Reviews
Sarah Kent
The soundtrack to Tate Britain’s seminal exhibition Women in Revolt! is a prolonged scream. On film, Gina Birch of the punk band The Raincoats gives vent to her pent-up anger and frustration by yelling at the top of her lungs for 3 minutes (main picture). And in many ways, this whole exhibition is a scream of rage.Sick of being marginalised by the male-dominated art world and tired of being treated as second class citizens in every other walk of life, in the 1970s women artists went on the offensive. They began organising, protesting and demonstrating and making work that is, in itself, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Lucy Beaumont tells some tall stories – many ridiculous and some of them true, one assumes. But such is Beaumont’s wide-eyed delivery that you believe her, particularly if you have seen her on the current series of Taskmaster, where her confused “I don’t know what I thought would happen” approach provides great entertainment.There’s more of that in The Trouble & Strife!, so named because many will know Beaumont from Meet the Richardsons, a comedy in which she and her husband, fellow comic Jon Richardson, play fictionalised versions of themselves. She co-wrote the show, as she Read more ...
peter.quinn
Choruses rocked, choreo popped, and thousands of light sticks danced in unison, as an incredible lineup of nine acts lit up this fourth edition of Korea On Stage, celebrating 140 years of UK-Korea relations.The evening commenced with the beautifully clear timbre of the traditional Korean stringed instrument, the gayageum, played by Yageum Yageum, who adroitly fused the ancient and the modern in her opening medley of songs by BTS, FIFTY FIFTY, NewJeans and IVE. Seated centre stage, her nimble-fingered playing, beatific smile and lightly worn virtuosity radiated a sense of joy which set the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Switzerland isn’t exactly famous for parading its history during WWII. Remaining neutral from the conflict like its neighbour Liechtenstein, the Swiss benefitted from financial and armament deals with Nazi Germany, turned away Jewish refugees at the border and, post-war, failed to inform the remaining families of Holocaust victims about the deposits left by dead relatives in Swiss banks. While there has been some examination of this dark history in Switzerland itself over the years, it’s not a story that has been turned into movies or tv dramas that have played outside the country Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The question they’re all asking is, can Shetland survive the loss of Douglas Henshall as DI Jimmy Perez? After all, it was Henshall’s shrewd and quietly anguished performance which gave the show much of its allure. And now there’s no Mark Bonnar either, who could always be relied on to add a soupçon of angst.Instead, it’s Ashley Jensen (Agatha Raisin, After Life etc) who’s front and centre in the new, revamped Shetland. She plays DI Ruth Calder of the Metropolitan Police, investigating the murder of a London gangster, Philip Remis. She’s looking for a runaway witness to the crime, Ellen Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Margaret Calvert's creations are never far. She set the rules for the design of Britain’s road signs, as well as drafting typography and graphics for national, regional and local rail signage. Back to the Swamp’s fifth track “Margaret Calvert Drives Out” features the lyrics “maximum information conveyed by minimum means, triangles for warning, circles for limits, blue for instructions, green for directions.”“Margaret Calvert Drives Out” gets into the specifics of this important figure’s guiding principles and inspirations within the framing of a pulsing music hinting at Arthur Russell and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you thought being a pop star might be fun, this four-part voyage around the tortured soul of Robbie Williams may convince you otherwise. He has sold 75 million records and historic numbers of concert tickets, scored 13 Number One albums and seven Number One singles in the UK, and has a shed full of gongs including 18 Brit Awards. But even so, now three months short of his 50th birthday, he still seems to feel that it could suddenly all end tomorrow, or possibly even this afternoon.“Nobody graduates from childhood fame well balanced,” he comments, having first been blasted into the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Rarely has a play's opening been so opportune. Just when it looked as if the West End was slipping into decline, along comes the smart, shrewd Backstairs Billy to allay mounting fears of late that the commercial theatre had lost all sense of quality control. (The offending titles know who they are.)It helps, of course, that Marcelo Dos Santos's royalty-themed play is getting a luxuriant production whose visual allure is evident from our first sight of designer Christopher Oram's spare-no-floral-arrangement recreation of the Garden Room of Clarence House. But just when you think you've heard Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There’s only a couple of things you need to know about playwright Richard Bean: he started out as a stand-up comic, and he comes from Hull. Oh, and he wears Hawaiian shirts to press nights. So that’s three things. Oh, and that his masterpiece One Man, Two Guvnors (a populist farcical version of Carlo Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters) was a global megahit.That’s four things – now you’re in the zone. Here’s some more: his latest, To Have and To Hold, is an acerbic take on marriage and aging, which premiers at the Hampstead Theatre, starring Alun Armstrong and Marion Bailey, and it’s co-directed Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“Underneath the abject willow/ Lover, sulk no more;/ Act from thought should quickly follow:/ What is thinking for?” In 1936, early in their tempestuous friendship, WH Auden wrote a poem for Benjamin Britten that urged the younger artist to pursue his passions – musical and erotic – and curb his fearful longing for comfort and safety.The poet’s hectoring insistence that the composer should embrace audacity and risk marked a partnership that began in hero-worship – the timid, tentative Britten’s for the bold and brilliant young bard – and ended in the composer’s violent rejection of his one- Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This splendid book proves that trivia need not be trivial, and that a miscellany of apparently disconnected facts can cohere, if done well. It is in the proud lineage of the “toilet book”, a form sadly in decline in these days of the smartphone. Although modest in its ambitions, it provides entertainment, enlightenment and a sense of serendipity, transcending its bullet-point format to be more than the sum of its parts.Justin Lewis has set out to tell a history of pop music not chronologically, but day by day from 1 January to 31 December, uncovering important – or sometimes delightfully Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Since first coming together in 1989, The Chemical Brothers have done more than enough to earn their place in the Pantheon of Rave Legends. They may not have been there at the birth of Acid House, but six number one albums, 13 top 20 singles and six Grammy awards is nothing to be sniffed at – especially for a couple of nerdy blokes who basically push buttons on boxes of electronic gadgets.Rave, Techno, Big Beat, Electronic Dance Music, whatever you want to call it, however, is essentially a medium best experienced in the live arena. The soundtrack to a communal experience, where audiences can Read more ...