Reviews
bruce.dessau
In 1985 I travelled to Madrid to interview Jonathan Richman. Two questions into our perfectly amicable chat, proceedings assumed pear-shaped proportions. The eccentric musician behind the proto-punk hit "Roadrunner" announced that he did not want to speak any more so that he could preserve his voice for the gig that night. The rest of the interview was conducted by pen on a piece of scrap cardboard.Last night's show in a tiny bar in New Cross – part of a typically quirky mini-tour of intimate venues – briefly looked in danger of ending early too. Or not starting at all. Richman and drummer Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Ariadne auf Naxos, according to its librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, is all about fidelity: fidelity in love, fidelity in art, fidelity in spirit. Ariadne on her island, abandoned by Theseus, can give herself to Bacchus only by persuading herself that he’s a god. The actress Zerbinetta gives herself to every man in sight, including the Composer (played, incidentally, by a girl), who for a moment weakens in his lofty contempt for these comic actors who intrude on his high ideals with their vulgar songs and dubious humour.Hofmannsthal could seldom be parted from his deep meanings. All the same Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Howard Marks was a pothead Errol Flynn, living a life of remarkable escapades and hair's-breadth escapes. A Welsh working-class Oxford graduate in nuclear physics and philosophy, he’d be fascinating company even if he wasn’t once the world’s most successful dope smuggler, and an associate of the IRA, the CIA, the Mob and MI6. His autobiography, Mr Nice, has let Marks earn a living reminiscing about it ever since. But Bernard Rose’s adaptation casts inadvertent doubt on such cult heroism. Marks’s life here seems somehow inconsequential.Played by Rhys Ifans, he’s presented as an accidental Read more ...
Sarah Kent
As well as being a great artist, Leonardo da Vinci designed machine guns, tanks and cluster bombs and worked out how to build a submarine; but so appalled was he by the potential of this last invention that he coded his notes to prevent anyone using them to instigate what he called "murder at the bottom of the seas".Murder at sea is exactly what submarines are meant for, of course, while their ability to cruise unseen beneath the waves makes them not only lethal but extremely sinister; more than any other weapons system they have become emblems of predatory stealth and evil intent. Coming Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If interior décor could shout, then last night’s music might have proved altogether incidental. The curtain rises to reveal a set gift-wrapped – ramparts, city walls and all – in the brightest of hot-pink damasks: a Nicky Haslam acid trip. Ladies and gentlemen, we are now entering operatic Orient 2.0, a sexy, postmodern take on the original you know and love, complete with an oversized menagerie of animals, evil tyrants and exotic princesses.It’s a familiar enough concept for Handel at ENO, wilful exaggeration, calculated anachronisms and all, and as we progress it is the large-scale Read more ...
Veronica Lee
We are in Brooklyn in 1938 and Sylvia Gellburg, a middle-class Jewish housewife, is paralysed from the waist down. It’s a hysterical paralysis brought on by the shock of seeing newspaper pictures of the cruelty meted out to German Jews during the horrors of Kristallnacht (or the night of broken glass). She becomes obsessed with a picture of two elderly Jews forced to clean the pavement with toothbrushes - events several thousand miles away have caused the sudden numbing of her limbs. Or is it something else?In Arthur Miller’s play (written in 1994), Sylvia (Lucy Cohu) is married to Phillip ( Read more ...
james.woodall
The National Theatre’s new production of Hamlet is both a very good Hamlet, yet also a somehow disappointing one. For a work so rich in possibilities, with so much emotion, so much superb and intricate engineering, it is often like this, in England or anywhere else - inspiring and unconvincing at once.Of few works in drama can this be said, or, as it were, permitted. For Hamlet, every allowance can and should be made. The most galvanising one I’ve seen also happened to be at the National (in the Lyttelton), 23 years ago: in Ingmar Bergman’s guest Swedish-language staging, Hamlet was a punk - Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
For a workplace sitcom, an endorsement from Ricky Gervais must be a double-edged sword. On the one hand Gervais’s seal of approval seems to have helped persuade E4 to commission an entire series of PhoneShop even before its pilot aired as part of Channel 4’s experimental Comedy Showcase season last November – Gervais having been so excited by the early draft sent to him by his old friend Phil Bowker that he became the nascent sitcom’s script editor. On the other hand, Gervais’s involvement inevitably raises expectations that PhoneShop will at least approach, however distantly, the dizzy Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Call a comic surreal and you hand him or her a licence to be as self-indulgent as they desire. Think of Vic Reeves, who long ago started believing that the mere proximity to one another of words like "bacon", "kazoo" and "Manama" was sufficiently hilarious to bring down the house. Ross Noble is, we are frequently told, a surreal comedian. His new show certainly contains enough references to "dwarves in sombreros" and "shaven suicide monkeys" to ensure that its title, Nonsensory Overload, comfortably adheres to the terms of the Trade Descriptions Act.
As befits a show with a get-out clause Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The most surreal scene in this searing, adrenaline rush of a documentary about a US platoon in Afghanistan is the sight of three soldiers dancing madly in their bunker to "Touch Me, I Want to Feel Your Body" on an iPod. Stationed in the Korengal Valley, part of the mountainous range of the Hindu Kush, they’ve named their remote hilltop 15-man outpost Restrepo after their medic, Juan Restrepo, who was killed in action (you see him at the beginning of the film, drunk, on a little video he made on a train in Italy before deployment: “We’re loving life and getting ready to go to war,” he says, Read more ...
mark.kidel
When Tony Harrison transposed his version of Molière’s The Misanthrope from the 17th century to the early 1970s, he managed with his characteristic and brilliant combination of savagery and wit to make the play feel totally contemporary. For Andrew Hilton’s new production at the Bristol Old Vic, Harrison has tweaked the play into the 21st century, with characters clutching iPhones and boasting of their connections with Sarkozy. Molière’s masterpiece is about human failings and the reason this classic makes us laugh today is because we recognise ourselves in the characters' parade of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The great music writer Nick Tosches put me onto James Luther Dickinson. In Where Dead Voices Gather, his self-indulgent but fascinating book about the obscure early-20th-century minstrel performer Emmett Miller, Tosches kept touching on Dickinson, a Memphis musician and occasional Rolling Stones sidesman (he played piano on "Wild Horses"). Tosches wrote that Dickinson's 1972 album Dixie Fried was "a dark gale-force reworking of old Southern music, a baptism of loud and dangerous rhythms, that stands as one of the great testaments not only of rock'n'roll but also of its ancient unfathomable Read more ...