Reviews
James Saynor
If you think we’ve got culture wars, then welcome to Transylvania. This rugged Romanian region is home to a bewildering overlap of ethnicities and tongues – Hungarian, a bit of German and Romanian itself – such that Cristian Mungiu’s new movie offers subtitles in different colours to get the idea across.In a backwoods burg full of shotguns, bears, people dressed as bears, worrying things in the forest and an awful lot of barking dogs, the Romanian auteur shows us how different folks can rub along quite well – up to a point when bigotry unfolds that would make Enoch Powell blanch.Matthias ( Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Can there be too much repetition? Is there a limit to the level of rhythmic insistence which can be tolerated? Judging by the enthused reaction to this sold-out show from Mexico’s Lorelle Meets The Obsolete where a heads down, no-nonsense pulse propelled their set, the answer to these questions is no.Central to this display of musical determination are drummer Andrea Davì and bassist Fernando Nuti. Both are Italian. Neither are full-time members of Lorelle Meets The Obsolete though each has played on their records, including this year’s Datura album. Whack, whack, whack goes Davì. Thump, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
This powerful play’s immediate backstory, with Moscow sentencing its author to eight years’ jail and its director going into forced exile, is not its immediate theme – and all the better for it, for how can anyone yet make any authentic dramatic reflection on Putin’s war on Ukraine?But there’s no doubt of the current war’s absolute relevance to Dmitri Glukhovsky and Maxim Didenko’s address of a hideous episode of World War Two, the murder of some 200,000 Polish Jews from Lodz by the SS, with help from Jews themselves.Normally Glukhovsky’s reputation rests on his bestselling Metro2033 Read more ...
Graham Fuller
A shot of a dead field mouse sets the tone for this sobering “slow cinema” documentary, narrator-director Christopher Morris’s response, simultaneously aghast and philosophical, to the looming environmental catastrophe.Rather than contemplate the decimation of the Amazon rain forests or the melting of the polar ice caps, Morris decided to spend a year filming the barley field that surrounds the 4,000-year-old Boscawen-Rôs East menhir, or standing stone, four miles north-east of Land’s End in Cornwall. According to the late earth mysteries writer John Michell, the so-called Longstone and Read more ...
David Nice
Many of us have perhaps grown too accustomed to the friendly face of My Fair Lady. George Bernard Shaw’s very original play is sharper, less sentimental yet ultimately more profoundly human. Its wit and wisdom zip along in Richard Jones’s symmetrical, perfectly calibrated production, with three astonishing performances and two climactic scenes, one in each half, which respectively make you (me) cry with laughter and bring a tear to the eye at choice moments.This isn’t the Cinderella story of the musical. There’s never any doubt that the huge emotional intelligence, spirit and quick learning Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
With more than 20 plays under her belt, San-Francisco based Lauren Gunderson is one of the most produced playwrights in the US. But she’s chosen London to premier her very topical new thriller. It’s a sign of a good writer that they can touch the zeitgeist just as the geist gets seriously gusty. anthropology was conceived before Chat GBT escalated the fears about the threat of artificial intelligence usurping mankind’s own sentient endeavour – and helped to herald the current actor and writer strikes in the US. While films have tackled the subject of AI getting ahead of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Nothing Lasts Forever opens with a drone, a weightless prologue of guitar feedback evoking the initial moments of the Buffalo Springfield’s “Everydays,” written by Stephen Stills and heard on his band’s 1967 second album Again. Teenage Fanclub’s 11th album ends with “I Will Love you,” a similarly gossamer reflection fusing the atmosphere of The Beatles’ “Across the Universe” and the cyclic rhythms of motorik.While an airiness suffuses the mostly low- to mid-tempo Nothing Lasts Forever, it is impossible with Teenage Fanclub not to think of what could have inspired them, what they might be Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
These days British orchestras count themselves lucky if they can see, and plan, five years ahead. In Bavaria they do things rather differently. As the ducal court ensemble, and later the house band of the Munich opera, the Bayerisches Staatsorchester can trace its history back to 1523. Last night the BSO, as part of a six-country tour to mark its 500th anniversary, arrived at the Barbican with the first of two programmes conducted by music director Vladimir Jurowski.Their opening concert began with a hauntingly meditative work by the contemporary Ukrainian composer Victoria Poleva; then the Read more ...
Paul Vale
It's rare that a new musical or play opens in the West End with as much positive word-of-mouth as The Little Big Things. Social media has been ablaze over the last few weeks, with critics and bloggers sneaking into previews and authoritative big names hailing a new hit long before the official press night.Fortunately much of the hype is well-founded, as this uproariously crowd-pleasing musical showcases not only a burgeoning new writing talent, but also flexes the muscles of @sohoplace as a truly accessible theatre space.In the summer of 2009, a 17-year-old Henry Fraser joined his rugger- Read more ...
CP Hunter
Celia Dale published 13 novels between 1944 and her death in 2011. A majority of her these are often categorised – albeit loosely – as crime fiction, or else labeled as a kind of suburban horror.Her astonishing skill, however, lay in the balance between genres: she wrote persistently along that tightrope of mundane normalcy and unsettling surreality, and deftly wove stories that leave the reader feeling uncomfortably disturbed – and yet unable to articulate precisely why. In her novels, people are rarely who they present themselves to be; intentions are obscured or hard-to-read; the narrative Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
You can imagine the thought processes that brought Kenneth Branagh’s latest adventure as Poirot, his third, to the big screen.“Memo to self: Find an Agatha Christie/Poirot story that hasn’t been done to death already, in fact isn’t well known at all so isn’t an automatically ‘spoiled' plot. Make it (inexpensively) exotic but still ‘period’ by moving the location to Venice in 1947, which looks very much like La Serenissima in 2023, minus the human sea of tourists following a guide holding up an umbrella. And there are still no cars and street furniture, and definitely no e-scooters, to CGI out Read more ...
David Nice
To master even one of Brahms’s three early sonatas is a colossal task for any pianist. To play them all with towering authority in a single concert takes a phenomenon. Elisabeth Leonskaja seems just that more than ever in her late 70s; not only is there no loss of the epic stops she can pull out in the most tumultuous music, but for all her poise, she’s also still willing to embrace the craziness and iconoclasm of the 20-year-old composer as if the works were written yesterday.All this, too, from memory, like another septuagenarian pianist, Idil Biret, when I last saw her. Leonskaja's first Read more ...