Reviews
David Nice
Union Jacks could be stowed away, and EU ones figuratively, furtively flourished: this was a concert of celebratory music for a Hanoverian king by a Saxon composer, by then recently become a British citizen, performed by a French ensemble in a Roman Catholic church which once served the Spanish Embassy. The present King, having already made a start repairing Britain’s damaged reputation on the continent by speaking German in Berlin, surely approved.How do I know? Because there he was, as we all suspected he would be because of tight security, enjoying among other things a more relaxed Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
It’s been more than 20 years since the premiere of The Shape of Things, Neil LaBute’s prickly drama about couples and friends and the ways we change each other. And boy, does it show. Director Nicky Allpress and a talented young cast try their best with a script that, though updated for this version at the Park Theatre, still feels behind the times.Evelyn (Amber Anderson) meets Adam (Luke Newton, of Bridgerton fame) at work. His work, that is – he’s a security guard at an art gallery, she’s an art student with a can of spray paint she eventually uses to draw a penis on a sculpture. She gives Read more ...
Jon Turney
If you cannot even step into the same river twice, how to take the measure of the ocean? Dipping your toes at the beach is irresistible, but uninformative. Sampling stuff out at sea helps more, but you have to get serious. Consider the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR), a device designed in the 1930s for recovering plankton from the open ocean. They are cruising along, tethered unobtrusively behind cargo ships and hauled in from time to time to assess their microscopic catch.By 2021, Helen Czerski tells us, CPRs had been towed for 7 million nautical miles, which would take them 326 times Read more ...
David Nice
Do we really need instrumental Shostakovich with lighting, movement, costumes and video projection? I might have said no before having seen what the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra could do with former leader Terje Tønnesen, performing the Chamber Symphony by heart in dramatic style. It seemed likely that memorizing even more music under new Artistic Director Pekka Kuusisto, and performing it in an insanely demanding dramatic framework, with no word spoken, could work.It does, beyond anyone's wildest imaginings. This collaboration is with a visionary Danish team: director Mikkel Harder Munck- Read more ...
Liz Thomson
There are few contemporary journalists whose names are instantly familiar – and usually it’s for the wrong reasons. Polly Toynbee occupies a special place in the hearts and minds of all those on the left. To those on the right, she is among the most offensive of “the wokerati”, though I doubt she’s mad about tofu. The Daily Express has called her “the high priestess of leftism”.Her columns, for the Observer, the Independent (ah, those long-gone halcyon days) and the Guardian, are essential reading for all those on the Labour/Lib Dem spectrum and reviled by Conservatives, who like to paint her Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It takes a real effort to sound this small, this timid; to resist the effort to rock out and kick pedal. Singer ‘Amelia’ (oh yeah, I bet that’s her name) has spent her entire adult life pretending she doesn't menstruate. The rest of her band, too, look like the sort of fanzine autistics who still wear dungarees at 30”.In his Melody Maker review of Heavenly’s June 1992 second album Le Jardin de Heavenly (its predecessor was a mini LP), Simon Price went on to say it “recreates only the most stylised clichés of childhood. The lyrics are emotionally retarded in the extreme, and the music veers Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The actress Sydney Sweeney’s face in the harrowing docudrama Reality is an ever-evolving map, its contours and pallor altering as it gradually dawns on her character, the real-life American whistleblower Reality Winner, that her conscience has put paid to her freedom for the forseeable future.Sweeney’s eyes are big to begin with but they seem to expand as Winner agonizingly bleeds out the truth of the unauthorised action she took to protect democracy during Donald Trump’s presidency; the eyes of Wallace Taylor (Marchánt Davis), one of the two FBI agents grilling Winner, never blink, his stare Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The inspirations for the directing debut of Benjamin Millepied, choreographer and dancer in Black Swan, are cited as Merimée’s novella Carmen and Pushkin’s narrative poem The Gypsies, the former better known as an opera guaranteed to raise the emotional temperature. Millepied has employed the brilliant Succession composer Nicholas Britell for some of the music; and, in the kind of tender-hearted beefcake role he has shown he can play so effectively, he has Paul Mescal. So why doesn’t this Carmen knock it out of the park?It seems to have taken three writers to craft the Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Needy, truculent, and aggressive, an in-your-face stick of intensity and guilt-inducing melancholy, privileged young Amanda in Carolina Cavalli’s downbeat comedy is the girl no one wants to end up talking to in the kitchen at parties. So empathetic is Benedetta Porcaroli’s portrayal of this emotional aggressor, however, that it’s difficult not to root for her. Especially if, per William Blake, one’s bag is eternal night rather than sweet delight. Newly returned from studying in Paris, Amanda has been welcomed back into the matriarchal family’s bosom like a virus and is staying in a Read more ...
Jane Edwardes
We all need a break from time to time, especially now given the grim state of the world. So it’s not surprising that comedy is making something of a comeback in the West End: Operation Mincemeat; The Unfriend seen recently at this theatre; The Play that Goes Wrong and all its offshoots; and now Bleak Expectations, an affectionate send-up of the various tropes of Charles Dickens.Initially, a popular Radio 4 comedy, this dramatised version premiered at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury in 2022. For fans of the radio show wondering whether to go, there’s the additional attraction of a different Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There are a few perils to saying supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, as Janette Manrara discovered on this opening night of Disney’s anniversary arena jaunt. Trying to divide the Glasgow crowd into sections to sing the song, Manrara tripped over who was to sing what, something only notable because the rest of the evening was possessed of an almost overpowering slickness.Although the opening overture went all the way back to Steamboat Willie, nearly all of the set, which featured a full orchestra, a rotating array of singers supplied from the West End and a likeable, cheerful hostess in Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Devoted fans may not learn anything that new about Noel Coward from Barnaby Thompson’s documentary Mad About the Boy, but they will doubtless see some new things. And those who know “the Master” only from his early plays, hardy perennials these days in British theatres, will marvel at the sheer range and volume of his output.Thompson has been given access to archive materials, including Coward’s home movies, by his estate, and these provide a welcome garnish to the bare bones of his CV. See Coward propelling himself on a lilo across the sea at the foot of his beloved Jamaican property. Read more ...