Reviews
fisun.guner
The Turner Prize has headed to the North East. It’ll be back in London next year, thence to Derry for 2013. Tate Britain plan to host the prize biennially, with a regional public gallery presenting it in the years in-between. This must be hailed as good news for those who complain of London-centricity. But as well as gaining new audiences, I do hope the prospect of leaving the capital won’t put others off, for this year the Turner Prize exhibition is looking very good indeed, and for that the Baltic must be commended for doing a fine curatorial job.In fact, I can’t remember the Turner Prize Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Maybe it’s a quirk of night-filming that the minister’s eyes look blood-red. But the earth in the Democratic Republic of Congo is Martian too, especially near the hell-hole where many of the minerals that power our mobile phones and laptops are mined. Danish director Frank Piasecki Poulsen enters that hole, motivated it seems by unusually visceral guilt that, even in liberal Scandinavia, casually used electronic paraphernalia is linked to terrible crimes.As we often half-hear, 5 million people have been killed in the last 15 years of civil war in the DRC; 300,000 women raped. This is death on Read more ...
judith.flanders
It may be that there is no sunnier place than Ashton’s La fille mal gardée. Certainly there is no sunnier ballet. It speaks not of great drama, nor ecstasy, but instead of gentle happiness, of quiet content and loving kindness. Not, one might think, the stuff of great art. But one would be – one is – wrong, and Ashton is happy to set us straight.The standard tale of a girl whose mother wants her to marry a rich simpleton, and how she instead gets her way and marries a simple farmer, is not the point. Ashton takes this and embroiders it with magic – a dash of music hall, a splash of folk Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is a strangely kaleidoscopic approach to documentary. A selection of recently unearthed footage and interviews which shows the Black Power movement in the USA through the eyes of idealistic Swedish film-makers, now re-edited and framed with the voices and music of both modern and veteran black radical cultural figures, it provides a disorienting, shifting set of superimposed viewpoints of a period in which in any case change seemed to be the only certainty.The footage itself is gripping and often truly eye-opening, particularly when it's at its most ordinary. The stories of dramatic Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Time is a rare privilege in a choreographer’s career - in Britain, anyway. We don’t have the equivalents of Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham or Paul Taylor, who build careers into their eighties and beyond, with mighty efforts from private patrons and friendly art giants of their generation (Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Isamu Noguchi et al). UK choreographers are fortunate to get 10 years until the Arts Council deems it time to push them out of the subsidised nest, to vanish in their late thirties, most of them.Hence the interesting anomaly of Richard Alston, who stands out as the senior Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Rich with cinematic life but existing doggedly in the shadow of death, Lynne Ramsay’s epically disquieting adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s bestseller is fluid and imaginatively realised. It's an emotional ambush, but executed with extraordinary precision. Steeped in a magnificent malice and caked in frosty beauty, We Need to Talk About Kevin deals with the lead up to and aftermath of a high-school massacre, and gives us every parent’s worst nightmare – spawning a monster.In We Need to Talk About Kevin Tilda Swinton plays Eva, the mother of the titular antagonist. Though it darts back and forth Read more ...
aleks.sierz
“Why does anyone ever have kids?” By the time a character in April De Angelis’s new comedy utters this exasperated exclamation, there are many in the audience - whether parents or children, or both - who must have had the same thought. And more than once in the evening. For this exceptionally hilarious and perceptive play, which opened last night, not only tickles the insides of your arm, but also lights up the senses and then gives you a quick cuddle, too.Hilary is 50; she lives with her husband Mark and 15-year-old daughter Tilly. It’s a nice middle-class family. So when Tilly brings home Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Reading the pre-transmission blurb, you might have formed the impression that Holy Flying Circus was going to offer new insights into the controversy that erupted around Monty Python's supposedly blasphemous Life of Brian movie when it was released in 1979. Instead, its 90 minutes were a thin gruel of flabby fantasy and caricature.The individual Pythons were impersonated with slavish accuracy, notably Charles Edwards's Michael Palin, so much so that Life of Brian became merely an excuse for a limping parade of in-jokes and weak riffs on the Monty Python legacy. The incontinent zaniness Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sharon Gless is best known for her role as Detective Christine Cagney in Cagney & Lacey, and then to another generation in the American version of Queer as Folk and currently in the drama Burn Notice. Gless's sexy voice and feisty demeanour in several of her roles has prompted many a fantasy over the years – for men and women, gay and straight - so it's apt that the actress, now a very fit-looking 68 and still in possession of a throaty laugh, is playing a woman who discovers her sexuality in her late sixties.A Round-Heeled Woman is an adaptation of Jane Juska’s bestselling book of the Read more ...
fisun.guner
The scale of the operation was hard to take in, as was the extent of the cover-up. Between 1940 and 1990, it’s estimated that up to 30,000 babies were trafficked in Spain. It started under the military dictatorship of Franco, but it ended long after its fall, though why the sudden cut-off was given as 1990 we never learned. What we did learn was this: that newborn babies were systematically taken by mothers deemed to be ideologically or morally unfit, and they were often bought by couples for cash. Within hours of giving birth these mothers were told that their babies had died.So grotesque Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There are various disinterments of supposedly iconic dance-makers going on in this year's Dance Umbrella (some live ones more dead than the dead ones), but no one is going to beat for sheer éclat Lucinda Childs’ astonishingly beautiful minimalist 1979 creation Dance, on this week at the Barbican.Minimalism is now a comfortable old sofa for today’s generations of dance-watchers, often handed very small platefuls of ideas, but this 60-minute piece has an understated poise and rich cleverness that shows American modern dance at the very top of its artistic game.Typically of this cool blonde US Read more ...
aleks.sierz
John Osborne was the great founding father of contemporary new writing for the theatre. In 1956, his Look Back in Anger changed British drama for ever, and his subsequent work explored the subjects of failure and national identity in language that is both highly rhetorical and at the same time feels as if it is torn from the gut. His 1964 play about the washed-up London solicitor Bill Maitland, which opened last night in Jamie Lloyd’s revival, is one of his masterpieces.The story shows the mental disintegration of the middle-aged Maitland during two days of personal and professional hell. It Read more ...