Reviews
India Lewis
It’s not hard to miss the fact that Bloomsbury is back in fashion at the moment. This summer, it felt like everyone’s Instagram story showed a trip to Charleston (the home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant). In the last month alone, the Charleston Trust has opened a new exhibition site, and Charlie Porter’s Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion has been published.Porter’s book is his second (after the highly readable What Artists Wear), and is an elegant and thoughtful investigation into the psychological space that clothes took up in the heads of the Bloomsbury Group, a Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Penelope Skinner’s new play is one of the most eccentric things I’ve seen in a long time. It’s undoubtedly entertaining, with an engagingly bonkers attempt by Kristin Scott Thomas to navigate an almost impossible role, perched between victim, diva and madwoman, equally reminsicent of Norma Desmond and one of the posh recluses from Grey Gardens. But tonally it’s exasperating, undecided whether it wants to be a #MeToo drama, a Tennessee Williams-infused tragedy, a fable, or comedy, with one moment that is literally trousers-round-your ankles farce. And its message is depressingly Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Since its release in 1999 David Fincher’s Fight Club has become something of a cult movie with young men who recite lines from the script like mantras. "This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time". It seems likely his new film, The Killer, will inspire the same devotion with the same demographic.Michael Fassbender plays the titular killer, a professional assassin who we first meet leading a monastic life in a stripped bare We Works office in Paris. He’s observing the luxury apartment building across the street, able to wait for days for his target to appear in Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Margot (Emilia Jones; Coda) has made a terrible mistake. She’s landed up in bed with Robert (Nicholas Braun; cousin Greg in Succession) and realises the sex is going to be excruciatingly bad.How to tell him that she’s changed her mind? Can she leave before it’s too late? Or is it easier to get it over with, otherwise he might turn nasty? Maybe, as a last resort, she can make herself get turned on by his gratitude. “Look how much he wants us,” she tells her better self, who watches, cringing, from a corner of the room.Director Susanna Fogel (Booksmart; The Flight Attendant), and Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
How to describe Alexander Zeldin’s latest, The Confessions? It is almost a kitchen-sink drama, but also a picaresque trawl through the life of an Australian woman that’s verging on epic, spanning most of her 80 years. And it’s stirring stuff, alternately enraging, sad and very funny. The woman is called Alice, and what we see are her adventures in the unliberated Oz of the late 20th century. As the older Alice, played by Amelda Brown, she addresses the audience directly with the house lights up, a tentative, slightly flustered woman who assures us she isn’t at all interesting. Then she Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Double bills at the ballet don’t often come as neatly gift-wrapped. Each of the works in question was made just before or during lockdown, arriving at its premiere by the skin of its teeth. Each went on to win a Critics’ Circle National Dance Award for best choreography.And each leans heavily on orchestral music – one a glorious swirl of Rachmaninov, the other a showreel of memories from a musical life: Elgar, Beethoven, Schubert, Fauré and more Rachmaninov. Placed side by side for the first time the two works fit as snugly as a pair of ballet slippers.The Cellist, choreographer Cathy Marston Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The first casualty of war is not truth, as the saying goes, but humanity – and not just in the sense of collateral damage. Media reporting turns victims into news items, along with satellite images of wrecked buildings or tanks crawling through a desert.It happens every time. This morning, on BBC News, the Palestinian journalist Taghreed El-Khodary patiently explained what the Israeli blockade of Gaza means in terms of journalism. No reporter can reach the scene of the catastrophe to bear witness. “The human stories are missing,” she added.The same was true of the Iraq War and now, two Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The enormous volume of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall has overwhelmed many of those invited to exhibit there, but Ghanaian artist El Anatsui responded to the challenge with magnificent hangings that tame the huge, industrial space.Made from thousands of bottle tops and slivers of metal sewn together by an army of helpers, the cloths are monumental yet intricately detailed. Suspended just inside the door is a billowing sail, pinkish red on one side and golden yellow on the other. Glinting under the spotlights, tiny reflective surfaces create a shimmering impression of movement.Above the bridge is Read more ...
David Nice
Young French soprano Clara Barbier Serrano has everything it takes to shine in an overcrowded singers’ world, including vivacious communicative skills – I witnessed those for the first time last Tuesday, when she performed at the Oxford International Song Festival without the score in front of her – attention to detail and a knack of forging unusual programmes beyond the usual song-recital round, commissions included.This often mesmerising event in the City Literary Institute’s recital room towards the end of the Bloomsbury Festival harnessed the talents of a fellow former student at the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
As a cultural destination, Salzburg really is hard to beat. Each year, a million and a half tourists descend on this compact city with its baroque architectural delights, and a population of just 150,000. The city of Mozart and of the Salzburger Festspiele was also once home to Paracelsus, Heinrich Biber, Stefan Zweig, Georg Trakl, and more recently – of course – The Sound of Music and Red Bull.The city’s setting and its skyline are breathtaking. One can marvel at the way buildings more than three centuries old were hewn into the sides of the rocky outcrops. There are churches everywhere; I Read more ...
David Nice
Eighteenth century Sweden is the nominal setting for A Masked Ball, but its essence is a unique mixture of Italian testosterone and French opéra-comique elegance. If this concert performance brought it closer to the indiscriminate vitality of early Verdi rather than the experimental shades of the middle period, there was still a huge amount to enjoy, and one stellar performance.I’d hoped to find more finesse, and more obvious co-ordination with the singers, than we got from veteran Anthony Negus; from previous encounters, it’s clear that the semi-professional Chelsea Opera Orchestra musicians Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Despite playing together for almost 25 years, Rodrigo y Gabriela are still taking chances in the live arena and refusing to take the easy path. They certainly didn’t put on a heritage act set in Birmingham this weekend.The Mexican guitarists’ show comprised wholly of tracks taken from their recent In Between Thoughts… A New World album and a handful of unrecorded tunes that have been composed since recording this disc. So, there was no “Diablo Rojo” and none of their flamenco nuevo-tinged covers of “Creep”, “Stairway to Heaven” or even their magnificent take on Pink Floyd’s “Echoes”, not that Read more ...