Reviews
India Lewis
Jockstrap’s crowd, in the vaults of Heaven, was always going to be beautiful and effortlessly cool. Ushered in by a ticket-check clerk sporting love bites, the dreamy sounds of the warm-up act, Pablo, filled the underground space. The audience, already packed in, swelled to full capacity over the night, singing along and swaying to a heavy, bassy throb. Jockstrap themselves were excellent, but played through each song without talking to the crowd, which at times made it feel as though they were just running through their new album (with a few other hits thrown in), a not uncommon feeling Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“He’s my best friend, a brother,” says Felice Lasco (Pierfrancesco Favino) of his childhood buddy, Oreste Spasiano (Tomasso Ragno). After 40 years away, Felice, a successful, married businessman, has returned to Naples from Cairo to see his aged mother (Aurora Quattrocchi).He hasn’t seen Oreste since he left at the age of 15. No letters, no phone calls. Nostalgia can be dangerous. A clue: Oreste is now known as Badman. Shades of Elena Ferrante’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay.In Italian director Mario Martone’s intensely atmospheric, compelling film, Felice walks the ancient streets with Read more ...
Gary Naylor
For many years, I would ask groups of students to vote in elections because “it’s important to honour those who gave up so much to ensure that the likes of us can”. Some would nod, others would shrug, a few might have inwardly scoffed – too cool for school, innit? Kate Prince’s long-aborning musical Sylvia illustrates how our (near) universal franchise was won and the emotional and physical cost levied on the pioneers who won the argument in Parliament and on the streets.Ben Stones’ set doesn’t give us much to work with – the dark greys on even darker greys suggesting the bleak Read more ...
Jon Turney
All the things going on with me as I type this – fingers moving keys, eye and brain registering characters on my screen, thoughts that will (I hope) generate the next lot of characters – rely on electrical signals.So much has been common knowledge since scientists built clever enough detectors to show nerve impulses, and brain waves. And electrical technology has been applied, with more enthusiasm than finesse, in procedures like electroencephalography (EEG), reading the waves, and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), giving them a good thrashing.But they are many decades old, and today we Read more ...
David Nice
It’s not often that the most bittersweet moment in a rich concert comes in the encore. Elisabeth Leonskaja had already played the generous extra in question, the Dumka movement of Dvořák’s A major Piano Quintet, with the Staatskapelle Quartet only a fortnight earlier. Here, fine-tuned with the Jerusalems, that moment when the joyfully flowing episode turns dark and the piano seems to call from a dark wood proved sheer magic.There wasn’t a moment in this concert where anyone in the audience could (or should) have lost concentration, The Jerusalems’ art is flexible, almost improvisatory in feel Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Marcel the Shell the Shoes On tells the story of a one-eyed little shell who lives with his grandmother Connie in a house that became an Airbnb after its former occupants divorced. The man inadvertently carried away Marcel’s extended family in a drawer when he left. Marcel pines for them, and he tugs at our heartstrings more relentlessly than should be allowed by a one-inch carapace animated by stop motion.If that suggests I’m resistant to Marcel’s winsomeness, it’s not true. He's as adorable as adorable gets. As in the 2010 trilogy of shorts that made Marcel a YouTube “fee-nom" – as a human Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is new writing becoming increasingly literary? Recently, some of the language being used by younger playwrights seems to me to be becoming too subtle, something to be savoured on the page rather than strongly felt in live performance. Certainly, this is true of Ava Wong Davies’s Graceland, which was a winner of the 2022 Ambassador Theatre Group Playwright’s Prize, having been developed as part of an Introduction to Playwriting group at the Royal Court, where it gets a studio production. Although this 75-minute monologue has moments of perception and beauty, it is more writerly than raw.The Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I once gave Peter Doig a tutorial, when he was a student at Chelsea College of Art. He had little to say about his strange images and I came away feeling I’d seen something unique, but was unable to tell if he was a very good painter or a very bad one. He now enjoys international success and his paintings sell for millions of pounds yet, judging by his Courtauld Gallery exhibition, my ambivalence was well founded. The show contains a sublimely beautiful painting and two very bad ones. The Alpinist 2019-22 (pictured right) is Doig at his very best. A lone skier trudges up a snow covered Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When Marina Allen’s second album Centrifics came out last autumn, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter said her voice was the only instrument on the record. She writes on guitar and piano but beyond what she sang, everything else was played by collaborators. Seeing her live might reveal how she saw the songs away from their studio setting – maybe getting close to how they were originally conceived.Centrifics is highly arranged. Brass, a flute, strings and more weave through the songs. Though guitar leads on some tracks, piano crops up more often as the main instrument complementing her voice. Read more ...
Katie Colombus
If I’m honest, venturing out into a misty Brighton night with my Tweens for their first proper gig (we won’t count Olly Murs – they were children then) felt somewhat trepidatious.I was buoyed by seeing other parents in the same situash, and comforted by the warmth of both crowd and venue in the Brighton Dome. The audience was a sliced n’diced mix of older MTV-range couples who grew up with CRJ’s music the first time round; Gen-Z Tik-Tok newbies who grew up watching Ballerina (an animated film featuring excellent musical-pop by Jepsen) and a strong LGBTQ+ crowd who take to the pit to sing Read more ...
David Nice
What a difference a piano can make. Boris Giltburg, like Angela Hewitt, prefers a very special Fazioli over the Steinways which dominate the concert scene at the Wigmore Hall and elsewhere. While those may yield a greater depth of field, more appropriate for a 2000 seater venue, few pianists have wrought sound magic on them anything like the kind we heard throughout last night’s rich recital.I’d better explain where a slight resistance kicked in across the wonders of the Chopin Ballades, which Giltburg presented as a sequence: like Schubert’s D899 Impromptus, the result came over as a kind of Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Who better to write a piece about the game-playing of a peace-talks negotiation than a former peace-talk negotiator, Daniel Taub? And who better to sprinkle some comedy oofle dust on the proceedings than the TV producer and writer Dan Patterson, begetter of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Mock the Week and many collaborations with Clive Anderson?And a tail-coated Anderson is our narrator-come-game show host for Winner's Curse, whose ambitions ever so slightly overreach themselves. The premise is that Anderson is Hugo Leitski, a former, yes, peace-talks negotiator for a fictitious Eastern European Read more ...