Reviews
Adam Sweeting
It's difficult to reach a rational verdict in the midst of the blog-barrage, Twitter-frenzy and crass party point-scoring that surround our new national pastime, but as the party leaders neared the 90-minute time limit, it was at least obvious that this second debate had brought feistier and more committed performances from all three of them. David Cameron and Gordon Brown wasted no time in demonstrating how well they'd learned Nick Clegg's trick of looking straight into the camera and addressing us viewers, though frankly you'd have thought that should always have been pretty bleeding Read more ...
william.ward
By general consent, The Real Thing expresses an almost perfect balance between the brilliance of its dialogue and the ideas examined on one hand, and the depth and range of human feelings on the other. Anna Mackmin’s brisk and dynamic take on the play, first performed nearly 30 years ago, to a large extent succeeds in recontextualising what is surely a classic, for a subsequent generation of viewers.Viewers rather than theatre-goers perhaps, because one of the principal differences between the cultural baggage of those who would have seen the first production at the Strand Theatre in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A father keeps his three adult children in a state of retarded development. They are deprived of books, education, television, indeed denied any access to the world beyond the electronic gates marking the perimeter edge of their known territory. In the place of knowledge is disinformation, disseminated on tapes. The sea is a leather chair, a zombie is a yellow flower, a vagina is a keyboard. And so on. In all this the mother is quiescent, complicit. The father is an absolute patriarch, the source of all morality and law. Dogtooth, a film by Giorgos Lanthimos set in contemporary Greece and Read more ...
james.woodall
If you're going to dance before the future King of England, and your company bears his family's crest, you'd better dance well. No one could really be in any doubt that the Royal Ballet would put on a grand show with its new revival of Frederick Ashton's 1960 La Fille mal gardée; but it was only at the end, when a shimmering cast in this always shimmering production took its bow with emphatic gestures to a box up on the right, that some of us in the audience realised who'd been watching [wrote James Woodall on 10 March. Ismene Brown reviews a second cast below.]Prince Charles and his wife are Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The opening episode of a new series is always an awkward blighter. You have to introduce the characters and establish the required tone, while squeezing in enough plot to keep the thing moving. Even mega-budget epics like FlashForward have struggled to make it work.And then along comes episode one of White Collar, a wry drama about a FBI agent and a master thief, and suddenly everything looks sublimely easy. Casting is all, and White Collar’s twin leads have an easy rapport that makes you believe that agent Peter Burke (Tim DeKay) really has spent three years pursuing the mercurial Neal Read more ...
Tim Cumming
A great wall of noise greets the audience as it settles in to the Royal Festival Hall - the sound of some heavy outer planet’s radio frequency, a subtly oscillating drone that recalls NASA’s recordings of radio emissions from Saturn made by the Cassini spacecraft. Lou Reed’s work station for the night is set centre-stage, behind a rack of electronic machinery, a row of guitars awaiting their signal stacked behind him, but for 20 minutes or so there’s just that continuum of noise – in fact the sound of three guitars leant up against a stack of live amps. Is this to soften up the audience’s Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Sometimes the back story doesn’t lead you to where you expect it might. Sometimes that turns out to be a good thing. Dan Arborise was born in Borneo to Polish parents, which opens up all sorts of musical possibilities, most of them probably far less exciting than they sound, but in reality his music is as English as sweet summer rain.I missed his first album, Around in Circles, released in 2006, but last year’s follow-up Of Tide and Trail made me sit up and take notice. This was woozy, trippy folk with a dash of west-country weirdness, a tinge of the acid-fried out-there-ness of Ozric Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Many is the mother the world over who announces that she won't die happy until she has lived to see her daughter (or son) happily wed. And so, out of a familial condition that transcends ethnicity and geography comes It's a Wonderful Afterlife, the Gurinder Chadha movie that carries this shared fretfulness one step further, throwing in curry jokes as it goes. What would happen if a mum were so desperate on her daughter's behalf that she resorted to murder? The answer is best pondered as and when this London-set Indian romcom is released on DVD, at which point you can Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Good dancing - never mind great dancing - calls for an investment of imagination in every point of the foot, every raise of the arm. Why otherwise do the constant drill of turning out the leg, stretching the instep, taking fifth position, if the performer does not find something to stimulate them to make it personal, to dream it, to claim it for their own nuance? Does the violinist play Schubert thinking that it is enough just to get the notes right? Ballet is not just a gymnastic drill - it is a wildly esoteric performance art that surely no one seriously wants to pursue unless they feel its Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Amazing untold stories remain waiting for cinema. Alejandro Amenábar has found one in the female philosopher Hypatia's quest for knowledge during the religious turmoil that gripped 4th-century Alexandria as the Roman Empire fell into the Dark Ages. Somehow he has managed to parlay the freedom given by his 2004 Foreign Language Oscar for The Sea Inside into a cosmic, 50-million-Euro epic of ideas which leaves Hollywood's narrow narrative parameters far behind.The Spanish director's follow-up to The Sea Inside (starring Javier Bardem as a paraplegic determined to die) apparently took shape Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Monologue is a boring word, but in the hands of an Irish pensmith it can create some pretty exciting theatre. From a writer such as Conor McPherson or Mark O’Rowe the monologue can set the night alight with its storytelling brio. Word-drunk on these great draughts of bubbling verbal nectar, you soon feel you know the speakers as well as your own family. Yes, a good monologue is that beguiling. Which is exactly the case with Elaine Murphy’s first play, now visiting west London, a lovely and loving set of monologues which create an emotionally rich picture of three generations of Dublin women. Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
For those of you who think that classical music ends with Mahler - or Brahms just to be on the safe side - that the musical experimentation of the past 60 years was some sort of grim continental joke, an extended whoopee cushion of a musical period that seemed to elevate the garden-shed accident into some kind of art form, you have two people to blame: Adolf Hitler and Edgar Varèse.Hitler's influence we shall come to another time. Edgar Varèse's impact was on display this weekend at the Southbank's retrospective, Varèse 360°. Everyone from Frank Zappa to Harrison Birtwistle have Read more ...