Reviews
Matt Wolf
The poster for Sucker Punch, Roy Williams's ambitious new play about boxing and race during the schism-prone age of Margaret Thatcher, promises a sort of black British Raging Bull: There in one graphic image are the blood and sweat, the bravado and the pain, of a sport that for self-evident reasons makes it to the stage relatively rarely. How do you set actors' juices flowing eight times a week (and risk their jawbones dislocating) in a way that the cinema can manage with comparative ease? One answer arrived at by the director Sacha Wares is to ramp up the atmosphere, in conjunction with a Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Helmut Lachenmann is a sort of George Bush of contemporary classical composition, a bogeyman, a warrior, an ideologue. In my time his name has always been served up with an exclamation mark - "you like Lachenmann!?" - partly because his politics have always reveled in anti-social extremes, partly because his musical tools were always either abstraction, noise, difficulty or perversity (musica negativa, as Henze once put it), his enemy, having a good time. The results are as intimidating to the ears (and performers) as his medieval face (picture, left) is to the soul. And in 50 years of Read more ...
joe.muggs
In retrospect, deciding on a quick in-and-out trip to the Sónar festival was a slightly silly idea. Not because there was any problem with the event, or with getting there, or because I had any difficulty chucking an all-nighter then making it to my plane at 11am, though. Quite the opposite: it was a silly idea because a small taster of one of the best-organised music festivals I have ever been to could only make me deeply hacked off that I wasn't going to be there for the whole thing.The daytime part of Sónar – called, perhaps logically, Sónar by Day – is held in the Centre de Cultura Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The fifth collaboration between iconic French actress Isabelle Huppert and director Benoît Jacquot tells the story of Ann (Huppert), a concert pianist who leaves her partner of 15 years after she sees him passionately kiss another woman. She decides to abandon her life, leaving no trace of her previous existence, and only one friend, Georges (Jean-Hugues Anglade), is allowed to know her plans. She has met Georges for the first time since childhood by a ridiculous contrivance but, as with so much in this film, it helps to go with the flow because Huppert, who appears in almost every scene, is Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The beautiful gardens of Garsington Manor might seem an ideal setting for Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its ilex groves, its miniature forests of pyramid yew, and its paths overhung (o’er-canopied?) with climbing roses. So it’s a mild shock to confront on the actual stage what looks like a huge attic store-room littered with beds, chucked in at all angles, a few lamps, various items of bric-à-brac, and, upstage centre, a large C. S. Lewis-style wardrobe through which, in due course, characters enter and exit.Bed admittedly is iconic in the Dream, a work in which half the Read more ...
graeme.thomson
You could tell Glastonbury at 40 was in trouble as early as the opening three minutes, when it cut from a well-heeled, ageing hippie survivor mumbling about “earth magic” to footage of Robbie Williams in 1998 bashing his way through the entirety of "Angels". The programme stumbled into the vast gulf between those two concepts as uncertainly as a reveller stumbles into the wrong tent at four in the morning, and never once looked like finding its way back home.Despite the fact that for nearly two decades the BBC has been sending its staff to Pilton in battalions stretching well into the Read more ...
bruce.dessau
In a recent posthumously published article on the Guardian's website, the late rock scribe Steven Wells fulminated about a crop of musicians who, he believed, were way past their sell-by date. Wells was a terrific journalist, positively brimming over with sulphuric wit and he had a point with Bob Dylan. But he was well wide of the mark when he suggested that Elvis Costello should have been given his P45 in 1979. If only Wells had been around for last night's magnificent solo Meltdown gig he might have revised his opinion.In fairness a lot of the peaks were drawn from Costello's first decade, Read more ...
David Nice
Only those who think the burnt-out question of Wagner and the Nazis can still be brought to bear on his operas could be disappointed by Richard Jones's life-enhancing new production. Not a swastika in sight, not a hint of anti-semitic caricature for the fallguy who was never intended for it in the first place, only affirmation of the opera's central message that great art can bring order and understanding to society.It launches with a masterstroke: a dropcloth collage portraying German-speaking genius from Bach and Mozart to Pina Bausch and Michael Haneke, embracing all creeds and persuasions Read more ...
fisun.guner
The gallery has been turned into a little girl’s dressing-up closet. The walls are painted midnight blue and dusted with glitter. Ballet shoes, made for small feet, and a discarded tutu are to be found in a decorous pile on the floor. There are shiny trinkets and princessy things and pictures of ballerinas in bright, pastel shades. And miniature cabinets, almost empty but for one or two small objects – old, discardable things that might be hoarded away as treasures by a child wrapped up in its own imaginary world.I’m not quite sure what Joseph Cornell would have made of all this – his Read more ...
david.cheal
It takes quite something to be able to hold the attention of a packed Royal Festival Hall with nothing but an acoustic guitar, a piano, and a bunch of songs. Two men who have that something are Richard Thompson and Loudon Wainwright III, a pair of folky old goats who have been mates for 30-odd years, and here, performing as part of Thompson’s Southbank Meltdown season, they kept me - and I suspect many others - enthralled with their songcraft, their voices, their bone-dry humour, and in Thompson’s case with his astonishing virtuoso guitar-picking – when he plays, it’s hard to believe that Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Richard Thompson’s appointment as curator of Meltdown 2010 split opinion at theartsdesk. I was one of those who hoped the hoary old maverick would exhilarate with daring new acts. Others feared it would just be a folk-in. In the end the program contained Iranian punk, some folk and a whole lot of Thompson himself. He's offered film scores, a new show, and a collaboration. And this afternoon he turned “cover band”, romping through 818 years of songwriting. If this were Stars in their Eyes, then last night Thompson was everyone from King Richard I to Britney Spears.Thompson has occasionally Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Anyone hoping to take refuge from last night’s football fever in the solemn halls of the Royal Opera House would have scored something of an own goal. Heading the bill for OperaShots – a trio of new operas staged in the intimate Linbury Theatre – was Jocelyn Pook’s Ingerland, an operatic meditation on the beautiful game. Framed by shorter works from Orlando Gough and Nitin Sawhney, the evening was a chance for three established composers to have a “shot” at opera for the first time. With Gough promising not so much an attempt as a “shot across the bow of opera”, we prepared ourselves for Read more ...