Reviews
Saskia Baron
This wasn’t a film to go and see with my 94-year-old father and hope I’d come out with my critical faculties intact and my handkerchief dry. The Great Escaper is an old fashioned, old school weepie about ageing, guilt and the horrors of war. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as well written or directed as its stars deserved. Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson have had better scripts in their long careers, but they both do a magnificent job with what they’ve been given and tears will flow.The Great Escaper is based on the story of Bernard/Bernie Jordan (Michael Caine below Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It was Carlos Acosta’s new production of Don Quixote that launched the Royal Ballet season in the autumn of 2013, and as it does so again 10 years on, its sunny dynamism is just what the doctor ordered.Don Q, as it’s known to ballet fans, can be an old warhorse. Russian productions and their variants, all of them drawn from a revised text of 1900, go big on technique and little else: for them it’s all about the backbending jetés and one-handed lifts, the speed of her fouettées and his circling leaps. Careless of dramatic continuity, dancers step out of character every few minutes to take Read more ...
Jon Turney
Have you ever considered the sheer range of sounds? You may think of deliberate human efforts to move the air: music and song, poetry or baby talk, cries and whispers. Other human-made noises come to mind: sirens, bells, fireworks; the hum of the street or the bustle of an army on the move. Animal and bird sounds appeal, of course, along with the music of a landscape – creaking branches, tinkling streams, or whistling winds. And if we are waxing metaphorical, perhaps the “sounds” of the cosmos, such as the echoes of the Big Bang, that still reverberate faintly as fluctuations in the universal Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At last, after waiting several years, we get to see Philip Guston’s paintings at Tate Modern. His retrospective was scheduled to open in summer 2020 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, but the murder of George Floyd made the institution nervous. The problem? Guston’s absurdist paintings of Klu Klux Klan (KKK) members. They could be seen to condone white supremacy or, at least, to make light of it. So the show was postponed until the artist’s intentions could be made clear.Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” sums up the ethos of these cartoon-like pictures. Made in the late Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Nothing goes out of date like new technology. Who now remembers how plain old Alan Sugar brought word-processing to the masses with the Amstrad PCW 8256, or how the Psion 5 was for a moment the last word in personal organisers?BlackBerry transports us back to the intoxicating rise and calamitous fall of the eponymous smartphone, designed by the Canadian company Research In Motion and which first appeared in 1999. The term “CrackBerry” – coined to describe the gadget’s addictive properties – was Webster’s Dictionary’s Word of 2006, and celebs from Leonardo di Caprio to Lady Gaga and Taylor Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Sondheim gala show Old Friends is a must for fans of the master, naturally, but its quality would knock anybody who loves musical theatre for six. It’s the successor to a one-off gala of the same name staged in May 2022 and broadcast since by the BBC; a recording will soon be available. The line-up that night included Bernadette Peters, Judi Dench, Sian Phillips, Damian Lewis, Maria Friedman, Helena Bonham Carter, Haydn Gwynne, Julian Ovenden and Julia McKenzie. The last-named has lent her expertise to the current production, along with Matthew Bourne, who's in charge of the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The variety show format is hardly new to concert programming. In the early 1900s it was the norm. Go to hear a Beethoven piano sonata or the latest piece by Claude Debussy and you could expect it to be followed by a novelty item on the fiddle, a vocal rendition of “Sally in our Alley” or a ventriloquist. By comparison Ballet Nights – an enterprise headed by impresario-compere Jamiel Devernay-Laurence – is playing safe by focusing on dance.Granted, each evening draws from a range of styles – from classical ballet through neo-classical to modern and avant-garde – with a single substantial piece Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The Royal Court’s collaboration with Access All Areas (AAA) may not be theatre’s first explicit embrace of the neurodiverse community on stage: Chickenshed has five decades of extraordinary inclusive work behind them and Jellyfish, starring Sarah Gordy at the National Theatre, was one of my highlights of 2019.But Molly Davies's play, directed by Hamish Pirie, may be the most ambitious. Developed by AAA’s seven learning disabled and autistic Associate Artists, the five-year long project addresses many issues but sinks into a convoluted narrative that never quite resolves itself into plain Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Basel Chamber Orchestra’s 21 string players on tour are an extraordinary set of musicians. Not only did they begin their programme in Manchester with Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, requiring at times one-to-a-part playing to accomplish its multi-voice textures, but eight of them put down their instruments and transformed into a choir for the piece that followed.That was for Heinz Holliger’s Eisblumen, written for seven strings plus four vocal parts: Bach’s chorale “Komm, O Tod” is heard beneath the very un-Bachian string writing. It was realised with delicacy and Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The problem facing any chef series is that its daily dramas are essentially rooted in the same small, sweaty space. It’s like one of the reductions prepared there, all the flavours compressed into an intense spoonful of sauce.As in Disney+’s riveting The Bear, the cast can take trips outside – that Chicago restaurant’s patissier even travelled as far as Copenhagen – but the triggers of the drama will most likely be in the pass and the pot-washing. Even so, taking a leaf out of the Shane Meadows film-to-TV-drama playbook, Stephen Graham’s production company has created a terrific series Read more ...
David Nice
Is Gounod’s Faust really a “complex and multi-layered work”, as director Jack Furness claims? Goethe’s original and Berlioz’s Damnation, absolutely; this tuneful concoction, half light opera, half kitsch melodrama, not so much. If Furness’s take leads him to concept overload, as well as quite a few really strong ideas, the big strength here lies in the casting of three world-class singers in the eternal triangle of rake, seduceable innocent and devil.The old, suicide-bent Faust’s crisis of scientific knowledge leaving a religious void causes Furness to set the action in a late 19th century Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I think of Sarah Lucas as the bad girl of British art, the one who uses her wicked sense of humour to point to rampant misogyny and call out the perpetrators. Of her generation of YBAs (Young British Artists), she has produced the edgiest, funniest and most disrespectful work.She enlarged the pages of The Sunday Sport to giant proportions, for instance, to bring home the nastiness of their attitude towards women. In Fat, Forty and Flab-ulous (pictured below) an overweight woman is derided for wanting to be sexy and desirable and in Pairfect Match readers are invited to match up women’s Read more ...