Reviews
judith.flanders
I’m not sure I’ve ever felt so ambivalent about a show, and so strongly both pro and con. The pros first, then. This is an astonishing, revelatory exhibition of avant-garde art and architecture in the Soviet Union in the brief but hectic period from the Revolution to the Stalinist crackdown in the 1930s. The show draws on Soviet archival photographs, never before exhibited, architectural photographer Richard Pare's gorgeous contemporary images of the buildings, and art from the extraordinary collection formed by George Costakis in the Soviet Union, when Constructivism and Suprematism were out Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ah, the Duke of York’s Picture House, the oldest consistently operating purpose-built cinema in the country. It’s a beautiful venue, just over a century old, and almost too comfortable. It’s been jazzed up a few times over the decades and, tonight, bathed in red light, wears its history with lazy insouciance, merging it with the current interior design’s burlesque Art Deco spin. My seat is at the back of the balcony, plush and comfortable, with a little shelf where I place my salted popcorn and horrible pear cider (the latter, a mistake). Mostly the Duke of York’s is still a cinema but they Read more ...
bruce.dessau
With the scheduled start time of last night's gig long gone and George Michael nowhere in sight, scurrilous jokes, gossip and unfounded rumours were floating around the Royal Albert Hall. We won't reprint them here but, needless to say, funny ciggies and Hampstead Heath were being mentioned. George's offstage antics might keep the red tops interested, but once he kicked the show off, backed by a 41-piece orchestra for the opening performance of the London run of his Symphonica tour, his glittering musical pedigree was absolutely centre stage.This was certainly an odd gig though. Often slow, Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There are many ways of breathing new life into Beethoven. Carlos Kleiber used to do it through imagery. He once famously asked his Viennese double basses to play like monkeys during a rehearsal of Beethoven's Seventh. Riccardo Chailly's tactic for his Barbican Beethoven cycle with the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra appears to have been to become, if not monkeyish, then at least a bit of a mischievous teenager. Consequently, his first concert saw him throw out the Classical niceties and fill the hall with impish dash and boyish extremes.Beethoven's Second Symphony gained in stature. With a beefy Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You'd think a lengthy shoot on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe would be any actor's dream, but apparently Ben Miller found making Death in Paradise too hot and uncomfortable. That means he's perfectly cast as DI Richard Poole, a detective from the Metropolitan Police sent (as the drama would have it) to Saint-Marie, a fictional small island near Guadeloupe, to investigate the murder of a fellow British cop, Charlie Hulme.Poole can't stand the Caribbean either, because the light's too bright, the sand is too sandy, and he feels the heat especially acutely because his luggage hasn't arrived Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The source material for a film like The Help - a story about the black maids who worked for white families in the American South and raised their children as their employers busied themselves with making money and playing bridge - would normally be a memoir or a news archive. But The Help is adapted from the novel of the same name by Kathryn Stockett, published in 2009.The book, which has sold more than two million copies, is set in 1963 in Jackson, Mississippi, when segregation was at its height and the civil rights movement just a few years old. Stockett and director Tate Taylor (who Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Spooky coincidences make good drama. Mike Bartlett’s epic follow-up to his highly successful 2010 play Earthquakes in London begins with a mind-bogglingly weird situation: every morning in the metropolis, dozens of people wake up and they’ve all had the same disturbing dream. The play, which opened last night, then goes on to examine what happens when citizens rise up to challenge the system in an era of foreign war and economic austerity.The story is set in a UK that's a bit like a parallel universe, where a Conservative government is led by a woman prime minister who seems bent on Read more ...
fisun.guner
The home, and women’s place within it, gained considerable importance for artists of the Dutch Golden Age. Artists such as Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, Nicholaes Maes and Gerrit Dou are among those who placed women at the centre of the well-ordered domestic realm. They featured as servants and mistresses, nursing mothers and coquettish girls, or as serious young women dedicated to the pursuits of home-making and suitable leisure. After years of conflict and uncertainty, the Dutch Republic emerged in 1648 and the home, the retreat of the newly powerful middle class, seemed naturally to Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The English National Opera were taking quite a gamble with last night's Rameau premiere. The daunting basics? A 250-year-old French opera that hasn't yet been properly adopted by its homeland, let alone by Britain; a mildly autistic mythological plot that eulogises the ordered loyalties of brotherly love over the messy complications of sexual desire; and a director, Barrie Kosky, Intendant at Berlin's Komische Oper, where you're not really allowed to break wind without the help of a dramaturg.Katrin Lea Tag's minimalist set took the gamble one step further. From start to finish, the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
At the newly renamed Harold Pinter Theatre (formerly the Comedy), the inaugural show is a special tribute to the Nobel Prize-winning playwright, who died in 2008. The subject matter of Ariel Dorfman’s play, which won an Olivier Award on its first outing in 1991, is a powerful reminder that Pinter was a human rights activist. He was also a friend of Dorfman so this revival, which stars Thandie Newton and opened last night, is an inspired choice of production.Dorfman, who was born in Argentina and grew up in Chile, wrote a university thesis on the plays of Pinter, so when he created this play Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s been a long time coming, and an extremely nervous wait for millions of fans who grew up on the boy reporter and his alliterating whisky-soaked maritime sidekick. Steven Spielberg first acquired the cinematic rights to The Adventures of Tintin in 1982, the year ET came out. In the interim he’s gone off on tangents featuring war and genocide, dinosaurs and sci-fi. They’ve all been thrillingly different, but all clearly bearing Spielberg’s kitemark. Spielberg may always be faithful to himself, but has a director only now making a habit of adapting from known sources (coming soon: War Horse Read more ...
howard.male
What a relief: Andrew Graham-Dixon got the job of presenting this documentary on one of my favourite British 20th-century artists. If it had been Waldemar Januszczak (sometimes interesting but too gimmick-laden and shouty) or Matthew Collings (sometimes interesting but too fond of the catchy sweeping statement) I would have thought twice about tuning in. But Graham-Dixon understands that the art documentary is not about him, it’s about the artist. And it’s not about trying desperately to come up with a new angle; it’s about bringing the artist alive in a new way to a new audience that isn’t Read more ...