Reviews
David Nice
"The church shouldn't be interfering in the personal and private lives of people - we don't own them." The comment comes from a Catholic priest working with abused children in the Philippines, Father Shay Cullen. It would be good to hear from other men or women of God rather more liberal than Pope Benedict XVI, for whose visit to Britain later this week this programme sounds no trumpets. Apparently few priests or bishops would speak to human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, so his is the talking head we see rather too much of here. But that's the personality-driven world of TV for you, and Read more ...
David Nice
Anticipating revivals of productions that were hardly vivacious in the first place, you can always find reasons to hope. Perhaps there'll be a dazzling house debut. Maybe someone, preferably the revival director, will bring a more focused individual zest to the kind of rough character sketches Jonathan Miller leaves flailing around his beautifully conceived historic locales. Not on this occasion. Singing and conducting were never less than accomplished, but only half-hearted titters from a sparse audience greeted the inhabitants of Miller's opera buffa toytown - more dullsville than doll's Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What a difference the Atlantic makes. An abused, underprivileged boy tries to escape his neglectful mother and through the kindness of an unrelated adult discovers he has a rare talent that - a few ups and downs notwithstanding - eventually brings him a happy and fulfilling life. I could be describing The Blind Side, which deservedly delivered a best acting Oscar for Sandra Bullock, or even Precious, about an abused girl.In fact it’s Brit flick The Kid, the second film by Nick Moran, who came to fame as a cockney geezer in Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels but is now a writer Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It must have been with a leaden heart that the BBC Proms planning team realised that 2010's Last Night would fall plumb on 9/11. How to reconcile all the traditional Brit triumphalism and singing of Jerusalem with the rather more contemporary need to reconcile all, whether out of Jerusalem or not? They did, and full marks for a delicate balancing-act of culture politics and a moving occasion last night (admitted by one who had spent a lifetime avoiding the Last Night of the Proms).Booking Renée Fleming, for one, was a canny move. She is most people’s favourite American soprano, gorgeous to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Part 2 @bbcproms. The madness begins. Ms Derham has not switched gowns in the interval. No sign of Titchmarsh, for which we must give thanks.The "traditional" necklace of laurels for Sir Henry Wood's bust. Wonder if he'd welcome his head being polished by a pink rag.How do they pick these pieces? Apols but the Marche joyeuse did not fill this tweeter with joy. On the other hand, here's Renée plus a mike.Not many sopranos can address an audience like Renée F. America's sweetheart sings Czech stuff now: back to her rootsWhile Renée continues blowing a hole in the Read more ...
david.cheal
Some years ago I saw Muse playing at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge. Towards the end of the show, at a climactic moment (I think it might have been during their proggy epic, “New Born”), singer and guitarist Matt Bellamy reached into a bag attached to his microphone stand, pulled out a handful of shiny golden confetti and flung it into the air. It fluttered downwards most attractively. It was a terrific show, with some truly powerful music, but as far as visuals were concerned, the confetti moment was about as good as it got.Compare and contrast that little affair with last night, the first Read more ...
David Nice
Two years after its first festive spree of 100 events, Kings Place has become the most congenial of all London's concert-hall zones in which to hang loose. On Friday afternoon I could have trotted happily between Russian piano classics, youth jazz and storytellers. I stayed with pianist Mikhail Rudy and cellist Alexander Ivashkin because I was intrigued to know how Rudy's stamina would hold out from a monument of the Russian repertoire in the first concert to a punishing transcription in the third.The answer was that he simply got better as the challenges accumulated. Must be honest and say I Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers are something of a musical enigma. Neither their true pitch nor order of movements, their origins, nor even whether they were intended as a complete sequence is known for certain, prompting scholar Denis Arnold to conclude that, “to perform it is to court disaster”. Such a grim augury however has done little to discourage musicians, and in this, their 400th anniversary year, Monteverdi’s Vespers have been ubiquitous. Crowning a year of performances across the country, John Eliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir – pioneers of the work, and the first ensemble to Read more ...
sue.steward
Multiple images of silhouetted horses cantering against blank backgrounds in grids of movement are what most people associate with Eadward Muybridge. Made in the late 1880s, they have contributed to his lasting reputation as a pioneer of photography and the moving image. So it is astonishing to discover through Tate Britain’s magnificent exhibition of his life’s work, that horses were only part of a story packed with surprises.The show’s chronological arrangement is designed to build curiosity: you enter a horse-free zone and have to wait for the horses. But you become immediately immersed Read more ...
Nick Hasted
For 15 years after the death of his demon muse Klaus Kinski, Werner Herzog made documentaries about equally obsessive visionaries, climaxing five years ago with Grizzly Man’s tale of Timothy Treadwell, who loved and was eaten by bears. Though the documentaries continue, Herzog is now finally re-engaging with feature films. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done was made back-to-back with Bad Lieutenant and shares some of its cast. But where the latter berserk Nick Cage cop film saw Herzog consciously attempt to reach new, young audiences, My Son, My Son is a more gnomic, matricidal mystery, Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Archaos were the mad, bad and dangerous troupe who revolutionised circus back in the Eighties and early Nineties – their antics with juggling chainsaws, raunchy Galllic attitude and mayhem with motorbikes is celebrated with a pop-up exhibition at the Bargehouse in the Oxo Tower Wharf on the South Bank for just three days ending on Sunday. It’s also a tribute to the genial genius behind the troupe, Pierre Bidon, who died earlier this year, at the age of 56.The exhibition features all sorts of memorabilia (and press cuts, including some by me from the not-very-lamented Blitz magazine - I went Read more ...
fisun.guner
Nell Leyshon’s new play takes place in a mental asylum closely based on London’s notorious Bethlem Hospital. Set in the 18th century, it is a bizarre fusion of farce, drama and drinking songs. Bethlem, of course, gave its name to the term “bedlam”, and bedlam certainly ensues in this rather chaotic and unfocused work.
The play attempts to evoke a Hogarthian vision of gin-soaked dissolution. Visually, at least, it succeeds: the stage is beset by a panoply of misfits, “lunaticks”, the wrongly certified, street musicians, down-and-outs and perpetrators of bizarre curatives for the Read more ...