Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno is the opposite of a jukebox musical. So fertile, so overflowing was the 22-year-old Handel’s musical imagination, that his very first oratorio, composed during his time in Rome, would become a chest full of music the composer returned to again and again, pilfering and self-plagiarising over the ensuing decades. All those hits from Rodelinda, from Agrippina, Partenope, Rinaldo: he wrote them here first.A poor performance can feel like a game of musical bingo, finger-tapping while waiting to spot the next tune while Tempo (Time), Disinganno (Enlightenment Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
It’s back yet again, Operation Mincemeat, a gift of a story that goes on giving. It surfaced as the 1956 film The Man Who Never Was, based on a 1953 book by Ewen Montagu, one of the MI5 types who came up with the 1943 plan of that name. Its latest run was kicked off by a 2010 book by Ben Macintyre, a play by Cardboard Citizens, a second film version, with Matthew Macfadyen and Colin Firth, in 2021 and a long-aborning musical by the SpitLip company. Somehow audiences never tire of hearing how MI5 turned a corpse into a vital red herring, complete with a briefcase of faked secret documents Read more ...
David Nice
Shortly before his death, Rachmaninov proposed recording the two-piano version of his swansong Symphonic Dances with Vladimir Horowitz. A curse on that RCA executive who turned the offer down. What amazes is how much pianistic magic can make up for the orchestral wizardry of the more familiar incarnation. The Kolesnikov-Tsoy duo is the one to redisover it now, and they did the same for Mikhail Pletnev’s recreative genius in music from Prokofiev’s Cinderella.The pairing makes perfect sense, as in irrational non-sense, where everything unpredictable flies and soars. There’s contrast in these Read more ...
India Lewis
As my editor noted, this was the first gig in his 30 years of music journalism that had guided meditation as its support act. This set the tone for a beautiful, peaceful evening at the ICA for Lucinda Chua, a homecoming gig and a welcome listen to pieces from her new and older albums.Sitting cross legged on the floor, reading my book, drying out from the spring rain, and waiting for the support, I heard someone comment that this was the most chilled gig that they had ever been to. Ten minutes later, lying down and staring at the ceiling, I would have had to agree. The meditation was led by a Read more ...
Saskia Baron
I was once invited to join a book club by a bunch of friendly, clever women. But their conversation began with whether they liked the novel’s central characters enough to imagine having dinner with them and from there, descended into swapping tips about conquering visible panty line and the effectiveness of various moisturisers. I didn’t last long (two sessions, maybe three), which is one way to warn anyone bothering to read this one star review, that I am probably not the ideal demographic audience for Book Club: The Next Chapter.We first meet Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Mary Steenburgen Read more ...
David Nice
Church and law are enemies of promise in Ibsen’s tragedy-without-catharis. You can see why this devastating attack on, among other things, the syphilitic sins of the fathers being visited on the hopeful young created a ruckus in the 1880s. It’s still potent thanks to the characters’ complex reactions to social constraints. Mark O’Rowe’s new version for Landmark Productons at the Abbey is faithful to the essence, while sets and costumes only reinforce modernity in period dress.Francis O'Connor's set is a crucial, at times crushing, participant in the slow-burn revelation of past sins wreaking Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
With acrobatics at this level, they make it all look so easy, it’s possible for an audience to become complacent. By the time the show Out of Chaos, by the troupe Gravity & Other Myths, from Adelaide, Australia, has finished, the Brighton Dome crowd is so used to the quiet fluidity of humans swiftly leaping onto each other’s shoulders, standing there, walking around, and so on, that it seems quite normal and do-able. Fortunately, there’s a boisterous crowd in, keen to whoop, shriek and offer loud praise for such effortlessly delivered gruelling physicality.The stage is plain, a circuit of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The phrase “male gaze” was coined by the British film theorist Laura Mulvey in 1975 and has become a standard tool for analysing a film’s gendered content. What director Nina Menkes has set out to show in Brainwashed is that the techniques that create the male gaze have entered cinema’s DNA and become standard across the genders, for makers and watchers alike. “It’s like a law,” she says. This is bad news for us all, she argues, not just cineastes.The documentary uses as its framework a 2018 lecture Menkes gave to her film production students at CalArts in Los Angeles. We cut to and from it Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The eponymous garment in The Blue Caftan is a thing of beauty meticulously stitched and embroidered by Halim (Saleh Bakri), a maalem or master tailor, in one of Morocco’s oldest medinas. His craftmanship, with its focus on intricate details and on colour, is reflected in writer-director Maryam Touzani’s filmmaking, which is equally time-weighted and precise.Like Daniel Day-Lewis’s dressmaker in Phantom Thread, Halim is an obsessive artist whose refusal to use a sewing machine infuriates customers at the shop he runs with his wife Mina (Lubna Azabal). The business is in trouble Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Plays about the theatre are many and varied, from Gypsy and Noises Off to the numerous Shakespeare works that absorb theatrical performance into their very fabric.Jack Thorne's The Motive the Cue immediately takes pole position amongst recent entries in this genre in telling of a onetime Broadway venture – Richard Burton's career-defining Hamlet in 1964, directed by John Gielgud – that surely is itself in time destined for Broadway. By the point, look for various performances, and Sam Mendes' direction, to have been laurelled along the way: the National Theatre hasn't hosted so purely Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Jah Jah Jah blah blah blah. We’ll get to that.I meet Everest at Worthing station at 3.20pm. He’s clad in a light brown corduroy jacket and a cap. He looks dapper. Like a Len Deighton spy. We board the train to Brighton. I hand him a chilled bottle of Henney’s Herefordshire cider (6%) and tuck into my own bottle of St Austell Proper Job Cornish IPA (4.5%). We open a small box of Morrisons All Butter Mature Cheddar Cheese Crumbles, and talk about the harshness that life can deal out to the old.It's a sunny Sunday. In Brighton, we walk down to The Gladstone pub on Lewes Road. It’s bright yellow Read more ...
Issy Brooks-Ward
On the front cover of Noreen Masud’s startling memoir, A Flat Place, a green square of sky is scored across by a notched brown line. It represents the horizon of one of the flat landscapes through which the author travels.Masud is, amongst other things, a theorist of the aphorism, and it is thus striking that the horizons on which she sets her sights throughout the chapters of this book are etymologically linked to this short-form wisdom: the Greek “apo”, which means “away from”, combines with “horizein”, meaning “to bound”.Though Masud never explicitly draws on this connection of wisdom- Read more ...