Reviews
Sam Marlowe
The spinning roulette wheel, the revolver, the devil’s mask, and above all that lissom semi-naked female gyrating in silhouette against flickering infernal flames: we all remember the opening titles to Tales of the Unexpected, which made its first TV appearance in 1979. Anyone who has also read the stories that spawned the series can vouch for their sublime slipperiness, the wicked, cackling glee that rattles through their understated prose, their winkling out of the awful and the uncanny in what appear socially ordinary situations.Now, in a follow-up to last year’s hit show Ghost Stories – Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This month we have some unjustly hyped rubbish electro-pop, some unjustly ignored brilliant eletcro-pop, some postmodern retro-disco, some dubstep, some grime, some sampledelic New York punk, and, at the top of the pile, one of Britain's brightest young actors proves he's equally adept on the microphone. Thomas H Green and Joe Muggs plough loudly through the lot with glee and the odd barbed word.Riz MC All in the Ghetto (Confirm/Ignore)
So actors shouldn't try to become hip-hop MCs, right? Remember Warren Beatty in Bulworth? Riz Ahmed, however, was an MC long before he made his name with a Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The second play in this venue’s ambitious Schools mini-season is the first drama to tackle the currently contentious subject of Free Schools. While the earlier play, John Donnelly’s The Knowledge, was a powerful account of how a young teacher is blooded in her encounters with a group of unruly kids, the second, by Steve Waters, focuses more on parents, and shows how a fortysomething teacher, Rachel, joins a group of middle-class west Londoners in order to set up a Free School.Rachel is under stress. Martin, her ex, has a new lover, and so he wants to leave London and move into the countryside Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
For us Ramistes the brilliance came as no surprise. But did the genius come across to the uninitiated? This new production of Castor et Pollux, one of Rameau's finest tragédie en musique, was the Baroque composer's Austrian stage premiere. Would the Theater an der Wien's audience look past the oddities and archaisms and unfamiliarities of Rameau's 300-year-old musical and dramatic language and embrace the radical nature of his leggy recitatives and proto-Romantic ebb and flow? No question. This was the theatre that embraced the premieres of Beethoven's Third and Fifth Read more ...
joe.muggs
Club music has always been hard to keep track of, and never more so than in the current climate of constant genre meltdown and cross-fertilisation. Which is why the DJ's art is more important than ever, particularly in the case of scene figureheads like the indefatigable Gilles Peterson – known for over 20 years as a patron of all things jazzy, but lately proving brilliantly adept at reaching all corners of what he refers to as “left-field dance music”. Shows like his are ideal – necessary, even – for nurturing, contextualising and showcasing new generation genre-agnostic talents like Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The puppets appearing in LIMF this year are by no means all child-friendly - after the mild kiddy-horror of Teatro Corsario and their hand-manipulated Bunraku creatures, the return of the much more disturbing imagination of Patrick Sims, founder and governing mad scientist of Buchinger’s Boot Marionettes, was my most-looked-for event. The unhinged strangeness of Armature of the Absolute and of Shellachrymellaecum still rattles discomfitingly around in the darker corners of my memory from time to time, scratchy, dusty flutterings of skeletal critters, tiny fairy babies sobbing in jars of Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s stunning, painfully sincere - if somewhat laborious - latest is a heartfelt paean to fatherhood, built around an agonising escalation of misery. It is bolstered by a mesmerising performance from Javier Bardem as a terminally ill man experiencing physical deterioration alongside spiritual elevation, who bridges the gap between this life and the next.Biutiful is set in Santa Coloma, a deprived district of Barcelona populated primarily by those on society’s fringes. Javier Bardem plays Uxbal, the father of two young children and one of the cogs in a criminal machine Read more ...
howard.male
Don’t you just hate it when your favourite cult show becomes everybody’s favourite cult show, and then to make matters worse even the damned Americans embrace it? But how could you not love a scarier, bloody version of the sitcom Spaced, or a funnier version of the horror movie Let the Right One In? Yes, the latter does sound particular unlikely, yet in 2008 Toby Whithouse managed to create a central trio of characters who are first and foremost endearing and achingly vulnerable, and only secondly a ghost, a werewolf and a vampire.Lenora Crichlow plays the goofily sexy, touchingly optimistic Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The return of the Royal Ballet’s Swan Lake production coincides with the tumult over the film Black Swan, about which the company’s marketing department must be pretty pleased, even if some of the dancers aren’t. The chief surprise for any newcomers drawn to the ballet by the film, obsessing as it does about the leading ballerina, must be how long it takes to meet the Swan Queen at all.An entire act goes by of the Prince having a party before the scene changes to the lake of swans, and it’s in this first act, long before the Swan Queen herself must step on stage, that a company proves its Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“There’s no situation in the world that can’t be passed off with small talk,” claims hostess extraordinaire Olivia Brown in Terence Rattigan’s Less Than Kind. It’s a maxim that could well serve as Rattigan’s theatrical epitaph, the philosophy that allows him to smuggle desperation, frustration and steel-capped social critique in amongst the silk peignoirs and smoking jackets of his drama. In celebration of the centenary of this newly fashionable playwright’s birth, the London stage is to be crowded with his work. Treats from Sienna Miller, Trevor Nunn, Simon Russell Beale and Thea Sharrock Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's a strange mixture, this Tudors malarkey. The opening episode of the fourth and supposedly final series spent an age spinning through the back story as if earnestly trying to educate us in the history of the bloodthirsty English ruling family. Then the credits rolled and everything returned to business as usual, in other words murder, lust, sadism, gluttony, treachery and avarice.It makes for a televisual mixture bursting with calories and MSG, especially when combined with the opulent camerawork and Kerrygold Country Irish locations. It's a formula which has plainly rubbed off on other Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A programme of French music under the baton of the LPO’s talented young principal guest conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin should be a treat. Nézet-Séguin’s affinity for French textures and gestures has already been amply proved, as has the orchestra’s own aptitude for them, yet whatever was happening to the Fauré Requiem last night at the Royal Festival Hall was neither polished nor delightful. To attribute it simply to a bad day might be the kindest thing, but when you take into account the sold-out hall, the Saturday-night profile of the concert and all the people who had come to London’s Read more ...