Reviews
mark.kidel
An “Army of Generals” suggests a kind of supergroup, a fighting force made up of leaders rather than followers. If Charles Hazlewood’s band, which has just started a residency at Bristol’s St George's, is such a host, then he presumably is the Generalissimo, primus inter pares, whose mastery is exercised with a showman's display of almost innocent ego.Hazlewood, whose proclamation of intent last week stirred considerable reaction among theartsdesk's users, has chosen as his theme for the residency a dialogue between classical music and contemporary work, dubbing it Abstractions and Read more ...
Russ Coffey
The annals of rock’n’roll are littered with complacency, fading stars, and acts who’ve had it and then lost it, forever. So, after 20 years, what makes the Manics different? How come they’re still turning out hit albums? Possibly it’s their hand-on-heart, Welsh-valley principles. Maybe it’s the way they find libraries as interesting a subject as love. Or perhaps it’s the way that they keep recovering from the brink of near self-destruction. Listening to them last night, though, something else became clear.In their souls they still appear to be 19. It showed in their choice of first song, “ Read more ...
David Nice
Tradition has often bedded down very comfortably in the Russian performing arts, which ought to be an asset in the current vortex but brings mixed blessings. Detailed ensemble work, the Moscow Sovremennik Theatre's strongest asset, takes time to develop, yet actors with roles for life may be slow to yield to fresh blood. So does theatre legend Galina Volchek's 21-year-old production of a tough literary adaptation about women learning the "new language" of the terrible year 1937 on the way to Siberia merit a standing ovation? If you're a Russian with a long memory, yes; but taking the Read more ...
fisun.guner
Austere, elegant, impressive. Edwin Lutyens’s Whitehall Cenotaph is a thing of beauty, a monument that embodies permanence in the face of all that is impermanent, and solidity in the face of all that is ephemeral. It’s an inspired decision to bring it indoors, for inside a hushed gallery, away from the rush of traffic and stripped of its flags and sculpted wreathes, Lutyens’s memorial can at last be properly admired as a work of art.Of course, it’s only a replica, three-quarters the size of the original. But it seems less of a reproduction, more of a ghostly doppelgänger, its sheeny Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Actor/director Peter Mullan describes NEDS, his third film as director (after Orphans and The Magdalene Sisters), as “personal but not autobiographical”, although it undoubtedly draws heavily on his working-class upbringing in 1970s Glasgow. He was, like his lead character John McGill, the academically gifted younger brother of a local hard man, determined to do well at school and escape the violent life he saw around him. Their father, as in the film, was a “raping, bullying alcoholic”.Actor/director Peter Mullan describes NEDS, his third film as director (after Orphans and The Magdalene Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Becky Shaw is lonely, unattractively needy, nervous, hungry for affection, affirmation, security. We are all Becky Shaw. That’s a gross generalisation, of course – but then, generalisation is the language of Gina Gionfriddo’s play, which premiered in Louisville, Kentucky, prior to a 2009 off-Broadway run.A smart-mouthed, brittle comedy about the slippery politics of sex, dependency and what we choose to call love, the piece is crammed with zingers, but often feels like little more than a US sitcom: a well-crafted, sharply written sitcom, but for all its style a work that seems more concerned Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
We’ve all seen singers go wrong. Forgetting words, missing entries, skipping verses – it happens often enough, and is generally cause for little more than some awkward laughter and a second attempt. Never, however, have I seen a wrong entry (as ill-luck would decree, in the only sacred work of the programme) greeted with a resonant expostulation of “Oh, shit” from the performer, followed by minor audience uproar and many apologies. It wasn’t the finest moment of the evening for Juan Diego Flórez, but – loath though I am to admit it – it wasn’t the worst either.The familiar Flórez recital tics Read more ...
David Nice
Have you ever found onstage nudity sexy? Unlike a friend of mine, for whom the epiphany of the National Theatre's Bent was the giant member in the first five minutes, I honestly haven't. Sensuous, once, in the Maly Theatre's skinny-dipping Platonov, and even sweet, in ATS Theatre's strong adaptation of Forster's Maurice. Since the theatre's Artistic Director Peter Bull, evidently a good guy, was staging this, Jack Heifner's all-male updating of Schnitzler's La Ronde, I'd hoped that some good things would come of it. Unfortunately, for me at any rate, Seduction was neither erotic, very funny Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The up - which I’m sorry not to have reported on before it ended last night - was the Spanish puppetry troupe Teatro Corsario, who made their hour’s strut and fret upon the stage in the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room a pleasingly diverting wee horror tale, La Maldición de Poe (The Curse of Poe), filled with gory corpses and spectral lighting and awful bloodthirsty characters.Mashing up three Poe stories - The Black Cat, The Murders in the Rue Morgue and the ditty Annabel Lee - the little team of five came up with an impressively populated narrative where Edgar fell in love with sick Annabel Read more ...
Ismene Brown
They’re calling Black Swan BS on some of the dance websites, and while they’re right about the dancing, this is a whale of an enjoyable outing to the flicks: lush, Gothic, psycho and flavoursomely OTT. I don’t much care that Natalie Portman can’t dance for toffee - Tobey Maguire probably didn’t satisfy jockeys with his style in Seabiscuit, or Hilary Swank the boxing clubs in Million Dollar Baby. It’s down to the character study, and who wants well-balanced yoghurt-eaters at a ballet movie anyway? We want girly fantasy, motherly obsession, blood in the shoes, Carrie at the ballet, and Darren Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Luke Haines holds a small cassette player to the microphone, switches it on and the sounds of birds are heard. It’s “Me and the Birds”, one of his new Outsider Music songs. His old Britpop-era band The Auteurs were guitar pop. His next outfit, Baader Meinhof, were edgier, noisier. After that, Black Box Recorder were artier. But this is beyond any of that. He sings of drinking cocktails in the lounge of a Travelodge with the birds he’s heard outside his window. The Suede reunion wasn’t like this.Although The Auteurs cropped up just before Britpop, Haines was more arch than the aiming-high Blur Read more ...
David Nice
Now I know why the BBC Symphony Orchestra slunk so easily into Piazzolla tango mode last Friday: they'd danced it under Latin American instruction four years ago. It's all part of their education department's annual Diverse Orchestras week, where performers from another culture come to open the players' fantasy and the onlookers get to learn something into the bargain. And learning has never been more fun than it was last night in the Tabernacle, Notting Hill's vibrant arts centre, where the Fez Andalusian Orchestra under one of the world's great string players, Mohamed Briouel, set a zinging Read more ...