. You can go left to the established Tate Modern collection of paintings and sculptures in white boxes, or right to a warren of performance and video art that fills two new large concrete barrel rooms - two options in gallery geometry and art practice. With the help of architects Herzog and De Meuron, Tate have incorporated the two disused oil drums into the gallery to provide a permanent platform for the immersive and interactive art forms that have come to dominate the visual arts over the past Read more ...
Natalie Shaw
Madonna earned her place in the pop elite many years ago, and there are many reasons for this, which needn't be reduced into a list. Certainly though, a big reason will be the obvious - how much better her fans' lives are with her songs in them. And 65,000 of them turned up in Hyde Park to see the spectacle and dance to the hits. Her latest album MDNA may be a weak, disengaged affair with singles that have failed to chart well, but with a back catalogue like no other, there was a huge expectation that its best moments may be reinvigorated for the live setting - or at least swarmed with Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Every production of Wagner’s Ring is a challenge. But to stage it in a smallish converted barn seating 500 with little or no stage machinery, which is what the Longborough Festival plans to do in a year’s time, might strike one as a particularly refined form of lunacy. The omens, nevertheless, could hardly be better. The final wing of the edifice, Götterdämmerung, is complete; and in almost every way it’s a remarkable, memorable achievement, a triumph of sheer enthusiasm and dedication – a rare victory for the fools rushing in ahead of the timid angels.No need to dwell on the obvious Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Paloma Faith has always struck me as a few cuts above your average conveyor belt post-Winehouse soul sister. A recent appearance on The Graham Norton Show in which she gave Russell Brand as good as she got in the verbals department suggests that there's more to this former magician's assistant than meets the eye. And 15 minutes into last night's gig, the first of her two shows as part of Somerset House's Summer Series, she firmed up her gobby intellectual credibility by name-dropping lefty post-Structuralists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.This intriguing moment came during some Read more ...
judith.flanders
As the much-loved Arthur Marshall so profoundly noted, Ibsen is “not a fun one”. One could, with as much truth, say the same about Shakespeare’s rarely staged Timon of Athens: its misanthropy, missing motivations and mercurial shifts in temper do not spell a fun night out to most. It is greatly to the credit of director Nicholas Hytner and his team, therefore, that the evening, if it doesn’t exactly fly by, is consistently engaging, thought-provoking and downright intelligent.Hytner and his designer, Tim Hatley, have created a world that mirrors our own. Timon is officially “of Athens”, but Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It all starts so promisingly; film-maker Andrew Kötting and writer Ian Sinclair “liberate” a swan pedallo from its moorings in Hastings to launch it into the sea. Naming the absurd craft “Edith” after King Harold’s mistress Edith Swan-neck, they plan to pedal the vessel 160 miles from Hastings to Hackney via the rivers of Kent and the Thames, finally ending up at the site of the Olympic Games.Conditions are rough and they spend two days on the beach waiting for calmer waters. Eventually we see them braving the waves along the coast to Rye, before turning inland and making their way along reed Read more ...
geoff brown
One top student orchestra playing on its own can be exciting enough. Two playing together can produce a charge of dynamite that might not leave the building standing. That was so anyway in last night’s Prom, when players from New York City’s Juilliard School and London’s Royal Academy of Music, by now frequent collaborators, joined up to shake the earth with thunderous brass, swooning strings, diamond precision, a velvet bloom – every characteristic of a world-class orchestra except the honour of being conducted by Lorin Maazel.Instead the podium was occupied by America’s favourite composer, Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Appearing at Buxton for the first time, Northern Ireland Opera are ahead of the game in marking next year’s Britten centenary by turning their attention to The Turn of the Screw. It is only their fifth production since the company was formed in 2010, so they are nothing if not adventurous. Being a chamber opera, the Screw suits their modest forces well, as it does the venue of Buxton Opera House. First staged at La Fenice in 1954, the claustrophobic opera benefits from an intimate theatre to make the most of its spookiness.Henry James loved ghost stories and the 1898 novella on which Britten’ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"What caused him to be so fast? Is he here for a purpose?" wondered Usain Bolt's father, Wellesley, in a mystical tone. Usain's mother, Jennifer, also seems to detect the workings of a higher power in her son's blindingly rapid progress around the world's running tracks. "Thank you, Lord, for what you have done," she said.It was hardly surprising that this profile of the so-called Lightning Bolt, multiple record-breaker and triple Olympic medallist, oozed with awe and dripped with reverence. Getting a film crew inside the Bolt entourage presumably depends on an understanding, possibly in Read more ...