Reviews
Kieron Tyler
Sixty-five-year-old Penny was exceptional. Unfortunately, just how exceptional was revealed after her death from a brain haemorrhage. In life, she was in the minority of people - 29 per cent - who have placed themselves on the Organ Donor Register. Transplant was a sobering, measured examination of what happened to her organs after death. All participants had waived their right to anonymity.Retrieval surgeons found that Penny's heart, liver and kidneys were fully functioning and in perfect condition. Evidence for heart disease is usually expected. Sixty-five is the age limit above which Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Tony Bennett receives a standing ovation just for walking on stage. His band arrive first, then Bennett in loose black suit, white shirt, black tie (not bow), and red handkerchief in breast pocket. He saunters into a spotlight stage right. It’s enough. He laps it up. There’s a real sense of occasion. The worry is that, at 85, he will not be able to deliver, that his voice will be a feeble shadow of its former self. His opening song, “Watch What Happens”, only exacerbates such thoughts as he talk-sings his way through it. Next, though, as he cracks into the Gershwin classic “They All Laughed Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Saying that seven-year-old Sally Hurst (Bailee Madison) is experiencing a nightmare childhood would be a whopping understatement. An anxious child, medicated into submission by her mother, she’s been sent to live with her father in a spooky mansion where tiny teeth-snatchers call to her from the shadows. In Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, first-time director and comic-book artist Troy Nixey - working under the tutelage of fantasy maestro Guillermo del Toro, who produces and co-wrote the screenplay - weaves haunted-house horror with Grimm fairytales and adds an all-American heroine in Scientology Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Is it back from the future or forward to the past? We start in the year 2149, and Earth is overcrowded, polluted and staggering towards extinction. Nobody can breathe outdoors without using a rebreather mask, and most plant and animal life has withered away. Near-derelict tower blocks rot in the sickly ginger twilight, like out-takes from Blade Runner. By an amazing stroke of luck, scientists at the FERMI Particle Accelerator have discovered a fissure in the fabric of time (sheesh, not again), and they've used it to construct a gateway back to the primeval world that existed 85 million Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The human spirit won't be easily vanquished, or so we're led to believe from Cool Hand Luke, which in itself should provide succour to those trapped at this stage adaptation of the novel that inspired the movie - still with me? - in the days and weeks to come. Marc Warren works hard in the role of the famously fettered Luke Jackson that brought Paul Newman a 1967 Oscar nod, and the Hustle star deserves credit first off for getting his American accent down pat.But as adapted by Emma Reeves from the 1965 book from Donn Pearce, who co-authored the film (and was himself put up for an Oscar), the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Dance is eating itself. Or dancers are eating themselves, rather. It's on-trend to defy the idea of the mute dancer, and instead have them verbally explaining themselves, their motivation, their art. This year’s Dance Umbrella launched last night with the “self-contemplation” of Cédric Andrieux, a handsome blond Frenchman, who regales us in a charming murmur for 80 minutes with the story of his career, with danced illustrations.I have nothing against a chap expressing himself to me, especially when he has as gentle and self-deprecating a delivery as Andrieux, but I'm largely with Ray McCooney Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Dogs, horses, cows, sheep, goats and pigs are the creatures that, however minuscule in stature, take pride of place in the fascinating exhibition of Thomas Gainsborough’s imaginary landscapes at the Holburne in Bath, an ideal complement to the nine major Gainsborough portraits in their British picture gallery.Surprisingly for one of the most prominent portrait-painters in all of British art, Gainsborough's animals, lovingly portrayed, their body language based on acute observation, dominate their human counterparts in these landscapes, who are more or less rural stereotypes.The half-dozen Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
William Glock once claimed that Pierre Boulez could literally vomit at music he believed to be substandard. I wonder what he would have made of my friend, who fled at the interval of the opening concert of the Southbank festival on Friday blaming Boulez's Domaines for setting off a panic attack. Her physical response was certainly a welcome corrective to the nonchalance with which the critical world increasingly greets Boulez's language, many of whom still insist that the days of serialism provoking anger or revulsion are in the distant past. Boulez can still upset. He even upset me a Read more ...
howard.male
There’s more than one way to reinterpret or simply embrace the extraordinary wealth of Ethiopian music that Francis Falceto has given us with the still growing Ethiopiques CD series of 1970s Ethio-jazz (as the style has been inadequately labelled). For example, Dub Colossus were seduced by the dissimulating aspect of the music that they felt it shared with dub reggae. And the Heliocentrics embraced its “otherness” over which they imposed their own art-school sensibility. Somewhere between these two approaches comes Switzerland’s Imperial Tiger Orchestra.Switzerland? You query, trying but Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
"Barclaycard? This man's in no state to go shopping!" Thus we remember the credit card commercials which formed the "origin story" of blundering secret agent Johnny English, then known as Richard Latham. Better name in fact, but no matter. Eight years after his big-screen debut, English is back, older and even more stupid.Here's the set-up. Six years earlier, Johnny English was sacked in disgrace by his employers, MI7, following his bungled effort to prevent the assassination of some president or other in Mozambique (we catch a glimpse of the tabloid headline "Doh-Zambique!"). He retired in Read more ...
aleks.sierz
It’s a strange fact that very few plays look at the subject of contemporary British royalty. The past yes, but today very seldom. A notable exception is 1990s playwright Sarah Kane’s visceral account of a fictional royal family in her 1996 play, Phaedra’s Love, a spirited revival of which opened last night at the Arcola Theatre. As you’d expect from this playwright, it is a gruelling evening of joyless sex and horrific violence. But it is also bleakly funny.Set in today’s Britain, the play is a radical updating of Seneca’s Phaedra play. Kane’s version is not a translation, but a completely Read more ...
graham.rickson
Revived with almost indecent haste, Jo Davies’s 2010 production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore now feels even more polished and slick. Slickness is not a derogatory term here; this staging hits the spot in pretty much every way – musically, dramatically and visually.Davies’s shrewdest move is to shift Gilbert’s creaky satire on the excesses of Victorian melodrama forward to the 1920s, a period now more closely associated with the genre – think silent cinema, big moustaches and shiny top hats. There are also several nice nods to 1930s horror films, and a witty sequence of scratchy slides Read more ...