Reviews
Sarah Kent
Lasting just over an hour, The Nettle Dress is like a fairy story. It builds very slowly, each beautifully framed shot contributing toward a perfect little gem that tells a moral tale.A man spends seven years coming to terms with the loss of both his father and his wife from cancer by spinning nettle fibres into threads, then weaving them into a length of cloth. He recalls sitting beside a hospital bed, spinning while listening to his father’s breathing dwindle to a last gentle sigh, then during his wife’s final illness, spinning his way through sorrow.“There were hours of stillness and calm Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
To coincide with the National Library of Scotland’s first bi-lingual exhibition Sguel/Story, an exhibition in English and Scottish Gaelic which celebrates stories and storytelling, the library presented a performance of newly reinterpreted Gaelic ballads with string quartet arrangements from composer Ned Bigham.These ballads – known as laoidhean – are heroic folk tales telling the stories of mythical beasts, brave warriors and ancient kings and queens, and have been an important part of Celtic folklore since Medieval times. One of the most notable collections of these songs was compiled by Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In September 1955, the grandly named London Skiffle Centre set up for business each Thursday in a room above the Round House pub in Soho’s Wardour Street. A prime mover in the venture was blues acolyte Cyril Davies. Two months after the opening, Lonnie Donegan’s “Rock Island Line” was issued as a single. It was previously out as a track on a 1953 Chris Barber album. Despite the wonky timeline, the skiffle boom was on.Davies – now in partnership with fellow blues enthusiast Alexis Korner – grew increasingly dissatisfied with skiffle and in March 1957 the duo renamed The London Skiffle Centre Read more ...
Sarah Kent
One of the most cherished memories of my 40 plus years as an art critic is of easing my way between Marina Abramović and her partner Ulay. They were standing either side of a doorway at Documenta in Kassel, Germany, leaving just enough room for people to squeeze through, trying not to touch their naked bodies.That was in 1977; Imponderabilia (pictured below right) is now being performed again at the Royal Academy by young artists trained for the purpose by Abramovic. For me, this induces a strong sense of déja vu; and although the feeling may be inevitable in a retrospective, it’s Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The work of the double Pulitzer-winning Black American dramatist Lynn Nottage has thankfully become a fixture in the UK. After its award-winning production of Sweat, the Donmar will stage the UK premiere of her Clyde’s next month, and MJ the Musical, for which she wrote the book, arrives in the West End in March 2024.But not to be missed right now is her 2018 play Mlima’s Tale at the Kiln. Out of a magazine article about the ivory trade, Nottage has spun a Brechtian yarn of corruption and mendacity, minus the Verfremdung and with a surprising number of laughs, that suggests a whole world Read more ...
stephen.walsh
It’s always tempting, at curtain-up in La Traviata, to settle back, half-close one’s eyes, and soak up the familiar without the anxiety of the new. Not this time you won’t. David McVicar’s lavish 2009 text-true staging is being revived with a generally strong, stylish and dependable cast.But one particular performance will have you sitting bolt upright in your seat, hardly able to believe that this is the third or fourth or whatever revival of an elderly production of a repertory standard in (many Welsh believe) Verdi’s native town.I’ve seen and heard some fine Violettas in my time, and some Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There are times when it’s best to know as little as possible before taking one’s seat for a show – this new production of Rebecca would be a perfect such example.It was once talked up as the new Phantom, the next smash hit musical that would do on Broadway in the 2010s what it had done in Europe in the 2000s. Mysterious backers sent emails from dubious addresses, one bearing news of the death of a key investor and, while real sets were built and real actors rehearsed, the money, like the deceased investor, was never real at all. More than a decade on, Rebecca, adapted from the 2006 Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Must science always be dominated by politics? This question is most urgent when the stakes are high – climate change or nuclear weapons. And it is grimly true that the fact that audiences are still interested in the race for the atom bomb between the Allies and Nazi Germany in the 1940s says something about our current anxieties about Russia, North Korea and Iran.Billed as the “other side of the Oppenheimer story”, American playwright Alan Brody’s award-winning 2013 history play, Operation Epsilon, gets its British premiere at the Southwark Playhouse, and offers a solid, if pedestrian, Read more ...
David Nice
Britten’s biggest cornucopia of invention seems unsinkable, and no-one seeing his breakthrough 1945 opera for the first time in this revival will fail to register its forceful genius. David Alden’s expressionist nightmare of a production, though, has never seemed to me to hit the heart of the matter. And though musical values are strong, ENO music director Martyn Brabbins doesn’t always keep the tension flowing.This always has been and always will be a showcase for the English National Opera Chorus, projecting perfectly while semaphoring and hand-jiving, good enough to make us forget - as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Thanks to numerous arguments and disagreements over script, casting etc, nine years have elapsed since Expendables 3 hit the multiplexes, and Sylvester Stallone and his mercenary crew were perilously close to being over the hill even then. In Expend4bles, age has duly withered them even further, a fact wryly acknowledged by director Scott Waugh and his screenwriting squad. Dolph Lundgren, now vaguely resembling an ancient relic dug up from a peat bog in Jutland, has become a comic figure whose sniper’s skills are severely hampered because he hasn’t made that latest trip to SpecSavers.Jason Read more ...
Robert Beale
For someone who said when he first took the helm at the Hallé that he “didn’t do much Mahler”, Sir Mark Elder has a pretty good track record. He’s conducted all the symphonies except one over 20 or so years at the Bridgewater Hall, and two of them have been heard under his baton more than once.Those are no. 9 (it was also recorded, in 2014) and no. 5 – and now, in his final season as music director, he’s begun with the former and will end with the latter, both recalling memorable experiences from the past for those who witnessed them.The Ninth is, in his own words, a lovely way to Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
An impressive performance by Samuel West as one of two warring hams stuck on-set in a trailer over a not-so-dormant volcano in Iceland, endlessly waiting to shoot their scene and go home, tended by a young runner whose woke values soon clash with their antediluvian ones...This Park Theatre debut sounds like the makings of a decent farce, with maybe a nod to Beckett. But Adrian Edmonson’s and Nigel Planer’s It’s Headed Straight Towards Us has ended up an incompletely digested mix of digs at the acting world and Young Ones-y excess. The action begins in blackout with what sound like Read more ...