Reviews
Matt Wolf
Life's journey is a challenge, and then some, for Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix), the beleaguered Odysseus/Job (you choose!) equivalent figure at the savage heart of Ari Aster's new film Beau is Afraid. But imagine surviving unimaginable ordeals on the long road of existence only to be met at the end by the Broadway legend Patti LuPone?Some trips are worth the destination and, running a fully felt three hours, this film is one of them, if not for a final sequence that lets the Juilliard-trained LuPone let rip: we all know she played Eva Peron but on this evidence, I'd love to have Read more ...
Jane Edwardes
Shakespeare drew on Plautus’s Menaechmi for this early short comedy. Was it his competitive streak that made him up the ante with not one set of identical twins but two?Imagine that you have newly arrived in a place that you have never visited before, and within 24 hours you are met by a woman who claims you as her husband, a man who thrusts a gold chain in your hands that he insists you had long ordered, and a courtesan who demands the return of a ring she says she gave you earlier. Farce or tragedy? That is the plight of poor Antipholus of Syracuse, who arrives in Ephesus with his servant Read more ...
Robert Beale
What makes a classical box office draw these days? If there were a simple answer to that question, a lot of concert givers would be laughing all the way to the bank.Is it recognisability – artists whose names are familiar from big-viewing TV events such as The Last Night of the Proms, or composer names that people feel are “safe”, like Beethoven and Sibelius, or even particular works that get a lot of airplay on Classic FM? Is it a sense of value for money, so three soloists for the ticket price of one sounds like a good deal (this could be very persuasive for us Northerners, being careful Read more ...
David Kettle
How do you cram a thousand-page novel, a cast of dozens and profound philosophical ponderings on love, fidelity, class and freedom into a two-and-a-half hour stage show? If you’re Lesley Hart – adapter of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre (from where it hops down south to Bristol Old Vic in June) – it’s with nimbleness, clear-sighted focus, and really quite a lot of swearing.We’ll come back to the profanities. In terms of adaptation, though, Hart’s stage version has a lot going for it. Okay, it inevitably feels crammed-in at times – the famously tone-setting grisly end for Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Who created the term “electronic superhighway”? First described a system of linked communication that would become the internet? Envisioned a multichannel TV system where viewers chose for themselves what to tune into? Watch Amanda Kim’s excellent documentary Moon Is the Oldest TV and you find that the correct answer to all those questions is Nam June Paik.A diminutive impish South Korean, Paik was born into an eminent wealthy Seoul family, on a par with the Samsungs, and by 17 knew he had to get out. He had become a Marxist, then a communist. His intellectual interests would take him to Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The family pet dies. It’s a problem many parents face, and when Gracie learns from her evasive father that her dog isn’t just gone, but gone forever, her five-year-old brain cannot process it and so begins a lifelong relationship with deaths, funerals and grief. It’s something we all experience but seldom talk about and, as such, it’s fertile ground for theatre. So Jacob Marx Rice’s new play is a worthy addition to the Finborough Theatre’s fine record of staging interesting work in its intimate space, all the more laudable as, on the face of it, this production is a tough sell in Read more ...
Mert Dilek
For a masterclass in expansive adaptation, one could do worse than turn to Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain, based on American author Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story of the same title. Proulx’s restrained but searing tale of the queer romance between two ranch hands in 1960s Wyoming generated in Lee's 2005 film a tragedy of deep interiority and complex emotion.Eighteen years on, this source material faces a kindred, if altogether new, challenge in Ashley Robinson’s stage adaptation at West End’s @sohoplace, which comes with serious star wattage through its central cast of Mike Faist Read more ...
Tim Cumming
These encounters are ones that may lead to lifelong relationships, with the halls at Kings Place this coming weekend filled with music from Mali, Colombia, Turkey, Georgia, Estonia, Tibet and a woodland in Sussex.Friday’s double-headed line-up features Malian blues-rock guitarist Vieux Farka Toure returning to his roots on his recent album, La Racines, with a focus on Songhai music from northern Mali, while in Hall Two the all-female London-based Mariachi band Las Adelitas reverse a few macho stereotypes.Saturday will be a high point, with not only a surround-sound remote connection with Sam Read more ...
Jon Turney
Humans are unsettled by incomplete data, unanswered questions. Show us dots on paper, and we’ll join them to make a picture. Show us objects in the night sky, and we create worlds.So it has been with Mars, conspicuous to us Earthbound gazers as one of the heavenly bodies that wanders from place to place against the backdrop of the stars. A planet, then, whatever that might be. An occult influence on terrestrial affairs, perhaps, or the sign of some unusually active god. Later, it seemed, a world that could share features with our own, as images of the known and unknown were both refashioned Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Standing ovations on the less-than-passionate South Bank can have a dutiful, grudging quality. However, I’ve seldom heard more heartfelt ardour at the Royal Festival Hall than the acclaim for Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra last night. Rightly so? Beyond all doubt.We knew, from recordings if not live performances, that their stewardship of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony passes beyond curatorial respect and into a sort of rapturous renewal. We’ll never quite hear Mahler’s Ninth (though Bruno Walter certainly comes close). Still, the great Budapest band arguably embodies the all- Read more ...
Anya Ryan
Food is the centrepiece of Gareth Farr’s chilling new play Biscuits for Breakfast. Meals are described so delicately that the rich steams of them cooking are almost scented. But though they are prepared, shared and savoured with fondness, crucially, they are never physically there.Instead, budding lovers Paul and Joanne dine with food suggested but never shown. Paul, a trainee chef, woos the spiky Joanne with a perfectly made fish pie. Both work at the local hotel, with Paul dreaming of breaking away from the Cornish seaside for a future of bestselling cookbooks and lavish restaurants. Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Margaret Simon (a brilliant Abby Ryder Fortson) is 11. What she wants above all is to be “normal and regular like everyone else”. This means getting her period at the right time – “I’d die if I didn’t get it till I was 16,” she tells her mother (Rachel McAdams) – and filling out her Gro-Bra. An only child, she makes God her confidant and asks him to help.Writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig’s charming, atmospheric movie is mainly faithful to Judy Blume’s iconic novel, fans will be relieved to know, though transferring such an interior life on to the screen is by definition problematic. It Read more ...