Reviews
Sarah Kent
Maher (Maher el Khair, an actual brick-maker) works in a brickyard sloshing sticky mud into rectangular moulds with his bare hands. Next the mud bricks are tipped out to dry in the sun, before being fired in a large, wood fired kiln. The same process has been used for centuries, yet this brickyard is within spitting distance of the Merowe Dam, a state-of-the-art hydroelectric dam built across the Nile in Sudan. Ancient and modern technologies collide.After a day spent in the mud, the men all go for a swim, except Maher who borrows a motorbike and rides off into the desert. Driving along a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Amongst the stranger recordings surfacing in 1977’s summer of punk was the version of Sex Pistols’s “Pretty Vacant” appearing on the budget Hallmark label album Top Of The Pops Volume 60 – the latest in a long-running series collecting ostensibly sound-alike versions of current hits recorded by anonymous session musicians and singers in a Wembley studio.This “Pretty Vacant” just-about caught the heft of the original but was in no way a convincing facsimile. The singer tried though. He adopted a voice along the Old Man Steptoe lines which might have caused the then Johnny Rotten to chuckle. Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The incendiary topic of Egyptian-American director Lotfy Nathan’s debut feature Harka is poverty and corruption in Tunisia a decade after the failed promise of the Arab Spring.The word harka in the local Arabic dialect means either “to burn” or “to emigrate illegally”, and both definitions refer to the sad story of Ali Hamdi (Adam Bessa), an unlicensed petrol vendor on the streets of Sidi Bouzid. This is the desert city where, in 2011, a real-life barrow boy by the name of Mohamed Bouazizi literally ignited the country’s Jasmine Revolution with a symbolic act of self-immolation following Read more ...
David Nice
Who’d have thought Florence Price, Rachmaninov, Gershwin and Brahms would all fit the (unspoken) theme of 1930s America? Brahms made the bill by virtue of Schoenberg’s 1937 arrangement of the C minor Piano Quartet, so outlandish and camp that you’d be tempted to credit Stokowski as the orchestrator. Like Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on the Theme of Paganini, it needs vertiginous audacity: that came in spades from conductor Joshua Weilerstein and pianist Martin James Bartlett.Weilerstein and an orchestra sounding especially lustrous in the string section made the best possible case for currently Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sometimes I go outside and look at our kitchen drain. Where there should be a vortex there’s a largely static pool. Tree roots have recently grown through the old pipes, their clumps colonised with fat, dog hair and coleslaw bits, and though a bit of handpumping will shift some of the stale water for a while, it really needs systemic attention from Dyno-rod. A good Dyno-rodding is what Chichester’s new production of Noel Coward’s The Vortex needs too.The catchline for the staging is that a real-life mother and son play the sex-mad mother and drug-addicted son of the drama, the subtle and Read more ...
Nick Hasted
James Gunn is running the whole DC show now, but his Guardians films have stayed free from Cinematic Universe snares, even the group’s Avengers cameos beaming in from their own pop-art corner. This swansong is their indulgent, sometimes meandering double-album and darkest chapter, making a visceral anti-vivisection and anti-eugenics case.Volume 3 resembles Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania in the shadows cast over a dayglo series by a particularly vicious villain. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s High Evolutionary was a relatively benign, species-splicing Dr Moreau, turned by later writers into a Read more ...
Tim Cumming
“YOUR NEW ALBUM IS FUCKING DEADLY!” hollers a voice from the depths of a full house at the Barbican on Thursday night, the first date on the north Dublin band’s UK tour for their stunning new album, False Lankum.Queue it up for your listening pleasure, and you’re going to be submerged in a sonic netherworld raised up by the four-piece’s panoply of organic drones seemingly captured in an echo chamber of epic proportions, with funereal drum taps, singer Radie Peat’s voice at its most haunted and disembodied, and more reminiscent of Heathen Earth-era Throbbing Gristle than anything heard before Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Nowadays Robert Graves is best known for his later and least interesting works on Greek myths and Roman emperors, but at his best, in the first decade of his writing life, as a war poet (Fairies and Fusiliers) and war memoirist (Good-Bye to All That), he was a powerful mythmaker in his own right.He was also borderline absurd, a cut-price Lord Byron whose scandalous private life – in particular the Jazz Age ménage à trois with his wife Nancy Nicholson and a charismatic American literary critic, Laura Riding – somehow overshadowed his literary career.The title of writer-director William Nunez’s Read more ...
Robert Beale
Getting on for 27 years ago, Thomas Adès’ These Premises Are Alarmed was one of the pieces commissioned by the Hallé for a premiere in the opening series of concerts at the new Bridgewater Hall, conducted by Kent Nagano.Now that Adès, then their composer-in-association, is about to be artist-in-residence (as composer, conductor and performer) over the coming two years, it was a neat idea to return to it. The three-minute piece struck me that first time by the fact that its vast list of percussion resources seemed to take literally the nickname of “kitchen” for that department, for it Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
As Australia's greatest comedic export exits the stage, strewing gladioli, a promising contender for that title makes an entrance, trailing a dog on wheels. The dog is the titular Colin from Accounts, for the few who still haven’t tried this exceptional, refreshingly mature comedy. Why has this eight-parter from a husband and wife team seemingly overnight occupied a place in British hearts that even Canada’s Schitt’s Creek didn’t manage until its last year of transmission? And that show had lockdown blues to speed it along. They aren’t unalike: both have a core of geniality cut with Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The great Russian novelists of the 19th century wrote what Henry James called "large, loose, baggy monsters" out of belief that "truth" was more important than artistic form. The 20th-century Russian-Ukrainian writer A. Anatoli, who renounced his Soviet identity (and surname Kuznetsov) after defecting to England in 1969, was unquestionably an artist.Yet he chose to subtitle Babi Yar, his classic non-fiction account of Ukraine's holocaust, "a document in the form of a novel". The book, first published in a heavily censored xxx in 1966, poses the question: why and how did the unprecedented Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Isaac Julien was a student at St Martin’s School of Art when the Brixton riots broke out. Black youths took to the streets, frustrated by high rates of unemployment, police harassment, far-right intimidation and media hostility, and all hell was let loose.The following year, 21-year-old Colin Roach was shot at the entrance to Stoke Newington Police Station and this time Julien felt he had to respond. “I was determined,” he said, “to appropriate video art techniques and repurpose them for the street.” Made with Sankofa Film and Video Collective, Who Killed Colin Roach?, 1983 records the Read more ...