Reviews
Veronica Lee
John Kearns' comedy is what you might call niche; absurdist, surrealist, poetic – they all apply, underlined by his onstage uniform, or “mask”, of tonsure wig and oversize false teeth. But last year he took part in something very definitely mainstream – Channel 4’s Taskmaster – and knows that some in the audience are here to see not the performer who won best newcomer and best show in the Edinburgh Comedy Awards in successive years (2013 and 2014), but the sweet, giggly comic seemingly incapable of lateral thinking, the contestant destined for last place. (Actually he came third.)Learns Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Gardener Narvel (Joel Edgerton) sniffs soil the way Blue Velvet’s Frank inhaled gas, finding erasure and release. Following Ethan Hawke’s priest in First Reformed (2017) and Oscar Isaac’s titular job in The Card Counter (2021), Paul Schrader’s latest driven protagonist verges on absurd, finding solace in pruning before deploying his secateurs with a prior, particular set of skills.Narvel is the head gardener at the plantation-style estate of aristocratic Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). He’s a middle-aged historian and philosopher of horticulture, keeping a journal at a monastic desk. “ Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Tunisian lives unfold over a working day in Erige Sehiri’s debut Under the Fig Trees, with fig-picking the backdrop to furtive, sparking collisions between men and women. Love, liberation and oppression all take their turn under the sun as community is strengthened or challenged, and a society is subtly implied.Sehiri has a documentary background, and cast non-professionals from her Kesra setting. The naturalistic, improvised performances seem effortlessly real, but this isn’t prosaic non-fiction. The play of changing light and shade marking the day, the loving framing of beautiful faces Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Masterminded by writer-director Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, Spy Kids etc), Hypnotic is a speedy, twisty, riotously enjoyable thriller that seeks to bend your mind into impossible shapes while also delivering more than a few droll wisecracks. Ben Affleck, seemingly reinvigorated as half of "Bennifer 2", is bang on the money here as Austin PD detective Danny Rourke. When he’s called out to investigate a tip-off about a bank heist, he finds himself tumbling down a rabbit-hole where time, space and identity itself all get swirled in a kaleidoscopic blender.Already, things haven’t been going Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The audience questions are when Kieran Yates’ talk boils over. Her book All the Houses I’ve Ever Lived In considers housing policy through autobiography and imaginative research, and the preceding interview has focused on its sometimes academic arguments and colourful details. Many here, though, want more practical answers to Britain’s housing crisis, an intimate iniquity which is our economy’s shaky foundation, while carving generational fault-lines.It's when Yates contrasts estate agents’ gaudily photoshopped property pictures with social housing candidates having to bid based on photo-free Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” was the UK’s first explicitly psychedelic record. Although there were delays with it hitting shops, it was recorded in December 1965. A large part of its impact came through the instrumentation and arrangement. Jazz players were on board, playing in a folky way without abandoning their core musical sensibilities. The ground-breaking arranger responsible was John Cameron.In 1976, Heatwave issued the instant dance-floor filler “Boogie Nights” as a single. It was a world-wide chart smash in 1977. Producer Barry Blue brought in arranger John Cameron to work on the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s 27 years since Gretchen Peters released her debut album, The Secret of Life, championed by Bob Harris and the late Terry Wogan, whose morning-tide enthusiasms also helped propel Eva Cassidy and Beth Neilsen Chapman to success - the term “Americana” hadn’t yet been invented!Peters has been touring Britain for some 25 years, unusually for an American recording a live album here (The Show: Live from the UK), which captured her just pre-Covid performing a career-spanning selection of songs with the all-female Southern Fried String Quartet. She’s won, or been nominated for, a raft of Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Full Time opens in darkness. All we can hear is the sound of a sleeping woman breathing. It’s one of the few quiet moments in a film that follows Julie (Laure Calamy) as she scrambles to manage her life. Divorced with two young children, she lives in a village and commutes to Paris. It’s still dark when she drops off her kids with an elderly child minder and it’s dark again when she picks them up after a long day’s work in the city. The radio relays news of train strikes and protests, her journey is a nightmare of crowded replacement coaches. Work is overseeing a team of Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of contemporary puppetry is its ability to skew our perception of reality so entirely that our senses become more heightened as we wait with meta-awareness in excited anticipation for what comes next – whether we know the story or not.On the stage of the Brighton Theatre Royal, giant figures become small objects, perspective is tipped on its side as we try to untangle the complexities of who is real and what is constructed. It is a delicious metaphorical tangle that parallels the book’s key themes.We are thrown into the infamous tale with some of its Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Love may change everything, as we're reminded multiple times during Andrew Lloyd Webber's rabidly polyamorous Aspects of Love, but certain things about this 1989 London hit (and subsequent Broadway flop) are fixed.The sexual shenanigans tracked across this adaptation of David Garnett's 1955 romantic novel are destined to remain a challenge to playgoers to varying degrees, especially amid a current climate of properly heightened sensitivities. But it seems equally true, at least to me, that this score is one of its composer's most beautiful - not so much because of the earworm, "Love Changes Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Jim Jones has been around the block a few times, plying his garage/punk/rock’n’roll schtick – most notably with his last couple of outfits, the Jim Jones Revue and Jim Jones and the Righteous Mind. Back in the ring with his new crew, the Jim Jones Allstars, however, he’s subtly changed the template to bring some serious old school rhythm and blues to the party as well.As part of this change, Jones has recruited some brass into the band, with a couple of saxophones to add a bit of vim. His eight-strong crew still look as if Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds had crawled out of South London though. Trilbies Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Two years on from Sean Holmes’ production and seven on from Emma Rice’s (both of which featured diverse casts), Elle While takes a turn with the old warhorse’s lovers and fairies, its sparring couples and its Morecambe and Wise-like shambles of a play-within-a-play. The question hangs in the air – what to do to excite audiences, some of whom are so familiar with A Midsummer Night’s Dream that, a row behind me, they were laughing a beat before the punchlines were delivered?The result of such consideration is a bit of a mishmash of things that work, some that don’t and quite a lot in- Read more ...