Reviews
Demetrios Matheou
It's been a decade since Lisandro Alonso’s last film, Jauja, which signalled the Argentine's first collaboration with professional actors, notably a magnificent Viggo Mortensen. The pair reprise their collaboration in Eureka, in the first of three stories tenuously connected by dashes of mysticism and the director’s customary interest in the fate of indigenous people.I’m a great admirer of this director, one of the brightest lights of the Argentine renaissance of the early Noughties, and a leading exponent of slow cinema. Alonso's films – from La libertad and Los Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Perhaps the most memorable of the stage designs Peter Pabst created for Pina Bausch is back in London after nearly 20 years: a sea of erect pink silk carnations, the Nelken of the title. It’s canonical that there are 8,000 of them, but only the backstage team know the truth of that. As the piece opens, dancers start to appear in formal attire, carrying chairs, picking their way through the flowers and sitting down in silence, expectantly. Then Richard Tauber sings Franz Léhar’s “Schön ist die Welt” (The world is beautiful). Over the next two hours the piece will turn that idea into a Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Judy Chicago created Birth Project in the 1980s, recognising with typical perspicacity that the favouring of “the paint strokes of the great male painters” over “the incredible array of needle techniques that women have used for centuries” has implications far beyond the precedence of one art form over another. She saw that a gendered hierarchy of art forms had contributed to the erasure of female experience, and pointed to the “iconographic void” where images of childbirth in western art might be.Appearing early on in the show, Birth Tear/Tear, 1982, is an extraordinary evocation of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was only a matter of time before Bob Marley got his own posthumous biopic, and One Love isn’t the worst you’ll see. For instance, it’s miles ahead of the Elton John flick Rocketman, and at least it’s an hour shorter than Baz Luhrmann’s bloated Elvis misfire.However, turning the life and artistry of a “soul rebel, natural mystic” into a mainstream film biography was always going to involve compromises and over-simplifications. Director Reinaldo Marcus Green (who helmed the King Richard tennis movie) has corralled a batch of screenwriters including Terence The Sopranos Winter. They’ve Read more ...
Gary Naylor
So, a jukebox musical celebrating the apotheosis of the White Saviour, the ultimate carnival of rock stars’ self-aggrandisement and the Boomers’ biggest bonanza of feelgood posturing? One is tempted to stand opposite The Old Vic, point at the punters going in and tell anyone within earshot, “Tonight Thank God it’s them instead of you”. Such a reaction was obviously on John O’Farrell’s mind when writing the book for this new musical and he spikes those guns (to some extent) by using a device that is occasionally clumsy, but just about does the job. Jemma (Naomi Katiyo) is our sceptical Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Impassive, immovable, relentless – Mads Mikkelsen’s Ludvig Kahlen, a fatherless army captain turned sodbuster in Nikolai Arcel’s The Promised Land, recalls the Hollywood Western’s most obdurate “rugged individuals”.At the peak of his powers in Nikolaj Arcel’s suspenseful saga about a territorial feud in 1750s Denmark, the star saves his weathered Silesian Wars campaigner from becoming a John Wayne-like monolith. Battlefield veteran Kahlen is a stranger to tender emotions; their impact flickers on his Mount Rushmore face, but so imperceptibly you couldn’t swear to it. It's an uncanny Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The frocks, the pearls, the chicest branding of any perfume in the world… Sorry, this is not what The New Look is about, for those who swooned at the V&A’s recent Chanel exhibition. The title promises a different focus, on the designer who in 1947 was credited with the “new look” in his first solo collection: Christian Dior. His creations were intended to make France dream again after the miseries of the four-year Nazi occupation. Corsets were resurrected, waistlines cinched-in, full skirts swirled in sumptuous fabrics. The look spoke of a romantic elegance lost during the war years Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
To judge by the post-interval empty seats near me, some of the Cadogan Hall audience had turned up last night solely to hear Nikolai Lugansky play Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto. Well, the more fool them. For sure they would have enjoyed their not so-brief encounter with a truly distinguished Russian pianist – noble standard-bearer for a grand tradition – who gave a finely-polished, well-shaped rendition of this beloved old story (on the eve of Valentine’s Day, too). However, any early quitters would have missed the generous panoply of French orchestral showpieces gift-wrapped for us by Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novella The Picture of Dorian Gray has given the world a trope built for flattery, along the lines of: “You look so young, you must have a portrait growing old in your attic”. But how many who use this line have read the text itself? Kip Williams of the Sydney Theatre Company has and has retooled it inventively for a 21st century audience. What emerges is a dazzling display of virtuoso acting and technical wizardry. And it isn’t just gratuitous whizz-bangery. Williams is making a serious argument for the tale’s modernity by telling it via contemporary technology.At Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The word “immersive” is overused. When an immersive experience can be anything from a foreign language course to a trip down the Amazon on a headset, what might immersive dance involve? Not watching from a plush-covered seat, probably, and the dance not happening on a stage.The Canadian choreographer Robert Binet has thought hard about how to effect greater proximity of dancer and spectator, short of the performers sitting in our laps. His project Dark With Excessive Bright, opening the Royal Ballet’s Festival of New Choreography, is a hugely imaginative, at times thrilling, attempt to bridge Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Awarded the best director prize at Cannes last year, Anh Hung Tran has served up cinema’s latest hymn to gastronomy, The Taste of Things. Tasting (and smelling) what’s on the screen is obviously impossible, but even so Tran provides as total a sensory experience as a film can of the religion of haute cuisine and its acolytes. The piece is delicately beautiful on many levels. Visually, it's a panorama of late 19th century genteel country living, in a house with a vast kitchen garden where people uproot celeriac plants and stick them in wooden trugs, lunch al fresco at a madly long table Read more ...
David Kettle
In terms of conveying monumental events using small-scale means, Edinburgh’s Tortoise in a Nutshell visual theatre company has form. Their 2013 Feral, for example, depicted the social breakdown of an apparently idyllic seaside town using puppetry and a lovingly assembled miniature set, to quietly devastating effect.Their new show Ragnarok – a collaboration with Norway’s Figurteatret i Nordland, based in the far-flung Lofoten Islands – goes quite a lot further, and proved a powerful climax to the ten-day Manipulate festival of animation, puppetry and visual theatre running across the city. Read more ...