Reviews
Sarah Kent
In this juxtaposition of Piet Mondrian, a world famous modernist, and Hilma af Klint, a little known Swedish painter, guess who knocks your socks off ! This fascinating show is a delight and a revelation, because it declares the spiritualist underpinnings of modernism which many, until now, have sought to hide.The exhibition comes to a climax in the very last room. Ten huge paintings – 10 foot by 8 – enfold you in the world of Hilma af Klint. The theme of this joyous installation is the progression from childhood to old age (pictured below: "Youth", 1907). Gliding across vibrantly coloured Read more ...
David Nice
Complex, ambiguous late romantic works in concert programmes need something more direct to keep them company. Mozart and Richard Strauss make excellent bedfellows (and Strauss was an extraordinary Mozart interpreter): no wonder Vladimir Jurowski’s Saturday night pairing worked well. But Mahler and Poulenc? That wasn’t Simon Rattle’s original intention; but in campaigning for the BBC Singers by inviting them to follow his LSO Mahler 7, he hit upon a rare ideal.In terms of post-concert coverage, most of the thunder has been stolen by Rattle's speech after the interval. Which, under the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The cast of The Secret Life of Bees first parade onto the Almeida stage hefting big glass storage jars full of a golden substance: honey. The jars glow as if they are beacons, lights that guide. Which they turn out to be.Most of the people in this parade are the Black women who tend the bees that produced this honey, creatures with a covetable sense of community, ready to unite against danger to the hive. Along with them are white folk with a different idea of a model community, a white supremacist one where Blacks can’t vote.It’s 1964, as a timeline running throughout reminds us, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Judging by the average age of people in the audience, many of those who enjoyed Dick & Dom in da Bungalow when it aired on the BBC in the early Noughties were already adults. There was, though, a smattering of youngsters near their bedtime – good to see, as one of the most enjoyable elements of the weekend morning BBC children’s show, presented by Richard (Dick) McCourt and Dominic (Dom) Wood, was its anarchic attitude to rules.Whether a generation of schoolteachers would feel so fondly towards McCourt and Wood is another matter. They were plagued by their charges playing Bogies, a game Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This skilfully-woven drama about an NHS doctor being battered by professional and personal pressures is undoubtedly timely, and benefits greatly from being written by Grace Ofori-Attah, a former NHS doctor herself. Her inside knowledge lends weight and verisimilitude to scenes depicting admission procedures or the way the treacherous politics of NHS hierarchies work, and perhaps most significantly, how internal investigations are conducted.And she couldn’t have asked for a finer or more harrowing performance than Niamh Algar delivers in the lead role of Dr Lucinda Edwards. She works in an A Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's saying a lot when a production lives up to its gasp-inducing set. That's the happy case with Josie Rourke's loving revival of Dancing at Lughnasa, which returns Brian Friel's modern-day classic to the building, the National, where this Olivier and Tony Award-winner first played London over 32 years ago.Upgraded this time round to the open expanse of the Olivier stage, the play occupies an Irish backwater from designer Robert Jones that seems to stretch to infinity and beyond, the vista defined by a striated stage curtain (it looks beaded, but isn't) itself suggesting the porousness of Read more ...
David Nice
Two recent operas by women have opened in London’s two main houses within a week. Both have superbly crafted librettos dealing with gun violence without a shot being fired, giddyingly fine production values and true ensembles guided by perfect conducting. The main difference is that while Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence feels to me ice-cold musically, and not always coherent with dramatic or vocal possibilities, Jeanine Tesori’s Blue hits us in the guts when it matters most.The game-changer at the London Coliseum is that Blue (a reference to the colour of American police uniforms) features a cast Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The timing was impeccable, though almost certainly accidental. As protesters lay prostrate in The Mall in a mass “die-in” on the day designated as Earth Day, and as many thousands more urged action against climate change outside the Houses of Parliament, Nederlands Dans Theater was giving its final London performance of a powerful new ballet called Figures in Extinction [1.0].A first-time collaboration between the globally hot choreographer Crystal Pite and Complicité's Simon McBurney, it presented a chilling catalogue of some of the plant and animal species, glaciers and rivers that are Read more ...
Robert Beale
Maybe he thought it was a relaxing way to celebrate his recent 75th birthday – maybe he just fancied a trip to Manchester to play with the BBC Philharmonic – either way there was something very special to hear in Garrick Ohlsson’s Rachmaninov Third Piano Concerto on Saturday.It's often considered one of the greatest challenges for any virtuoso pianist, not least because it’s a 40-minute score in which the soloist is hardly ever silent. There are constant torrents, cascades and armfuls of notes, so that it’s simply a marathon before any question of interpretation or approach arises. But Read more ...
Gary Naylor
As the UK undergoes yet another political convulsion, this time concerning the threshold for ministers being shitty to fellow workers, it is apt that Bertolt Brecht’s parable about the challenges of being good in a dysfunctional society hits London. Anthony Lau’s co-production between the Lyric Hammersmith, ETT and Sheffield Theatres also catches a ride on the cultural zeitgeist, since it shares elements of its aesthetic with the multi-Academy Award winning movie, Everything Everywhere All At Once. Rather like that film, I suspect this show will divide audiences.We open on Georgia Lowe’s Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Paranoia seeps into paradise in Albert Serra’s Pacifiction, a scathing critique of French colonialism on the Polynesian island of Tahiti. Acting on rumours that his overlords are about to resume nuclear testing in the region and fearing his elimination, the urbane High Commissioner De Roller (Benoît Magimel) is forced to turn detective to learn their veracity. It’s not his fault that Inspector Clouseau might do a better job.Serra’s film isn’t a comedy, however, but a political thriller simultaneously languid and chilling. The languor emanates from its haziness, a quality paradoxically Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Sick of Myself is being marketed as one of those oh so clever satirical comedies about privileged but fucked-up people. Think Worst Person in the World, Triangle of Sadness and The White Lotus and you’ll get the genre.Set in Oslo and Gothenburg, it’s the story of 20-something Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) who works in a trendy coffee shop and feels side-lined by her installation artist boyfriend, Thomas. She’s also jealous of her friends who have more interesting jobs and craves respect from them and from Thomas. A cool art gallery has just put on an exhibition Read more ...