Reviews
sue.steward
In the week that Sarah Ferguson was caught on a secret camera receiving a stash of $40,000 from News of the World journalists, Tate Modern launched this ambitious and excitingly diverse photography exhibition. Had the meeting been earlier, the incriminating images would have been perfect for the show. Instead, the Royal Family is spied on in Alison Jackson’s unusually generous parody, The Queen Plays with her Corgis. Spread across 14 rooms, the collection holds over 250 still images and several short films, and includes work by legends from the early years and 20th-century icons (from Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Rossini provided the lively curtain-raisers to both halves of this Chamber Orchestra of Europe concert, streamed live to Aberdeen where Shell, the sponsors, have something of a vested interest in keeping their employees entertained. The liquid gold on this occasion was of the legato variety and not one but two Fischers ensured that it flowed freely and purposefully. Ivan Fischer is quite simply one of the most perceptive and persuasive conductors on the planet; Julia Fischer (no relation) is the epitome of German cool and precision. She plays the violin rather well, too. But first, The Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There are, in urban myth, those moments when a runway model – leggy, impassively superhuman and dressed in some impossibly haute garment – catches a heel and collapses, foal-like, into a heap of fragile legs. It’s a moment that Sex and the City the series neatly turned on its head, urging us to celebrate the beauty to be found in human flaw and error; yet, watching the self-assured sass of this once-mighty franchise sprawl headlong, it wasn’t beauty but a sense of raging frustration that dominated. The fashion, the friends, even the puns are all still in their place, but where (as Carrie Read more ...
stephen.walsh
To launch a music festival with the Arditti Quartet, as Bath has just almost done (a pair of dance events preceded them), is a bold enough gesture, if no bolder than for the Arditti to open up their Assembly Rooms concert with Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge – a finisher if ever there was one. But for this particular group, late Beethoven might well seem like a kind of starting point. Beethoven was the first to write unplayable music for string quartet; and the Arditti have always specialised in the unplayable. Beethoven thrived on making life hard for his players; he apparently believed that Read more ...
howard.male
I’m not sure what it says about a songwriter when they simply call a song “Music", but the half French, half Moroccan singer Hindi Zahra is a bit of an enigma all round. Critics have already compared the 30-year-old to Billie Holiday and Madeleine Peyroux, presumably because of her phrasing, timbre and a certain fragility in her voice. But her debut album is neither easy listening or jazz. In fact, it’s got more in common with the woozy, trip-hoppy work of Martina Topley Bird, or even the lo-fi experiments with sound that Tom Waits indulges in. The latter aspect being what got my ears Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A young Arthur Miller wrote this highly moralistic, redemption-seeking play soon after the Second World War, a parable about an older generation’s dubious pragmatic principles versus the bewildered idealism of their children who were Miller’s generation, the soldiers’ generation. The deathlessness of its message about faulty army equipment, young military casualties and the no-blame culture may be quite as much a reason for this new revival of Howard Davies's 2000 National Theatre production, now with David Suchet and Zoë Wanamaker.If I find Miller's effects over-calculated, they were not so Read more ...
william.ward
The worldwide anti-Berlusconi lobby has made much of the fact that the state-owned (and government-controlled) RAI TV channels declined to screen trailers for Italo-Swede Erik Gandini’s 2009 documentary film Videocracy. But It's hard to think what exercised Berlusconi's place men there so much. Anyone hoping to sit down to 85 minutes of harsh political polemic will be disappointed. Michael Moore it is not.Presented in the UK for the first time at the London Documentary Film Festival at the Barbican in April, followed by a debate with the director in person, Videocracy is a highly engaging and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's bizarre, and then there's Paradise Found, a new musical that falls so short of the not always clearly defined mark that audiences may likely be mulling over what went wrong for years. What do the two acts have to do with one another? What in heaven's name is the point? How much weight in water is leading man Mandy Patinkin losing per performance? Those are just a few of the questions spectators will be left pondering during what for many will nonetheless be essential viewing, notwithstanding the show's self-evidently inchoate status. Not in a quarter-century of playgoing this side of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
“Are you looking forward to Christmas?” was always going to be a difficult question. Anthony looked forward to spending it with his daughter and grandchild – as long as he kept taking the medication that allowed him to stay out of hospital. Andrew should have had a happy gathering lined up, except his latest bout of mania had seen him leave the family home. Richard was wrapping presents. A whisk for his mum, because she’d stopped eating; some liqueur chocolates for his gran, the only way to get a drop of alcohol into the old girl. Trouble was Richard had something else to look forward to: the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Nick Grosso is a good example of the “now you see him, now you don’t” playwright. In the mid-1990s, he was feted as a lads’ writer for his funny plays about masculinity, such as Peaches, Sweetheart and Real Classy Affair. Then he dropped out of view. He resurfaced briefly in 2002 with the deliciously surrealistic Kosher Harry. Then nothing. Until now. As his new comedy, which opened last night in a production which stars Lesley Sharp, takes to the Royal Court studio stage, we have a chance to enjoy again Grosso’s knack for words.The first surprise is that this is a girls’ play. Just as the Read more ...
howard.male
It was never going to work now, was it? Martin Amis’s dense yet surging 400-page novel condensed down to just two hours of primetime TV? But director Jeremy Lovering, along with writers Tom Butterworth and Chris Hurford (Ashes to Ashes) certainly have a good bash at it. On the plus side, many of Amis’s original words, dialogue and set-pieces were left intact. On the minus side, where do I start? The first problem is that Nick Frost was miscast. Not woefully miscast - physically he fits the bill – but Simon Pegg’s comic sidekick is more cuddly koala than dead-eyed grizzly, as Amis’s morally Read more ...
edward.seckerson
We might have expected that the rising young bel canto tenor Lawrence Brownlee would include “Ah! Mes amis… Pour mon âme” from Donizetti’s La fille du régiment (that’s the number with the nine top Cs) in his Rosenblatt recital at St John’s, Smith Square – but what we might not have anticipated, after so taxing a programme as this, was that he would sing it again. That’s 18 top Cs (and the rest), which isn’t just cheeky, it’s a message: start looking over your shoulder, Juan Diego Florez - Brownlee’s breathing down your neck.The extraordinary thing about the young African-American’s voice is Read more ...