Reviews
Kieron Tyler
“Sky at Night” begins Radio Red. Its brooding atmosphere is shared with Saint Etienne’s “Hobart Paving.” Also, a sinuous sense of melody is at one with Todd Rundgren’s finest ballads. Melodic filigrees suggest Laura Nyro or Brighton band The Mummers. It’s some album opener.Subsequently, the Shipley-born, London-dwelling Laura Groves’ first album under her own name takes in gently soulful reflections and floating creations – mostly built around an electric piano and her multi-tracked voice – which are hard to pin down. Perhaps she’s been listening to The Carpenters, maybe Tin Drum-era Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Presented to you by Channel 4’s industrious Walter, Enemy of the People is a punchy Finnish drama which makes some smart and timely observations about life in the age of digital money and poisonous social media.It’s the story of an ambitious and dogged investigative journalist, Katja Salonen (Kreeta Salminen). She has written an article suggesting that football hero Samuli Tolonen (Jussi Partanen) has failed to make a financial investment in the local FC Tampere football stadium, after promising to do so.This earns Katja a tsunami of online messages dripping with bile, sexism and hatred, but Read more ...
David Kettle
Heaven, Traverse Theatre ★★★★★It’s a rare show that combines form and content to quite such devastatingly potent effect. The storyline of two-hander Heaven from Dublin-based Fishamble theatre company might seem simple: a middle-aged couple return to their former home town, where they encounter old (and new) flames, leading to a reassessment of their partnership, love and hopes.Despite the narrow focus of the material – examined in forensic detail in Eugene O’Brien’s penetrating script – there’s nonetheless a mythic quality to these two everypeople, buffeted by forces greater than Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Krystal Evans, Monkey Barrel @The Hive ★★★★American comic Krystal Evans (now living in the UK) tells us she has a “resting sarcastic voice” but after five minutes in her company you realise she’s just naturally, hootingly funny. Which is a good thing because Krystal Evans: The Hottest Girl at Burn Camp describes a horrific childhood incident in which her younger sister died, and a less funny comic might not be able to pull it off.Evans begins her tale by describing her chaotic upbringing. Her family lived in a mobile home in Washington State – “Nirvana, rain and heroin, just like Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Popped straight out to the streamers, Nicole Holofcener’s new film has apparently been labelled as insufficiently marketable for a theatrical release against the juggernaut of Barbenheimer. Surely by now a movie that doesn't feature either Ryan Gosling or Florence Pugh’s bare chests could be allowed in the cinema?Some of us might be craving dialogue we can hear and a 90-minute running time, or a script that doesn’t yammer on about the patriarchy while smothering us in pink. It's hard to believe that You Hurt My Feelings wouldn't have sold a few tickets in the cinemas that cater for Read more ...
India Lewis
I approached Henry Hoke’s fifth book, Open Throat, with some trepidation. A slim novel (156 pages), it seemed, at first glance, to be an over-intellectualised prose-cum-poetical text about a mountain lion.But the novel was so much more: an odd but wryly astute social commentary from an animal that has been forced to move from nature to where the humans are – and he doesn’t wholly hate it. It’s also (loosely) based on the famous P-22 mountain lion, who also lived in LA, and whose story at times intersects with that of the protagonist of Open Throat.The lion, whose name, we are told, is Read more ...
David Nice
“There will be more incense,” promised Glyndebourne Music Director Robin Ticciati of the company’s annual visit to the Proms. He was talking to my Opera Zoom class between the final rehearsal and first performance of Poulenc’s great masterpiece about the martyrdom of Carmelite nuns during the French revolution, as directed by Barrie Kosky with unsparing horror and humanity. And now here was the operatic company of the year taking its final bow after a sellout run in Sussex.Ticciati was right: during earlier scenes in the convent, the hallowed atmosphere in the Albert Hall was such that over Read more ...
David Kettle
Stuntman, Summerhall ★★★★★Masculinity and violence are hot subjects for theatrical examination – and dance theatre two-hander Stuntman from Scottish company Superfan is far from the only Fringe show that investigates them this year. What makes Stuntman stand out, though, is a particularly playful, even tender perspective on those forbiddingly thorny issues, and a joyfully light-touch appraisal of their crucial impact on male identity and relationships.The show might begin with gleeful live-action re-enactments of shoot-em-up hyperviolence from the two swaggering performers, all Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ania Magliano, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★ When Ania Magliano made her Fringe debut last year, her show was rightly garlanded with four- and five-star reviews. She sounded like an original voice on the comedy scene and this year her show, I Can’t Believe You’ve Done This, sold out its entire run before the festival opened.An hour that is ostensibly about the comic’s worst haircut doesn’t sound enthralling, but of course it works both as metaphor about overcoming adversity and a structure for the comedy as Magliano talks about her recovery from a sexual assault.She uses the hairdresser’s lack of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Matthew Bourne regularly revamps the first version of a new piece so that by the second go-round it really zings. For the return of his 2019 Romeo + Juliet, though, very little has changed, yet it feels refreshed.Dramaturgically, it’s still a bit unwieldy. Bourne’s lovers are inmates at the Verona Institute, some kind of correctional facility in “the not too distant future”. Unlike the other incarcerated waifs, Romeo has well-heeled parents (his father is Senator Montague), and they have placed him there, we don’t know exactly why. They can also extricate him at will, we discover, when Bourne Read more ...
Simon Thompson
And we’re off! This concert marked the beginning not just of the 2023 Edinburgh International Festival but, perhaps more importantly, of Nicola Benedetti’s tenure in charge as the EIF’s Director. She came onstage for a chat before a note of music was played. Part of her mission as director appears to be to make the arts more accessible, and if her introductory chat wasn’t much more than a gentle hello then it still did the job. Any aim to demystify classical music has to be welcomed.That brief seems to have been passed on to violinist Stefan Jackiw, the artist around whom this programme Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ed Byrne Assembly Rooms ★★★★★ Ed Byrne has frequently referenced his loved ones in previous shows but this new hour is one he would never wanted to have written, as it was prompted by the death of his younger brother, Paul, last year. Its title, Tragedy Plus Time, is taken from an aphorism attributed to Mark Twain about the definition of humour.But this is no misery memoir, far from it – Byrne is too talented a comic for that, and it’s a gag-filled hour, albeit one that deals with death and its impact. Byrne also poses some questions about the nature of sibling love and rivalry, and the Read more ...