Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
The pairing of Philip Glass and Franz Kafka is a natural one. A shared fascination with obsession, with developing a simple premise to its most densely worked-out, most logical conclusion is evident in both, and it is only perhaps surprising that it took until 2000 for Glass to produce In The Penal Colony. Exploiting the minimal surroundings of the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre to maximal effect, this UK premiere production forgoes inference and suggestion in favour of all-out confrontation, etching its message brutally into the audience.Adhering to the outlines of Kafka’s original Read more ...
judith.flanders
Rachel Whiteread is best known for her exploration of space, of presence and absence, of how we look at what is present – and absent – in the textures of our lives. House, her life-sized cast of a house in a derelict street in East London, first brought her to fame, and more recently Untitled (Plinth), her mockingly affectionate take on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square, a resin-cast replica of the plinth itself, literally shaped a new viewpoint of that absence in the heart of the West End. Now in two exhibitions of (mostly) drawings and some sculpture, the viewer can follow along, looking Read more ...
judith.flanders
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre is making one of its regular stops in Europe (the company tours commitedly: not only in the USA, but more than two months of each year are spent bringing their bravura dance style to the world). It is to their enduring credit, then, that their performances look as fresh and as spontaneous as they do.In Hymn, artistic director Judith Jamison’s tribute to Ailey, her mentor and the company’s founder, she tells, in voice-over, of loving "spectacle, yes", but also "social statements, yes", wanting to transmit not only Ailey’s own "blood memories", his lines Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jerry Bruckheimer’s production stable has already given us a lifetime’s supply of law-enforcement stories. The hydra-headed CSI franchise has become more ubiquitous than I Love Lucy in its heyday, while Cold Case and the FBI missing-persons yarns of Without a Trace are probably showing on a set near you whether you’re in Saigon or Santiago. Now here’s Jerry’s latest brainchild, Dark Blue, the saga of a crew of undercover Los Angeles cops led by Lieutenant Carter Shaw (Dylan McDermott).Since this is a Bruckheimer product, you might assume you weren’t about to be plunged too deeply into the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Alvin Ailey dancers have been dancing about survival, grit, positivity and joy in the Lord for half a century now, and even though the parents of last night’s dancers may not have been born when Ailey did the unthinkable and launched a black dance company in the dark days of 1958 America, the company still evidently has an urge to rejoice running in its veins.The regular returns of AAADC to Britain - and there’s a big nationwide tour this time - are constant wake-up calls to the spirit. How can you sit down-in-the-mouth about anything at all when you’re watching a girl haughtily unfolding her Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“I want to disrupt your sense of logic and show you something really thrilling,” explains a young academic, as her animated scribbling on the whiteboard gains pace and incomprehensible complexity. It’s a promise that Complicite’s A Disappearing Number – now making its third London appearance – has little trouble fulfilling. A maths lecture may seem an unprepossessing (if not downright unappealing) start to a play, but in loosing their theatre from the conventional unities of time, space, chronology and even the axes of vertical and horizontal, Complicite have also freed maths from the lecture Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Ozarks, situated mostly in Missouri, are not on most tourists’ itineraries when they visit the United States. The area is not as pretty or dramatic as the Appalachians or the Rockies, and the mining and backwoods country is considered different, remote even, by many Americans. And while it has a distinct dialect and a rich oral and musical culture from its pioneer heritage of Irish, Scots and German immigrants who settled on the vast plateau in the early 19th century, the only representation many know of Ozark people is The Beverly Hillbillies. It’s in this self-contained world that Read more ...
david.cheal
Rock music doesn’t get much better than this. For two hours, the raggedy Chicago band Wilco poured out song after song from a repertoire that stretches back 15 years, slipping effortlessly between gentle alt-country and avant-garde rock, between the whisperingly quiet and the crushingly loud. They were sensational, a band at the top of their game. And thanks to the immaculate sound system, and the acoustics of this fabulous hall, loudness never tipped over into distortion; everything was there, audible in the mix.What makes Wilco’s music special is that they straddle two worlds, one tough and Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
How do you rescue a drama about Spitfire pilots from over half a century of cliché and pastiche, from Kenneth More in Reach for the Sky to Armstrong and Miller’s street-talking RAF officers? After all, put an actor in a flying jacket and a cravat, get him to smoke a pipe and read the paper as he awaits the call to scramble, and you’ve got a 24-carat stereotype. The answer, as the wholly admirable First Light illustrates, is to go back to basics – to find the authentic details amidst the stock scenarios, and the emotional truth behind the stiff upper lips.It helps if you have first-rate source Read more ...
aleks.sierz
What is with the National and history plays? On the large stages of this theatre, the main fare is historical accounts of contemporary problems. Maybe the programmers here imagine that their audiences, like T S Eliot’s humankind, “can’t bear very much reality”. History always has a nostalgic glow. So instead of commissioning a new play about the current war in Afghanistan, the flagship venue is staging American playwright J T Rogers’s drama about the Soviet Union’s 1980s occupation and the covert war, waged by the CIA, to stop the reds by any means necessary. But does this historical account Read more ...
sue.steward
Edward Weston was once obsessed with photographing "toilets" (his word) and did it repeatedly in pursuit of the perfect image. "That gloss enamelled receptacle of extraordinary beauty" is how he described the scuzzy lav at the Gold Circle Mine in Death Valley, and seemingly near-orgasmic with excitement, said it was "an absolute, aesthetic response to form". That statement wasn’t about toilets alone, of course; this legend of American photography was, understandably, a perfectionist in every thing he photographed. But he was also, during the early years of this collection of 37 prints (1920s Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It takes a brave company to revive a notorious Broadway flop. It takes an even braver one to supplement a small cast with an amateur, community chorus of over 60 people, onstage for almost the entire duration. The Young Vic can rarely be accused of lacking ambition, and their latest production – sprawling American musical The Human Comedy by Hair’s Galt MacDermot – is as ambitious as it gets. Reinventing a flawed fantasy-parable about community as genuine community theatre, they have tapped into a sincerity that no amount of slick Broadway effects could hope to match – a sincerity that, if it Read more ...