Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Great comedy may be timeless, but that's probably because of the great comedians performing it as much as the material itself. Could you imagine Dad's Army being anything more than a shadow of its former self if it was remade with a new cast? Would Frasier achieve the same transcendent mix of bourgeois self-regard and millisecond farcical timing with James Corden and Mathew Horne in place of Kelsey Grammer and David Hyde Pierce? Do we want to hear anybody reciting the "Dead Parrot Sketch" ever again?Jonathan Ross's pretext for assembling a bevy of his comic chums to recreate rare Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The annual tradition that is the Royal Ballet School Matinee at Covent Garden isn’t just some prestige indulgence for the nervous parents of ballet children fortunate enough to survive the militaristic training and dogged enough to want to continue into the beckoning career where there are such frail job prospects. It is a place where the gap between a good student and a potential artist comes clear through the sheer size and one-offness of the occasion.That’s a big stage to conquer, a stage of dreams and fame, where Fonteyn and Seymour danced, where Guillem and Bussell and Dowell lit fires Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The BBC just can't stop showing that flipping Lennon Naked drama. No sooner have we emerged from the Fatherhood Season, where it first appeared, than we're into a John Lennon Night on BBC Four, featuring Lennon Naked again under a new temporary flag of convenience. Chances are it'll ricochet back into the schedules for another encore when they do a Motherhood Season, Lennon being better known for writing songs about his mother Julia than about his unreliable dad.But earlier in the evening came the Classic Albums documentary about Lennon's Plastic Ono Band album, his post-Beatles solo debut Read more ...
fisun.guner
What a troubled life Alice Neel led. The death of her first child, a daughter, who died of diphtheria in 1928 just before her first birthday; another daughter lost to her estranged husband’s family in Cuba two years later (as an adult and a mother herself, the daughter, Isabetta, committed suicide); life as a single mother raising two later sons on welfare in the slum district of New York's Spanish Harlem; and a neglected but always diligent artist for much of the rest of it, only achieving fame and acclaim towards the end.And yet we find her, in variously dated archive footage featured Read more ...
anne.billson
It's the eternal human-vampire-werewolf triangle, and at times it feels as though it really will go on for ever and ever. The story so far: in the small North-West Pacific town of Forks, where the sun hardly ever shines, a teenage girl called Bella loves Edward, a 100-year-old vampire who is perfect in every way, except of course that he drinks (non-human) blood, and has a tendency to sparkle on those rare occasions when the sun does come out. But, as we all know, girls like sparkly things, so that's OK.But hey, it's complicated, because Bella also loves Jacob, a Native American of the Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
Dominic Savage’s new two-part film, part of BBC Two’s renewed commitment to intelligent and challenging drama (we shall see; fewer biopics please), comes billed as a look at modern teenage life, although it seemed more drawn to long silences - or the sound of the wind in the trees - and the seemingly desolate land and seascapes of the Lincolnshire coast. Your eyes kept being drawn to the edge of the screen, away from the young protagonists, Lindsey and Robert, which I suppose was meant to lend Dive a fatalistic edge, or a sense of universality.But what was more surprising, given that this was Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Of course she isn't now the watchful, learning 29-year-old who premiered Covent Garden’s opulent, sensually loaded production in 1995, but Gheorghiu’s varicoloured voice - a rainbow of tears, sobs, scoops, warbling runs and top notes that seem to rack her body with pain - has if anything added more colours since then (including a less fetching jeune-fille timbre in the middle that sounds as if it’s hiding a problem). When in the overture the front-cloth loads its antique photograph of a plain, dumpy little girl with despairing eyes, and then fades to show Gheorghiu pensively sitting alone Read more ...
David Nice
John Adams thinks his and poet June Jordan's fantasia on love in a time of earthquake flopped at its 1995 Berkeley premiere for two main reasons. The characters - three blacks, two whites, a Hispanic and an Asian - were deemed too self-consciously multiculti: odd when America knew that was just how LA was then, even more so than Stratford East today (for once, the audience reflected the cast in this co-production with the Barbican). And Adams was shocked to find the pop and classical worlds so rigidly defensive. I've spoken to plenty of folk who hate the piece, trapped as they are behind the Read more ...
fisun.guner
He may be a writer, a director, an actor, a historian, and, of course, a former member of Monty Python, yet rather than being a Renaissance man, Terry Jones is clearly a mediaevalist at heart. We know this not only because he has written well-received books on Chaucer and medieval history, but an amiable half hour spent in his company at the National Gallery shows us just where his sensibilities lie. He was the first guest in a series inviting celebs to talk about their favourite artworks and Tim Marlow, whose televisual style is so effortlessly smooth and mellow that you might mistake him Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If there was an opposite to the limitless “ever after” of fairytales, the relentlessly nullifying "nevermore" of Edgar Allan Poe’s raven would come pretty close. A deformed, sickly smiling "musical fable for adults", the ominously named Nevermore is Canadian theatre company Catalyst’s grim(m) take on the life of that greatest of storytellers, Poe himself. Had Little Red Riding Hood decided to meet the Wolf at an S&M club for a spot of burlesque (and had Nick Cave been on hand to write some songs about the encounter), Nevermore would be the result.More hauntingly macabre than any of Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Infamously, the first production of La Bête, David Hirson's literary satire set in 17th-century France and written in rhyming couplets, closed in New York after only 25 performances. No such bleak fate is likely to attend this London (and Broadway-bound) revival nearly two decades on, powered as it is by three top-octane stars: Joanna Lumley, David Hyde Pierce and, above all, Mark Rylance, fresh from Jerusalem. Audiences who flocked to see Rylance dominate that play will thrill again to the actor's fabulously showboating turn in La Bête as the titular jackass clown. But is the play itself a Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Kristin Scott Thomas possesses an altogether singular beauty: classical yet faintly wistful, intimidating at times but equally capable of enormous warmth. And because this English rose has professionally blossomed not just in the Anglo-American cinema (and theatre) but also in France, there's something faintly "other" about her. That, in turn, has been useful to this actress's stage turns in Chekhov and Pirandello and accounts for her infinite variety on screen. After all, not everyone could move with ease from John Lennon's Liverpudlian aunt to her latest film role as a French doctor's Read more ...