Reviews
stephen.walsh
Janáček’s obsession with Russia has always intrigued me: something to do with a shared Slav ancestry traceable to peasant roots being crunched to pieces by the modern world. Gone are the rolling paragraphs and the vast, empty fields and sky. In Katya Kabanova everyone is hemmed in by ancient attitudes and superstitions, and the music, with its abrupt, laconic gestures, is a part of the prison. The work’s most characteristic phrase is Katya’s helpless, repeated “There’s something else I wanted to tell you,” and its typical moment Kudryash’s useless attempt to explain lightning conductors to Read more ...
Natalie Shaw
Sean Paul, the accessible face of dancehall, is back. It’s been 10 years since he rose to the big league with his 2002 breakout album Dutty Rock, and he recently released his fifth album Tomahawk Technique. His mix of dancehall rhythms, bhangra beats and old-school reggae with boyband-cheesy lyrics gave him temporary pop pin-up status during the early 2000s. He brought dancehall to an international audience, and ended up having a huge influence on American hip-hop.In the intervening years, Sean Paul admirably resisted the urge to Americanise his Jamaican dancehall stylings - until this latest Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Those quaint old TV shows in which we were invited to support and admire the police unreservedly have long been overtaken by real-life events. Now evolution has brought us to Line of Duty, a series that presents the police as a failing bureaucracy hamstrung by paperwork and political correctness. From what one gathers of how our contemporary rozzers operate - inviting you to report crimes by email, for instance, because police stations are only open some of the time, or arresting victims instead of perpetrators - this may be unpleasantly close to reality.Perhaps writer Jed Mercurio picked up Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Les Troyens is one of music's mythical beasts. The greatest opera that few will have ever seen. Until recently the epic was considered so demanding that it was thought unstageable. David McVicar's new production for the Royal Opera House is only the second in its history. So for most of us last night will have been the first chance to witness the five-hour masterpiece in its original French. It is amid the murmuring woodwinds that the most memorable musical truth of Troyens is to be foundBeyond the fact that the cast is huge, however, (the opera house were fielding the largest Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Post-Dubya, post-Palin, (very) post-Yes We Can, the US sitcom appears finally to have arrived at the same point its more cynically inclined British equivalent reached decades ago. In a political age defined by dishonour and doublespeak, it seems the most effective means of responding to all that mendacious incompetence is to dropkick depressing reality into the realm of the absurd.Perhaps pertinently, perhaps not, a couple of Brits are helping bring political satire to America's small screens. Conceived, directed and co-written (with Simon Blackwell) by Armando Iannucci, Veep - which aired in Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The Arab Spring has arguably been the most important international event after the credit crunch, yet it seems to be of little interest to British playwrights. Parochial, obsessed with writing only what they know, they have been put to shame by Hassan Abdulrazzak, an Iraqi playwright who was born in Czechoslovakia and now lives in London, working as a scientist. His 2007 debut, Baghdad Wedding, was a big hit, and his long-awaited second play is set in Cairo during the revolution that toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak.To be exact, the date is 28 January 2011. While the people gather in Tahrir Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Istanbul, even more than Rome, is the point in the world where tectonic plates of civilisations collide: Europe, Arabia and Asia, Muslim Istanbul and Christian Constantinople, fundamentalists and secularists, 21st-century women and 15th-century men. The smells of hookahs, roses and fish are part of the magic the city has from time immemorial radiated, beckoning traders and dealers, visitors and adventurers, to a place of shifting histories and irresistible mystery. All of which should make Nefés, Pina Bausch’s travelogue on Istanbul, one of the more substantial productions of her long series Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
When Clarence “Big Man” Clemons, the E Street Band’s charismatic saxophone player, died of stroke-related complications this time last year, there were those among us who wondered if we’d ever see the band together again. His on-stage interplay with Bruce Springsteen seemed to have become even more central to the greatest rock'n'roll show on earth since the band reformed proper in 1999, even if the knees that supported that magnificent frame could no longer hold out the length of shows that regularly topped the three-hour mark. That this year’s Wrecking Ball tour proudly bore the E Street Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“Let slip the dogs of war.” Somewhere in the bowels of Kiev’s Olympic Stadium, a football coach will have said something along these lines around the half seven mark. Meanwhile, over on the clever-clever channel, an alternative meeting between England and Italy took place.Shakespeare set any number of plays in the Italy he encountered in his source material, but with the possible exception of Romeo and Juliet, none feels quite so much of a statement about the Italian state of mind as Julius Caesar. It’s no coincidence that this was the play given to an Italian company for the recent Globe to Read more ...
josh.spero
The first room of Andy Warhol: The Portfolios at Dulwich Picture Gallery made me regret coming. The second room made me never want to leave. The first has 10 of the Flowers and 10 of the Campbell's Soup Cans, four weedy sunsets and one Marilyn in pink, purple and brown - hardly any nourishment, certainly nothing fresh. I'm a Warhol fan - 10 glowing Marilyns in a darkened room at the National Portrait Gallery is the closest I've come to a religious experience - but is there anything new to say about these overly familiar works?Luckily, there was also Birmingham Race Riot (1964) (pictured below Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Can your BFF also be the father (or mother) of your child, not to mention the lover with whom you share both body and bed once all platonic constraints have been cast aside? It's in the DNA of the Hollywood romcom to contrive suspense out of so many foregone conclusions, and I doubt anyone watching Friends with Kids will be in any way surprised at the outcome. What filmgoers should respond to are the wisdom and wit that writer/director/star Jennifer Westfeldt gently imparts along the way to a finish that may make even the most child-phobic start to choke up. As unpredictable in its details as Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“America treats its musical titans as disposable, and I’m not disposable.” Coming from anyone else, Van Dykes Parks’ declaration last night might have been self-aggrandising. Parks is 69, but he could have said this during any of the last four decades with no problem. He is a titan, and he is not disposable. Coinciding with the reissue of his first three albums, this concert reached back to 1968 and stopped off at all points from then on. And before too.Parks has opinions and isn't shy of expressing them. He wants you to think. Like his music, he arranges words baroquely and meanings are Read more ...