Reviews
Markie Robson-Scott
“It’s an injustice of nature that I haven’t become an athlete and it’s an injustice of nature that we do not have wings,” says German director Werner Herzog, aged 81, sounding characteristically intense.Who else, muses Wim Wenders, one of the many talking heads in Thomas von Steinaeker’s exhilarating documentary, has succeeded in “inventing” their own accent in a way that the whole world imitates and enjoys? Herzog is a “truly mythological creature” and has, he says, shaped the American perception of Germans like no one else. Though no one else is quite like Herzog.His films – he’s the Read more ...
David Kettle
Evil walks among us. But it doesn’t arrive courtesy of mad scientists, bubbling potions and horrifying transformations. Instead, it comes from ordinary people surrendering themselves to their basest desires and resentments. Even worse, doing that feels… good.Anyone expecting jump scares and hideous, barely human creatures from Jekyll and Hyde at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre – boiled down from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella into an intense 70-minute solo show by Scottish writer and performer Gary McNair – might be disappointed, at least partially. Indeed, there’s quite a bit about McNair’s Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Waiting in the National Theatre’s foyer on press night, a space teeming with people speaking different languages, boasting different heritages – London in other words – news came through that leading members of the government had resigned because the proposed Rwanda bill was not harsh enough. Looking across the Thames, one could not help but imagine what this city would have looked like without its immigrants, its trade, its wealth, the skyscrapers, streets and opportunities they represent built on that 1000 year old continuing story. Thinking of my own Anglo-Swedish sons, for neither the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
British Theatre abounds in forgotten writers. And in ones whose early work is too rarely revived. One such is Michael Hastings, best known for Tom & Viv, his 1984 biographical drama about TS Eliot and his wife Vivienne, so in theory it’s great to see this playwright’s 1956 debut, Don’t Destroy Me, being revived at the Arcola by director Tricia Thorns’ Two’s Company, whose remit is the discovery and resuscitation of long-ignored work.First staged in the same year as John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, the play is an anguished Jewish family story, but is it any good?Set in a Brixton flat in Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
We’re used to the idea of 19th century ballets being updated, but the Giselle currently presented by English National Ballet takes it the other way.This production, itself more than 50 years old, offers the closest possible experience of a Romantic ballet as it might have been in the mid-1800s – minus the gas lighting and noisy stage machinery. It’s as if a thick layer of dust has been blown from an old, foxed etching, revealing its delicate lines and textures, heightening its emotional force.The specialness of Mary Skeaping’s production – the culmination of a lifetime’s research – drew Read more ...
stephen.walsh
There were a lot of horns on display in the BBC NOW’s latest concert in Cardiff’s Hoddinott Hall. Brahms’s Second Symphony has four of them, and so does the Elegy for Brahms that Parry wrote on hearing of Brahms’s death in 1897. Gavin Higgins’s Horn Concerto, whose world premiere formed the programme’s centrepiece, has no less than five.It was a horny concert, in the nicest sense, but even in that other sense that nice people don’t mention, such is Brahms at his most – shall we say – virile.Higgins is himself a horn-player, so his concerto is not just a passing commission but clearly Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Violinist Jonas Ilias-Kadesha was placed front and centre of the publicity for this concert. This is his first season concert with the SCO, though back in 2019 he stood in for an indisposed soloist at short notice for one of their European tours. Inviting him back is a vote of confidence, so I was looking forward to hearing him as soloist in Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 and Ravel’s Tzigane.His Mozart turned out to be a very mixed bag, however. It began well, with clipped, precise playing from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in the opening tutti, and an improvisatory opening flourish from Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Bull And The Lion was originally released in 1976 by Jo'burg, a South African label which opened-up for business in 1973 with a couple of singles and the first album by black singer Margaret Singana. Her debut LP was titled Lady Africa. The same year, the imprint issued the second single by Rabbitt, a white pop-rock band whose guitarist Trevor Rabin became internationally known when he played with Manfred Mann and then joined Yes.Jo'burg, it seems, was not bound by genre limitations and the strictures of working within Apartheid-era South Africa. After 1973, Singana and Rabbitt remained Read more ...
David Nice
Those were happy days back in 2014 when, justifiably flushed with the success of the Royal Opera’s Tristan und Isolde revival, director Christof Loy, music director Antonio Pappano and soprano Nina Stemme mooted possibly the toughest role challenge of them all, that of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s vengeful obsessive Elektra. Yet nearly a decade is a long time in the life of a dramatic soprano, and on last night’s evidence, it's come too late in London.The music drama might have carried it, but oddly, given Loy’s track record, nothing that happens onstage matches the focused intensity and spine- Read more ...
Gary Naylor
It is no surprise that the phrase “Witch Hunt” is Donald Trump’s favoured term to describe his legal travails. Leaving aside its connotations of a malevolent state going after an innocent victim whilst in the throes of a self-serving moral panic, it plays into a founding psychodrama of the USA - the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. Arthur Miller’s play based on those events, The Crucible, is now embedded in the high school curriculum keeping the flame alive, so it makes sense for Talene Monahon to write a prequel from a feminist perspective and, after a run in New York, it has reached the Read more ...
Robert Beale
Reviving Giles Havergal’s 2013 production from its “Festival of Britten” of that year, Opera North have an Albert Herring that’s both immersive and intimate, to quote their own publicity.Immersive because it was designed specifically for the refurbished Howard Assembly Room inside the Grand Theatre buildings in Leeds, with the audience mainly on two sides of the long performance space, with a few at the narrow end furthest from the 13-piece orchestra; intimate because it’s all very close-up, the action taking place often only a few feet away from us. (It isn’t going to tour, unlike the other Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Nailah Hunter’s debut album occupies a domain where trip-hop, Lana Del Rey were she recording in a deep, echo-filled cave and ambient-slanted pop overlap. There’s a kinship with FKA Twigs and Julia Holter, but Hunter’s propensity to channel what feels like a mystical experience means that Lovegaze is more inscrutable than what’s generated by first impressions.Her voice is distant, a low-ish soprano set in a wash of synths. Pattering percussion and the glissando of her Celtic harp pierce the aural mist. On the relatively sparsely arranged “Adorned” – which has a slight Alice Coltrane feel – Read more ...