Reviews
Saskia Baron
Otto Baxter is no stranger to the camera, ever since he was a small boy he’s been featured on television with his adoptive mother Lucy Baxter, an impressive campaigner for better understanding of people with Down's Syndrome. Archive footage shows him to be a cheeky, outgoing child with a keen sense of fun. Brought up with three other boys with Down’s Syndrome, all adopted, his on-screen confidence shines through. Baxter has worked as an actor both on stage and in acclaimed short films and has been the subject of documentaries, including Otto: Love, Lust and Las Vegas Read more ...
David Nice
During his transformational time at the helm of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Vladimir Jurowski conducted the complete Threepenny Opera in concert and two performances of Rachmaninov’s Third Symphony which changed my mind about its being good only in parts. Last night’s interpretation made his fellow Russian’s late fantasy billow and soar, while Weill’s Little Threepenny Music opened with sheer stylish delight in the song/dance numbers framed by incisive austerity.That supposedly orchestral pianist so responsive to a genial Jurowski and the wind players of the Berlin Radio Symphony Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The journey from off-Broadway to central London has taken 15 years, but the multi-award-winning musical Next to Normal has finally made it. That time lag may lead to suspicions that its subject matter has become a tad outmoded, but this staging, directed by outgoing Donmar director Michael Longhurst, is fresh and affecting.The scene looks set for a conventional tale of middle-age crisis, of a “normal” middle-class kind. Diana and Dan live in a glass box they designed themselves – they met as architecture students – complete with Bulthaup-style minimal kitchen and stainless steel fridge. Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
From Forty Shades of Blue, 20 years ago, to Keep the Lights On and Love is Strange, writer/director Ira Sachs has proved himself to be a master at exploring romantic relationships – and the messier, the better. So, after the whimsical, inconsequential ensemble Frankie, he’s back to his best with a good old-fashioned love triangle. Passages is set in Paris, where German filmmaker Tomas (Franz Rogowski) and English printer Martin (Ben Whishaw) are an expat married couple, with a gorgeous apartment in the city, a country house, and some understandings, nay Read more ...
India Lewis
Zadie Smith’s latest novel, The Fraud, is her first venture into historical fiction – a fiction based on a factual trial and a real, forgotten Victorian author. While the premise is interesting and the story is engaging in itself, this book perhaps doesn’t quite feel as readable as her past novels – though, admittedly, that is a high bar.The Fraud centres around Eliza Touchet, the cousin of real-life author William Ainsworth, who in his time outsold Charles Dickens. Eliza is a good conduit for the narrative: a woman who has an affair with both Ainsworth and his wife and who, in later years, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Here we are in rural Ireland and on the other side of bonkers. Apocalypse Clown is billed as an "end-of-the-world road movie with clowns". It’s hilarious, off the wall, beyond the cringe.The protagonists are three washed-up members of the circus clown profession. They make a combustible madcap combination as they travel together around, squished into that long-extinct symbol of hippydom, a bright yellow Renault 4L.The starting point is that some celestial event – possibly a solar flare, but it doesn’t actually matter – has suddenly caused every piece of equipment that needs computer Read more ...
James Saynor
This modest British dramedy is billed as a “heart-warming story of friendship and survival set against the backdrop of the 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak”. That’s perhaps not the first catastrophe we associate with that fateful year, but it was a grim event in its own way: a livestock epidemic that led to the culling of countless farm animals across Britain.The film wears its over-warm heart on a rather thin sleeve but seems to have an intrepid background: it’s adapted from a play that won a writing competition at a small Battersea theatre in 2014 And it’s hard to be critical of first-time Read more ...
Justine Elias
At first, eight-year-old Peter tries to wish away the strange midnight noises as bad dreams, but the persistent knocking against his attic bedroom wall keeps him awake. His querulous mother (Lizzy Caplan, pictured below), assures him that he’s got a “beautiful imagination”, and “that there are bound to be bumps in the night.”It’s hard to tell if the boy (Woody Norman) is more frightened of being in school, where he dodges bullies twice his size, or going home, where he cowers under the glare of his controlling father (Anthony Starr, fairly vibrating with menace). Peter’s house, like the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Fia is a Swedish singer with a crystalline voice and a ear for a great melody - her singalong choruses are not typical for a festival Friday night headliner, like getting the audience to join in with “Sit with your pain/ cradle it close/ and when you’re ready/ Let it go.” This had a hypnotic effect on the audience, more mass therapy than a having a good time. The lyrics won’t go down as great poetry, but the point of the song was the effect it had, there was an undeniable group energy in the audience - a growing group empathy that every single person in the audience had varying levels of pain Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
One of the great wonders of Western literary history is one of the earliest, Homer’s The Odyssey, an epic poem with all the thrills and spills of an Indiana Jones outing, with added Olympians. The National’s version turned out not to be The Odyssey as we know it, though. Billed as a “new play” by Chris Bush, with music by Jim Fortune, it was the fifth instalment of a Public Acts project, following the massed efforts of four amateur groups across the country – in Stoke, Sunderland, Doncaster and Trowbridge – which performed a different section of the story each, from four Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They could have titled this series Gaslighting. It’s a sly and twisty thriller about a conman whose deadliest weapon is his gift for making his victims feel as if everything that happened to them was their own fault, and they brought it on themselves.It’s written by sisters Penelope and Ginny Skinner, and it makes you wonder what ghastly experiences they might have gone through to be able to create a character as hideously unscrupulous as Dr Rob Chance. Or at any rate that’s the name he’s using when we first encounter him – through the eyes of one of his victims, Alice Newman (Rebekah Staton Read more ...
Simon Thompson
The Edinburgh International Festival’s Queen’s Hall series ended with two very impressive debuts. Thursday morning brought the Isidore Quartet, who winningly, if slightly naively, told us that Edinburgh had a similar energy to their native New York.These four young men – the oldest member is 24 – were charm personified in the second of Haydn’s “Sun” Quartets, combining easy grace with carefree beauty, and using vibrato only discreetly to colour the sound carefully. Similarly, their take on the third of Mendelssohn’s Op 44 Quartets combined delicacy with warmth and terrific clarity of Read more ...