Reviews
graeme.thomson
It’s not so much the children of mad celebs I feel sorry for as their animals. The private zoo stuffed with exotic, non-indigenous wildlife is a sure sign of money, power and hubris run riot. The tigers and chimps at the Neverland ranch became powerful symbols of Michael Jackson’s dislocation. Similarly, last night's Storyville told how an abandoned brood of pet hippos have come to define the worst excesses of the late Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar.Escobar was not a conventional star, but he enjoyed all the trappings of celebrity: wealth, glamour, infamy. He was hailed as a hero at Read more ...
aleks.sierz
At a failing secondary school in Tilbury, Essex, Zoe arrives as an ambitious, newly qualified teacher who hopes to make a difference to her unruly pupils. But although she impresses her learning mentor, Maz, and Harry, the soon-to-retire acting head, she gradually gets into an emotional tangle. Neither her attractive manner, nor her will to succeed, nor her teaching skills are able to prevent her from making some bad mistakes: she wants to be friends with her pupils; she sleeps with Maz; she overplays her hand, in both classroom and staffroom.As the impeccably plotted story — which spans one Read more ...
fisun.guner
Horizon took a funny turn this week. The new series started off gently enough – there was a nostalgic look back at 60 years of science on the box, then an exploration as to what makes us clever (the fun this entailed when vaguely well-known people sweated through a series of IQ tests). But last night it wanted us to get to grips with something very slippery indeed, so slippery that even the eminent scientists responsible for unleashing some of the more frontier theories in particle physics readily admitted their conceptual limitations in understanding their own formulations.So when the off- Read more ...
judith.flanders
The show opens with his iconic 1991 piece, My Hands are My Heart, a double photograph of Orozco’s naked torso. In the first photograph his hands clutch a hidden object at chest-height; in the second the hands splay open to present to the viewer a piece of clay, now impressed with his fingermarks in the shape of a heart. In two simple images, Orozco encapsulates the artist’s act of creation, and then of offering the creation to the viewer. It is simple, and touching in its simplicity.Much of his work relies on this type of essentialism: he uses found materials, recycled objects, to make Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Joseph Mallord William Turner - Billy to his intimates, such as he had - is the notional centre of The Painter, a snapshot of the great British landscape artist as a young iceberg. Toby Jones is the main draw in this world premiere of Rebecca Lenkiewicz's new play, and he emanates quiet charisma and sardonic wit. But it's the women in his life who get the better scenes and who steal the show.Success came early to Turner. In 1799, when the play begins, he was still in his mid-twenties but had been exhibiting watercolours at the Royal Academy for nearly a decade – possibly buying his paints Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Who knew the changeover of the EU Presidency could be this much fun? Amid the formal bowing and scraping at the Royal Festival Hall bunfights last night that signalled that the Hungarians were now at the tiller of this sinking political ship were some dodgy political metaphors, a round of orchestral Where's Wally and some extraordinary music.Conductor Ivan Fischer had shuffled his Budapest Festival Orchestra as if a pack of cards and distributed them seemingly chaotically across the stage. The principal bassoon was with the first violins. First flute led the cellos. Horns, principal Read more ...
David Nice
No doubt about it, Leonidas Kavakos is one of the world's top 10 live-wire violinists. But here in London he seems to have sold himself a bit short recently with a less than great concerto repertoire (Korngold, Szymanowski's Second). Korngold furnished a springy intermezzo in last night's blockbuster recital, Szymanowski a ravishing second encore, but I went to hear two giddying masterpieces, Prokofiev's First Violin Sonata and Schubert's Fantasy in C. If unknown quantity Enrico Pace could manage to play Richter to Kavakos's David Oistrakh, it might turn out to be awe-inspiring. He did, so it Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With such weighty gastronauts as Heston Blumenthal, Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall all aboard Channel 4's Big Fish Fight jamboree, Gordon Ramsay obviously couldn't bear to be left standing on the quay. In fact, with Gordon Ramsay: Shark Bait he has made the most provocative film of the season, a punchy documentary in which the shouty superchef did some bold poking about in the hideous innards of the global trade in shark fins.Shark-fin soup used to be a delicacy reserved for Chinese emperors, but has subsequently grown into a staple of Chinese restaurants and even street vendors Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jimmy Carr, a comedian who has more than once got into hot water over jokes that some find offensive, does a very strange thing for the encore of his latest show, Laughter Therapy - he gives a lecture cum homily on the limits of offensiveness, and how anything is permissible if the audience allows it. “I know my jokes are cruel and brutal and unacceptable,” he says. “But they have only one purpose - to make you laugh.”That’s rich, that is. Carr, a Cambridge graduate and a very bright bloke, can’t get himself off the hook that easily, even with this show’s disclaimer, “Not to be taken if you Read more ...
graham.rickson
The classical-music industry loves dead icons; witness the endless reissuing and remarketing of recordings by Kathleen Ferrier and Jacqueline du Pré. Canadian pianist Glenn Gould died from a stroke at the age of 50 in 1982 and his seminal Bach discs have never been out of the catalogue since. Françis Giraud told Gould’s story on screen before in his 1993 film Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, an imaginative series of vignettes depicting scenes from Gould’s life.Michèle Hozer and Peter Raymont’s new film is more conventional in being chronologically ordered and composed almost entirely Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Sunday Afternoon Song Recitals are a wonderful Wigmore tradition. Filling in that tricky gap between lengthy weekend lunch and early school-night supper, they offer a chunky one-act programme, generous but without the fuss and faff of an interval. Balancing young talent with more established performers, the next few months see (among others) Emma Bell, Anna Grevelius and Isabel Bayrakdarian occupying this slot. Playing to the prevailing mood yesterday afternoon was repertoire from Gounod, Britten’s Cabaret Songs and the UK premiere of Iain Bell’s song cycle Day Turned Into Night. Sitting Read more ...
David Nice
This was a programme born for marketing cliché: banish the winter blues by bathing in Latin American/Iberian warmth. And it turned out to be true, by virtue of an unexpected watershed. How did the BBC Symphony strings manage to be first among the London orchestras to slip into something truly sensual, whether tangoing with an Argentinian bandoneónist - "A what?" you may ask, and I'll tell you shortly - or dancing malagueñas with a Spanish pianist? Was it the after-effect of the John Wilson Hollywood treatment last Sunday, or just sheer joy in welcoming back the high, bright style of conductor Read more ...