Reviews
Alice Brewer
Always Open Always Closed is Caitlin Merrett King’s first published work of fiction, and it begins paratactically, with a list of displacements:MS REAL FEELS POSITIONLESS At her desk in the studio (not as often as she would like) or at the kitchen table or sofa, or at a kitchen table or at some else’s desk or in the pub or in Pollokshields Library (most often). Where she is situated, there you will find Ms Real staring, scrolling distracted, turning her phone over like a peach in her palm sliding it behind her laptop to avoid further frustration. Peach 15 minutes 5 minute break another 15 Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
A performance of Olivier Messiaen’s kaleidoscopic Turangalîla-Symphonie is always going to be a bit of an event. The Edinburgh International Festival set this one up nicely by making it not only the impressive culmination of a four-concert residency by the London Symphony Orchestra, but also the centrepiece of a group of Messiaen-themed performances.These included a separate concert, earlier in the evening, which juxtaposed Debussy’s La Mer and Milhaud’s La création du monde in a programme described as The Road to Turangalîla, and the previous day a performance of Messiaen’s Quartet for the Read more ...
David Kettle
A toy car – in fact, a mobile home with comically enormous antenna on top – shudders over arms and shoulders as if they were mountain ranges. A colossal polar bear comforts its curious cub. A lifesize puppet grandmother is chased up and down stairs by her over-enthusiastic stairlift.There’s a lot of humour, and of exquisite beauty, in this brief, ephemeral collaboration between two Belgian puppetry and mime companies, Focus and Challiwaté, at the International Festival. The overarching narrative – such as it is – involves a trio of characters (maybe reporters, possibly archivers, at least Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Blue Beetle is DC’s first screen Latino superhero, a recent development in the history of a D-grade character summed up here in his own film as “like the Flash… or Superman… but not as good”. Scraping the character barrel and first meant for cable, his debut also resists the grim “adult” gravitas routinely borrowed from Alan Moore and Frank Miller’s Eighties comics, popping with bright colours and breezy, communal humanity.Jamie Reyes (Xolo Maridueña, pictured below) is our teenage hero, forced to give up post-college ambitions when his family home is threatened with repossession in Palmera Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The final track of Giant Steps is titled “The White Noise Revisited.” Its lyrics recount the crushing impact of a job where you “kill yourself at work for what seems nothing at all.” After coming home, “you listen to the Beatles and relax and close your eyes.”Inevitably, as it was also a double album with a similarly hop-scotch approach to musical styles, the newly reissued Giant Steps was bracketed with The Beatles’ eponymous double album from 1968; what was dubbed “The White Album.” Little needs saying about what’s in the grooves of the wonderful Giant Steps on the occasion of its 30th- Read more ...
Simon Thompson
This concert, the Edinburgh International Festival debut of the Castalian Quartet, almost didn’t happen due to the illness of their second violin, Daniel Roberts. Then, a couple of days ago, in stepped Yume Fujise, leader of the Kleio Quartet, to save the day, which is no mean feat considering that this programme featured both a world premiere and the knottiest of Beethoven’s late quartets.She did a terrific job, though (Fujise pictured below), as did the other three. In fact, they built the programme around that premiere, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Awake. Turnage’s inspiration came from Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Despite its cursory nods to new technology, there’s something deliciously old-fashioned about Only Murders in the Building. Now into its third series, it tells the stories of a trio of affluent Manhattanites who make true-life podcasts about the mysterious deaths that occur in their palatial Upper West Side apartment building.It’s a grandiose pile designed in Italian Renaissance style, and its name, The Arconia, makes it sound more like an ocean liner than a block of flats. You could imagine bumping into Myrna Loy and William Powell in the lobby.The leading threesome comprises veteran actors/ Read more ...
David Kettle
Maureen, House of Oz ★★★★Make yourself comfortable – we’ll be here for a while. That’s what our host, 80-something Maureen, advises us several times during the course of her unhurried, hypnotically vivid reminscences of a life lived to the full. The era-defining, population-shifting changes she’s witnessed across her home neighbourhood of King’s Cross, Sydney. The teenage lover who disappeared into the turmoil of World War Two and returned changed forever. The soulmate whose death celebrations she staged with exquisite care. The little black book in which she records the dates of Read more ...
Cheri Amour
It shouldn’t be news to you that thanks to Gen Z, Y2K is making a comeback. From fashion threads to cultural memes, our feeds are a wash of “nowstalgia”. After 15 years away from the dive bars of their youth, Noughties noisemakers Be Your Own Pet are primed for the revival.It was actually another indie figurehead (admittedly who’s not left the mainstream music scene) behind the record coming together though. Not content with jamming out the old hits, the daydream of a single Nashville performance quickly morphed into a string of shows supporting Jack White, a man expertly crafting our new Read more ...
joe.muggs
We Out Here Festival, now in its fifth year (and fourth edition, as 2020 was of course cancelled for Covid), has become an institution. Curated by jazz-centric veteran DJ Gilles Peterson and actualised by Noah Ball – best known for his role in creating Outlook Festival in Croatia which has served as UK bass music’s metting point in the sun since 2008 – it joins the dots culturally through generations of music both strange and hedonistic and attracts a faithful crowd that reflects that.The diversity of the crowd is the first thing you’ll notice about the festival. Though it has grown a lot Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We’re in (pretty much literally so in this most intimate of venues) an Edwardian sitting room, time hanging heavily in the air, gentility almost visibly fading before our eyes. Two sisters (young, educated, attractive) bicker with each other. But for the pre-World War One era, they are not young, educated or attractive enough to acquire a gentleman for a husband, their only route out of a long, slow future of the same day repeating for decades. Things might change if the flirtations of man-on-the-make, Mr Smythe, can be converted into something more substantive.Staged in London for the first Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
György Kurtág is 97 and the last man standing of the post-war generation of avant-garde composers. Last night the Proms staged the UK premiere of his first opera, started in his eighties and premiered in 2018, a setting of Samuel Beckett’s typically mystifying play Endgame. Sadly, for all the brilliant passages of orchestral writing, and top-notch singing and playing, as an opera it’s a bit of a damp squib in which some minutes hung heavy.Kurtág is one of the great miniaturists – his life’s work is about 10 hours of music – but this opera is two solid hours without an interval (and it is Read more ...