Reviews
Emma Dibdin
Having spent the last few years alternating deftly between high-profile, star-studded blockbusters (the Ocean’s trilogy, last year’s Contagion) and smaller, more niche projects starring largely unknowns (Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience), Steven Soderbergh may have found his perfect middle ground. Male stripping dramedy Magic Mike pairs big names (Channing Tatum, Matthew McConaughey) with near-unknowns; it combines trashy visual pleasures with shrewd, straightforward character writing; it was made on a $7 million shoestring, and has already become a box office hit in the US. It is something Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It could have been a cow lowing in the distance, the sound drifting across a barren landscape. Its tone transformed after echoing through hillsides and ravines. Actually, it was Karl Seglem blowing into the horn of a goat. Suddenly, he stopped and began wordlessly chanting. The other two musicians on stage at St Luke's kept their heads down and continued providing the sonic wash knitting together this collaboration between the classical, jazz and uncategorisable.Seglem’s diversion into the animalistic was short, but it helped define last night. The union of Christian Wallumrød, Seglem and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Apparently it’s the taking part that counts, which would explain why recent weeks have brought unseemly howls of protest and threats of litigation from British athletes who have failed to make it into the Olympic squad. You’d like to sit these people with their adamantine sense of entitlement in front of a couple of this week’s releases. One we know all about. Chariots of Fire has jogged back along the beach and onto cinema screens in time to remind us about all our amateur yesteryears. The ageless story of two British sprinters who defied the Establishment, it finds a remarkably good Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The front door of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House may first have slammed shut in 1879, but it’s a sound whose echoes and re-echoes continue to resonate. The crash of feminist selfhood, bursting through the catatonic tranquility of domestic order, originally scandalised 19th-century Norwegian society, but with scandal now rather harder to come by, Ibsen’s play has acquired a quieter, but infinitely more pervasive impact. In Carrie Cracknell’s faithfully realist rendering it speaks with harrowing directness, cutting to the contemporary heart of the matter as few updated stagings have so cleanly done. Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Many years ago in Helsinki I met Sibelius’s daughter, Margareta, and her husband, the conductor Jussi Jalas. He used to come to Manchester to conduct the Halle. And it was he who rescued from obscurity his father-in-law’s only completed opera, The Maiden in the Tower, composed in 1896. This he did in 1981 on Finnish radio, not long before he died. I can’t help thinking how thrilled he would have been to know that the work was at last receiving its UK premiere at the Buxton Festival.It is linked in a unique double bill with another neglected one-act opera, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Kashchkei the Read more ...
bruce.dessau
The first time I interviewed Marc Almond back in the late 1980s he had a pet snake with him, just one of the many things that sets him apart from today's stars. These days the only reptiles one sees around chart-toppers are the publicists. Almond has been part of the pop furniture for three decades but it was still something of a surprise to discover that he was celebrating his 55th birthday last night. Tempus fugit and all that. Or as the still-nimble black-clad crooner said to his mostly similarly-aged audience, "we are all in it together, dear".A decade ago Almond might have celebrated by Read more ...
james.woodall
Let us conclude, after London’s season of World Cities - 10 dance shows - that Pina Bausch was not a choreographer. She began 50 years ago in Essen as a ballet dancer and like so many dancers in that field got bored with the rules. When she took over ballet in Wuppertal in 1973, she clearly had rule-breaking in mind but also had something inside her head very different from what one might identify as the geometry of dance.She is undoubtedly a stage poet, in my view more Surrealist than Expressionist - striving in a genuinely theatrical way to fulfil Marianne Moore’s advice that poets should Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Handel, a national hero at the time, went blind writing Jephtha, his last great oratorio, and sadly thence into terminal decline. Now, 260 years after its first performance at Covent Garden, we have a new production by Frederic Wake-Walker, who is also responsible for the design. So, it’s very much his show.Being an oratorio, Jephtha wasn’t written to be staged. So, what do you do? After all, the story is about a man with ambition whose success on the battlefield brings him national acclaim but personal tragedy. You could go traditional or modern. Or make him a character recognisable in today Read more ...
Anne Blood
In Dorothea Tanning's Victory, a piece of charred toast is mounted on a black background and framed in gold. The work comes dangerously close to pure jest but instead propels itself into a critique of female domesticity and then down a road of historical influences from Surrealism and Dada straight through to stark 1960s Minimalism. Tanning made this piece in 2005, when she was well into her nineties, and it’s a delightful example of her late work. Victory is witty and proves why collage is so exciting as a medium, its juxtapostions colliding to provide multiple meanings and paths of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Every leading thespian needs a depressive Swedish detective in his repertoire, and Kenneth Branagh has the knighthood to prove it. He may also face a little extra critical scrutiny this time around, since the return of his Anglicised Wallander comes in the wake of the recent Scandi invasion, courtesy of The Bridge, Borgen and The Killing II. We've even had a little dose of Sebastian Bergman, starring Rolf Lassgard, famous in Sweden for his portrayal of Kurt Wallander. And we've had the Swedish Wallander itself.How do Branagh and co measure up? Pretty well I guess, though it's always going to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Now we're talking! Following on from a small-screen Richard II of greater aural than visual interest, along comes Richard Eyre's TV adaptation of both Henry IV plays, and the first thing that seems evident about Part One is how well it would hold up in the cinema. (Indeed, I saw it in just such a setting at a preview screening with the director in attendance.) Lustrously shot in all manner of rusts, ochres, and browns that can drain away where needed, primarily during the battle scenes, Eyre's diptych in its first half makes a ravishing case for Shakespeare on film even as it whets the Read more ...
philip radcliffe
No sooner had the Olympic torch been run out of town than in rushed the cavalcade of opera singers, musicians, actors, dancers and literary talkers for the start of the 34th Buxton Festival. Leading them, so to speak, was Stephen Barlow, the new Artistic Director. Nothing daunted, he decided to take up the baton for the opening night.The tradition here is to surprise us with works from opera’s old curiosity shop. Even if we’ve heard of them, we may well not have seen them, sometimes prompting the ironical “I wonder why?” Not the case with Intermezzo, but we have the double bill of Sibelius’s Read more ...