Reviews
igor.toronyilalic
Look past the cum buckets, the trucker pussy, the fuck you-ing and cunt-hungry beasting (librettist Richard Thomas's words, not mine), the mountainous titties and cheap promotional candy that had been confected for the legions of rubbishy celebrity opera virgins scattered in the Royal Opera House audience at last night's world premiere and you will find a profoundly conservative, and mostly not unattractive, new opera in Anna Nicole.Most conservative was the story. Put-upon female has life destroyed for evening's entertainment - ie, classic operatic fallen-woman porn. Ask Violetta, Lulu Read more ...
judith.flanders
Louise Bourgeois died last year at nearly 100, a revered figure: survivor of the Surrealist movement into the 21st century, a pioneer of autobiographical expression, whose fame came only late in life. Tracey Emin, by contrast, found fame early, coming to the attention of the general public in Charles Saatchi’s Sensation show at the Royal Academy while she was still in her thirties. Both, however, work a single-mindedly autobiographical vein – indeed, open their veins figuratively to pour their lives into their art. The idea of a collaborative work, therefore, seems natural.Bourgeois created Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Men. They say these strange creatures never leave the playground. Even when the years have passed, boys stubbornly remain boys, chatting rubbish, competing manfully and finally burning out. In Enda Walsh’s Penelope, which was a hit at the Edinburgh Festival last year and now visits London, four men compete for the love of one woman, and they are as likely to be found bickering over a small barbecued sausage as they are to be seen fighting to the death with knives. The only question is: can they also work together?Penelope, produced by Galway’s Druid theatre company, was commissioned by Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Some of you will know that Wagner and I haven't been seeing eye to eye of late. Last year's Tannhäuser I believed was the end of the road for the two of us. Not quite. With one of the most celebrated Wagner productions of the past two decades returning to the English National Opera last night - Nikolaus Lehnhoff's Parsifal - I decided to give him a final chance. My whole mind, body and soul was primed to repel it, yet I came out almost blubbing.The revelation didn't come immediately - nothing in Wagner comes immediately - though it didn't take long for the music to start having its Read more ...
graeme.thomson
There is little danger of our nation wasting away for the lack of culinary-themed televisual roughage: hairy bikers, domestic goddesses, campaigning wide boys, chicken-liberating poshos, alpha-male bully boys, Michelin-starred French fusspots. Channel hopping some nights feels more like flicking through the world's least coherent cook book.But it’s Masterchef – and its inevitable D-list-led Celebrity offshoot – that has become the firm favourite of the armchair gourmand. It's not fine dining by any stretch of the imagination but it's reliable and terribly moreish. Part contrived reality telly Read more ...
David Nice
It's hard to believe that Yannick Nézet-Séguin could ever turn in a less-than-electrifying concert. According to theartsdesk, he did just that a couple of weeks ago. I wasn't there so I can't comment (though I can credit a rough edge or two). What I do know is that last night was showbusiness as usual: the phenomenal urge to communicate, with a committed diva in tow; the rounding-off and energising of every phrase; and a danger to the music-making, meriting a pop-star reception from the audience at the end, which that live-wire maverick among composers, Hector Berlioz, would have adored.So Read more ...
josh.spero
Inside Inside Job is an interesting film struggling to get out. Sadly, one has to sit through two hours of Financial Meltdown 101 to see it. Narrated by Matt Damon in his serious voice (and if you're anything like me, you'll always be thinking of his Team America caricature), the film starts with the perfect glaciers of Iceland being ravaged as the free market takes its toll. The financial engineering that brought its banks down is exposed, and it's cut to a rock song overlaying swooning shots of New York that would not be out of place in Sex and the City.These first five minutes tell us Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Aylesbury, a town without a theatre, has built itself one - a gleaming, glass-fronted, smack-you-in-the-eye 1,500-seater, driven and supported by the district council. High Wycombe and Milton Keynes must beware, so thin are the pickings these days for the regional theatres. The pity is that the Ballet Boyz’ show The Talent last night was the only night of decent dance programmed in this amazing new venue for half of 2011.This is the desert that the dumbing of box office has led to - swanky new theatres pop up with little but Chinese circus and Russian “fat” ballet to show, while proper Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Their record label describes them rather laboriously as “a Baroque super-group of four superstar Baroque instrumentalists”, but the Retrospect Trio don’t need any fancy titles to prove their quality. Bringing together violinists Sophie Gent and Matthew Truscott (leader of the OAE) and Jonathan Manson on bass viol (principal cello of the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra) under the direction of young harpsichordist Matthew Halls, this ensemble is all about unshowy musicianship. Joined last night by soprano Julia Doyle they offered up some of the best Purcell London is likely to see this year – with Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
News reaches us of discontent within the so-called "travelling community", where not everyone appreciates the portrait of Romany life which has been emerging from Channel 4's hit series. Perhaps they didn't like all that stuff about hairy-knuckled male chauvinism, women being married off as teenagers and kept in the kitchen, and the gypsies' habit of settling disputes by staging punch-ups in car parks."I think the show's a bad thing, and I'm not the only one saying it," complained Hughie Smith, president of the Gypsy Council. Roxy Freeman, a traveller who has written a book called Little Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Based on a novel by Kanae Minato, Tetsuya Nakashima’s provocative, serenely sinister thriller is fuelled by the murderous desire of its teens and the righteous anger of their teacher. Best known for the inebriated mania of Kamikaze Girls and Memories of Matsuko, in Confessions Nakashima trades his outrageous rainbow hues for a distinctly funereal aesthetic. It’s as if a dark veil has been drawn across his signature style, with the film bowed in sombre recognition of its troubling subject matter.Confessions opens on familiar scenes of unruly schoolchildren, in this case Class B, who are all Read more ...
judith.flanders
It is perfectly true that, as Arthur Marshall once said of Ibsen, I am Not a Fun One. A party really is a party without me there. And Shoes, now transferred from Sadler’s Wells, is not much of a party, whether I’m there or not. Conceived in cynicism by its composer/writer Richard Thomas (he admits, no, boasts, that he knew nothing about the subject until after he was commissioned to write the show); acquired in cynicism by Sadler’s Wells (it took a 15-minute pitch from an author who knew nothing about the subject) – what is there to admire, much less like?Not a lot, as it turns out, and what Read more ...