Reviews
Helen Hawkins
It must have looked like a funny idea on paper: a mute innocent stumbles into a Hollywood career, is mindlessly fêted by the industry and throws all its idiocies into stark relief. It’s an idea as old as the romances of Chretien de Troyes and Voltaire’s Candide, and was given an earlier Hollywood outing in Being There. But the lack of originality of the basic premise isn’t the problem here. Because lovable Charlie Day, star of the TV series It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, is the begetter of this script, as well as its director and star, all manner of famous faces have pitched in to Read more ...
David Nice
Funfairs and dance music, old world and new, should have guaranteed a corker of a second Prom from the Boston Symphony Orchestra with its chief conductor, Andris Nelsons. Glitter it did; but wit, drive and violence took a back seat to showcase sophistication, at least from where I was sitting in the hall (always a necessary qualification)If Nelsons seems to have lost the spark of his vintage days with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, his polish fits the classy Boston band very well – there’s little of the brave new brashness of the New York Philharmonic from these players, though Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ahir Shah, Monkey BarrelAhir Shah is a fast talker, but then in Ends – which deservedly won best show in the Edinburgh Comedy Awards – he has a lot to say. It's a show about multiculturalism, family, identity, fitting in, and encompasses modern history on two continents, so he has a lot to pack in.He starts, more prosaically, by talking about how he got into this comedy lark because, as three generations of his family sat down together to watch Goodness Gracious Me in 1998, it was the first time he had heard his grandparents properly laugh out loud.Shah's family – specifically his late Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Forty-seven years ago this week, a new band called The Clash were seen by a paying audience in London for the first time. On Sunday 29 August 1976 they played Islington’s Screen on the Green cinema, billed between Manchester’s Buzzcocks – their earliest London show – and rising luminaries Sex Pistols. Doors opened at midnight. The anniversary needs marking.At this point, The Clash had three guitarists. They were a five-piece band rather than the four-piece which became familiar. The guitarist who left a few weeks after the Screen on the Green outing was Keith Levene. Along with fellow Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
This was one of the more strait-laced concert performances, with few concessions to Wagner’s underlying stage drama. The soloists were in formal concert dress, strung out in a line at the front of the stage, with interaction between them limited to looks of anguish and the sparest of gestures. The shepherd boy in Act 1 was banished to the upper reaches of the organ gallery, and there was a substantial off-stage band in Act 2, but otherwise there was nothing to distract us from the music.But what music! Wagner's Overture to Tannhäuser is justly seen as a masterpiece in its own right, but under Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Optimistically billed as John Travolta’s comeback, writer-director Nicholas Maggio’s debut is an effective Southern noir, with Travolta an authoritative but peripheral presence.Mob Land is mostly about Shelby Connors (Shiloh Fernandez), a small-town ex-racing driver with Parkinson’s, struggling to make ends meet with his wife Caroline (Ashley Benson) and daughter. Repossession threatens his home, where Caroline’s brother Trey (Kevin Dillon, pictured below left with Fernandez) spends his time, and suggests the bad choice that will send them to hell. A local pharmacy is a Mob front pushing Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Few singers can match the exhilarating range of counter-tenor Iestyn Davies’ performances, whether it’s in the free-soaring clarity of his voice in rapid recitative-style passages or the white heat of intensity he brings to sustained notes.In this heady, captivating late-night Prom, he – together with the English Concert, inspirationally directed by Kristian Bezuidenhout (pictured below) – delivered a programme of Bach that was as linguistically fascinating as it was musically uplifting.The opening piece was the solo cantata Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust, which Bach wrote in 1726 when he Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Several years ago I got chatting to a young tenor who was training at the Royal Northern College of Music. He was enjoying his studies, but complained that, as a British tenor, he got offered a lot of Britten and Handel but not an awful lot else.There was Britten aplenty in this recital from Nick Pritchard, another young British tenor, but it was a shrewd move for him to begin his recital with French language repertoire because it showed up a side of his voice that I found as surprising as it was lovely.Put simply, there’s a gorgeous sweetness to Pritchard’s voice that knocked me for six. The Read more ...
David Kettle
CHOO CHOO! (Or... Have You Ever Thought About ****** **** *****? (Cos I Have)), Pleasance Dome ★★★★Nye and Duncan seem to live a charmed life. Clad in primary-coloured dungarees, they begin their days with a song, and see what adventures the radio has in store for them. Maybe today they’ll be play-acting a game show, or recreating a famous movie scene. Anything to fill the time. Most importantly, they’re counting the days until their holiday. Well, Duncan is.There are a lot of laughs to be had at new company StammerMouth’s slightly sinister send-up of children’s entertainers, but Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Everything is Alive opens with all that could be wanted from a Slowdive album. “Shanty” is just-under six minutes of out-of-focus, shimmering aural fog in which guitars throb and drums are a distant pulse. An acid-house-type heartbeat is offset against a harpsichord-like refrain recalling Broadcast. Lines drift in about a burning candle and the arrival of night. It all seems to be about the passing of time.Text-book Slowdive then, on a line between their 1993 second album Souvlaki and its 1995 follow-up Pygmalion. The latter became their last release before they split the same year. They Read more ...
aleks.sierz
This is a play about censorship in a totalitarian state – but, no, I’m not reviewing The Pillowman again. Instead, I’m watching A Mirror by Sam Holcroft, a playwright who – as her 2015 play Rules for Living amply illustrated – is interested in playful games with the idea of theatricality.This time, she explores ideas about fact and fiction in a tricksy story set in a repressive regime whose Almeida Theatre production stars the always watchable, and highly bankable, Jonny Lee Miller.The plot is about Mr Čelik (Miller), director of the Ministry of Culture in a dystopian no-place, whose job is Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s the summer holidays, and though Georgie (Lola Campbell) is only 12, she’s managing to keep her council house looking just the way her mum liked it. There may be a few spiders hanging around but they have names and personalities and there’s food in the cupboard, even if it’s been paid for from the proceeds of selling the bikes Georgie has stolen. Though her mother died recently, social services aren’t too fussed as they believe her uncle is looking after her. They don’t think it’s odd that he’s called Winston Churchill, or that when they phone to check up, he answers their Read more ...