Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
Those who are “Jung and easily Freudened” (to misquote Joyce) need have nothing to fear from David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method. Yes, it’s the film where Michael Fassbender takes a cane to a barely corseted Keira Knightley, but don’t let the S&M seduce you; in an elaborate double bluff, it turns out that this costume drama is every bit as blandly bourgeois as its fin-de-siècle characters, with less sex than the average episode of Downton Abbey.While the fascination with society’s more deviant elements is classic Cronenberg, there’s little else here to signal the director’s input. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I can never quite work out Andrew Marr. Serious political journalist? Wannabe arts correspondent? Failed actor? Celebrity superfan? Anyway here he was, following the Queen around the world on a variety of exotic junkets, shouting at the camera and waving his arms about as if he'd been standing in the sun too long. From time to time he'd try to drive home some poetic or rhetorical phrase by ladling on a bit of thespian over-emphasis, like somebody doing Larry Olivier at the News & Current Affairs Christmas party. If he hadn't been protected by his camera crew, it would have been Read more ...
Veronica Lee
On a bitingly cold and snowy night in Leicester, Nathan Caton still manages to attract a big house for his show Get Rich or Die Cryin'. The hip young Londoner, in corncrow-and-dreads hairstyle and city slicker casual gear, is an immediately engaging presence on stage at the Firebug club, dissing his teated fruit-drink bottle as undermining any macho posturing he may be tempted to do.Caton is clearly too bright for any of that nonsense, though. He's a qualified architect, but has been involved in comedy for several years (he's 27 and feeling old, he tells us, because he has a teenage brother) Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Like a bleached Mount Parnassus for the gods, pouring linen down steep slopes in foaming white rivers, streaming white curtains up into heaven, few stage sets I’ve seen for a dance piece have been as captivatingly gorgeous as Es Devlin and Bronia Housman’s mountainous creation for Russell Maliphant’s new work. The dancers too are draped in white like gods - or statues to be unwrapped from dust-sheets. The visual metaphors cunningly overlap, for this is a work in which Maliphant intends homage to the art of sculptors, notably the French neo-classical rebel, Auguste Rodin.It comes across as Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Walking into a Wickes DIY superstore in Cricklewood, north London, Peter Capaldi is overwhelmed. The history there isn’t obvious as shoppers scurry about. But he knows it’s the site of Cricklewood Studios, the engine of British cinema that churned out classics like Clog Capers of 1932, the horror benchmark Dr Worm and the hilarious Thumbs up Matron. The end came in the 1980s with Terry Gilliam’s Professor Hypochondria’s Magical Odyssey and the wrecking ball. Wickes rose from the rubble.Cricklewood never had the cachet of Pinewood or Elstree. Its films weren’t as lauded as those of Read more ...
james.woodall
In opening words cited in the programme for Primavera’s new production of Howard Brenton’s Bloody Poetry (1984) the playwright states he wanted to remind people of “England’s radical, republican tradition” as “Thatcher set about shredding it”. So he chose to dramatise sections of the lives of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley in self-exile, post-Waterloo, in Switzerland and Italy. It was an odd choice.The result was a play about poetry, dreams, idealism and personal depravity, not politics or public radicalism, or anything that engaged with early-1980s Britain. Byron and Shelley – along Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Who knows where the time goes? Even semi-detached folk fans like me know that immortal Sandy Denny song with that title. The passage of time and passing of the seasons were great subjects for her. As some French dude put it: Ou sont les neiges d’antan? This year’s snow was coming down in Siberian clumps but that didn’t stop an enthusiastic crowd turning up for a special event – a live version of a remarkable project; singer-songwriter Thea Gilmore’s setting to music of an album’s worth of Sandy Denny lyrics, found in her notebooks after she died. It’s 30 odd years since Denny's Read more ...
judith.flanders
Site-specific work has been flavour of the month for many many months now, and when the site is as spectacular as the Old Vic Tunnels, one understands why. Nearly 3,000 square metres of tunnelling under Waterloo Station (the trains rumble steadily overhead), the site has in its year as a venue been the location of the first showing of Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop, a participant in last year’s LIFT festival, and Alan Moore, the V for Vendetta graphic comic genius, even read there.Interestingly, as that list suggests, none of the works have been literally “site-specific”, that is, Read more ...
graeme.thomson
I last saw Dan Auerbach and Pat Carney’s primitive garage blues duo a little under four years ago, touring their sixth album Attack & Release. Truth be told, I found them slightly heavy going. Big riffs, big drums, back-of-a-beer mat lyrics and not much else. Heard one, heard 'em all. My, but they’ve grown. Or, at least, their audience has. After a decade’s hard graft and eight albums, The Black Keys are suddenly a very big deal indeed. They play three sold-out nights at Alexandra Palace next week, while tickets for a forthcoming show at Madison Square Garden were snapped up within Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Long winters, when most outdoor activities are off the menu, must encourage creativity. Judging by the new releases in from Scandinavia, almost-constant dark and sub sub-zero temperatures would do the music of more temperate regions some good, feeding inspiration. Whether it’s Norwegians with a yen for the spooky, irresistible accordionists and disturbing singer-songwriters from Finland, or do-it-yourself Danes, all and more are here.Amongst the aspects which make Scandinavia’s music striking, especially music from Norway, are songs which don’t initially reveal where they’re going. Twists and Read more ...
philip radcliffe
“The north wind doth blow and we shall have snow.” And how! The BBC Phil’s composer/conductor H K “Nali” Gruber could not have timed the UK premiere of his Northwind Pictures better. We were ready targets for his shattering evocation of the wind with every device at the percussionists’ disposal and a large hand-cranked wind machine. The boys in the back row had a great night out.A one-movement piece, it is derived from his comic fairy-tale opera Der Herr Wind (Mr North Wind), successfully premiered by Zurich Opera in 2005. You don’t need to know the story to get something out of the music, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Roundhouse is a melee of moneyed cosmopolitan twentysomething trendies. The beautiful people are out in force. My God, there are some delicious women and men here, expensively dressed, uptown couture to the hilt, a hefty smattering of languages from around the globe. Unexpectedly, for me at least, 22-year-old Chilean-American electronica prodigy Nicolas Jaar has the most chi-chi gig in London tonight. This is not a plus – the queues at the bar are half-an-hour long, dilettante party people buying rounds of exotic shots and bottles of bubbly, waving wodges of tenners about. And while Jaar’ Read more ...