Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
This November, experimental theatre company Hydrocracker will bring The New World Order – a site-specific cycle of five Pinter plays – to a former government building in Hackney. Doubtless the immersive impact will add disquieting emphasis to Pinter’s dark tales of totalitarian power and abuse of authority, but if you prefer your Pinter a served a little straighter, briefer and with greater intimacy, then the Young Vic’s miniature double-bill One For The Road/Victoria Station offers a fairly devastating warm-up act.Not seen out in public together since Pinter himself directed their London Read more ...
fisun.guner
In recent years it seems we have seen an awful lot of Gerhard Richter. There have been three major exhibitions in London well within the last seven or eight years. One is hardly complaining, since there is always a demand to see “the world’s most influential living painter”, as he is often claimed to be (and not without some reason). But in each case these have, and with varied success, focused on one particular, narrow aspect of Richter’s output: portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, colour charts at the Serpentine, intimate “scrapbook” photos, many obscured with paint, at the Read more ...
ash.smyth
Since he hit the ground limping, seven years back, diagnostic genius Gregory House, MD, has been shot, drugged, trapped under a collapsing building, exposed to deadly viruses (his own doing), prosecuted, fired, committed to a psychiatric unit, and generally killed off and resurrected in many and variously cunning ways. He has never (yet) been pushed over Niagara Falls (we don't have to go into the whole House/Holmes thing, right?), but when the last season culminated with House driving a suburban saloon through his boss's living-room window, it did seem like the show might Read more ...
emma.simmonds
If you can judge a man by his friends then the volatile Joseph would be something of a contradiction. His best mate is looking death in the eye, riddled with sickness and regret (and by all accounts left that way by the lifestyle they both shared). Then there’s the wheeler-dealer prone to racist tirades. On the redemptive side is the charming, if porcelain-fragile friendship that he strikes up with dedicated Christian Hannah. It’s this friendship - and that which he also forms with a young, isolated boy on his estate – on which the film pivots.In Tyrannosaur Peter Mullan plays embittered Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It’s been a long-standing source of surprise to me how Nerina Pallot continues to operate a whisker under the radar. From the get-go, 10 years back, she’s had the voice, songs and looks to be a star. Maybe a decade ago was the wrong time for her. But now, with her musical style residing somewhere between Laura Marling and Adele, surely she’s perfect for today’s market. The critics sure think so. In the last few months, column inches have argued that her new album’s the one to really break her into the mainstream. I agree. But when she walked out on stage at the Shepherds Bush Empire I couldn’ Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Lexington on Pentonville Road is a pub with an easy-going Deep South style. The main bar looks like the sort of place where cattle barons might relax with basque-clad floozies after a hard week kicking homesteaders off their land. Instead, however, the place has a smattering of people, mostly in their twenties, a number with large sideburns and Stooges T-shirts, listening to a New Zealander called Delaney Davidson playing solo blues.Davidson is a cross between one-man-band Son of Dave and The Cramps. He samples himself, plays off a rhythm track and drops drily amusing remarks in-between Read more ...
David Benedict
You can accuse Alfred Uhry's 1987 play Driving Miss Daisy of many things – being overtly sentimental is top of the charge sheet – but you certainly cannot claim that it’s a case of false advertising. Even if, like this critic, you missed the original stage version or any of its revivals, not to mention the Oscar-winning movie, it’s painfully clear from the opening scene in which the heroine is forced to hire a chauffeur that this is not just precisely but wholly a play about Miss Daisy being driven. With the, excuse me, Rolls-Royce casting of Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones, it Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Fiona Shaw's new production of The Marriage of Figaro for the ENO focuses on the theme of entrapment. Her first victim? A noisy bee. Don Basilio finds himself so harassed by its buzzing, he confines it to the body of a harpsichord. Magically, a few seconds later, the low hum reappears - on strings and bassoons.It's classic Shaw: a clever, symbolic, funny and possibly superfluous bit of theatrical punnery. She doesn't overdo the anomie. The political and class dimensions are but lightly touched upon. But there is certainly a nasty tension to the Almaviva household. Were they as upset about the Read more ...
judith.flanders
Ex-voto paintings are a tradition in Mexico, an offering of gratitude to God and the saints for answered prayers, row after row of them lining the walls of Mexican churches, testifying to the congregations’ devotion, and to the enduring link between man and the spiritual. In artistic terms, however, these paintings, which have been created from the 16th century onwards, are one of the great national archives of folk art, extraordinary depictions of ordinary people: a moving, comic, tragic, epic narrative that is not to be missed.Ex-votos, or retablos, began to be painted in the 16th century, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It takes more than utmost craft and rich personality to hold the stage as a soloist - it takes a touch of divine self-belief, which Akram Khan has never displayed to more magnetic effect before than in his new solo DESH. Actually solo is too small a word for this epic, lavish display of the starpower that Khan now emits in the world of dance theatre.This production looks as if it has cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to stage, with its luxuriously liberal video animations by Yeast Culture, celestial lighting by Michael Hulls, an ambitiously created live/recorded soundscore by Jocelyn Pook Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Conor McPherson has set his latest play at an interesting point in Irish – and European – history. It is 1822, post-Napoleonic wars, and Ireland is in an economic mess, with impoverished peasants facing the failure of their crops for the second year in a row, unable to pay the rent to the Ascendancy landlords living in the “Big House”. Lady Madeleine Lambroke (Fenella Woolgar), mistress of the slowly decaying Mount Prospect, is about to marry off her teenage daughter, Hannah, to an English marquis, who will pay off her debts and thereby save the estate.Hannah (Emily Taaffe), who saw her Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Waiting for Woody Allen to turn in a half-decent movie is bit like inching through a recession. The green shoots of recovery are constantly hoped for, but slow to show. Now and then the new one will come along and seem marginally less dire, but prove all too chimerical. How many of the films in the last decade does anyone remember for the right reasons? And don't say Vicky Cristina Barcelona with its atrocious voiceover and pervy lesbo snog. So unremittingly abject were Allen’s preceding European films set in London that anything would have looked like the Venus de Milo standing next to them. Read more ...