Reviews
Gary Naylor
One wonders if Ricky Simmonds and Simon Vaughan pondered long over their debut musical’s title. Silvio might invite hubristic comparisons with Evita (another unlikely political leader), but Berlusconi feels a little Hamilton – too soon? They went with the surname of their anti-hero which appears a mite unwieldy on the playbill. Alas, that’s not the last unwieldy element of this sprawling, curiously unengaging, half-hearted skewering of Italy’s preening populist. We open on a stage all but filled with a bright white set of steps that half-reminded me of the Victor Emmanuel II Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There’s something about the Irish coastal village that makes filmmakers see it as a perfect locale for tales of human emotion in extremis, from David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter to Martin McDonagh’s Banshees of Inisherin. Perhaps it’s the tension between political discontent, privation and the gorgeous landscape that unsettles people, makes them behave badly. In the case of God’s Creatures, co-directed by Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer, you could even say it’s something in the water, literally: tides that can turn treacherous in seconds, making the work of the fishermen Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Handel’s Theodora – voluptuously beautiful, warm-to-the-touch music, yoked to a libretto of chilly piety about Christian martyrdom in 4th-century Rome. It’s a red rag to directors, and there’s a relief to seeing the oratorio in the concert hall, where the composer is cut free from a lot of acrobatic conceptual wriggling. And really, when it sounds like this, you need nothing more.Back in 2018 Jonathan Cohen and his period group Arcangelo brought Theodora to the Proms. Distant and correct in the cavernous Royal Albert Hall, it never quite caught fire. Five years on and Cohen and leading lady Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Sierra Pettengill has made the politest angry film I have seen. It has an incendiary quality that comes precisely from its calm stance towards its material. This is a polemic, but one that burns steadily under the surface and asks the viewer to take a measured approach to its material.Fans of Adam Curtis documentaries will immediately recognise the unusual flavour of the archive material Pettengill has assembled in Riotsville USA: it reeks of its era of origin yet today seems surreal and other-worldly. She researched her material from 2015 to 2021 in multiple archives, including the US Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
With all the talk – and, frankly, fear – around AI and the increasing dominance of the digital world, it’s fascinating to see what dance has to say about it.Although choreographers have been playing with avatars and movement sensors for a couple of decades now (Merce Cunningham and Wayne McGregor come to mind), Tom Dale is something of a rarity in setting his entire focus on digital interaction, seeking out specialists in digital projection and digitally generated music to collaborate with on equal terms. And while one always hesitates to proclaim the novelty of anything, still less a new art Read more ...
Robert Beale
Mansfield Park was written to be a country house opera – that kind where you have a smallish number of performers, no chorus, and the “set” is simply the rooms and furnishings of a gracious residence from an age gone by.Accompaniment was originally four hands on one piano. But the concept soon grew to be more than that: composer Jonathan Dove made a small-orchestra score of its warm and melodious music, and music training institutions realised that with seven out of the 10 roles in the story being young people, they had a gift for their public theatre shows.The Royal Northern College of Music Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
How much more is there left to be said about the excellence of Succession? It’s back for a final season, and devotees will pore over every detail, every conversational ploy from robust to downright crude, every chess move on this volatile board. As they should, because nothing comparable has appeared on television.Its genius lies, for starters, in going back to basics. Family feuds are positively biblical, the preferred stuff of drama through the ages. Nowadays we dress them up as intergalactic struggles with high-octane heroes and dazzling SFX. But Succession has taken them back to Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As Inspiral Carpets play “She Comes in the Fall”, a great song and one of their signature tunes, its martial drumming drags me into my own past. Seeing them play it at a 600-capacity venue makes me recall seeing them, over three decades ago, headlining the Reading Festival and, indeed, their own festival-style event at Alexandra Palace, when a female marching band would come onstage during this song. They were huge news then.There’s no marching band in 2023 but the song is still delivered with raucous punch that has the sold-out Concorde 2 loudly matching singer Stephen Holt on the choruses. Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
“There is another world… a way of perceiving that is chaotic and awesome and terrifying,” announces Seraphina Madsen’s cigarillo-smoking, telepathic cat.Lecturing a teenage coven on the art of sorcery and how to tap into the powers of the “Unseen world”, Tu Tu (also known as "The Master", in just one of Madsen’s many playful nods to Mikhail Bulgakov) swings from chandeliers, drinks champagne, plays the bongos and an electro-acoustic harp, and waltzes around a Gothic Revival mansion in a diamanté collar.Yet you’d be mistaken for thinking he’s a beneficent magical moggy akin to those found in a Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There’s no point in being upset with the writer Steven Knight for doing what he usually does; even so, many viewers will find what he has done with Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations far too Peaky for their tastes. Knight’s role is described as having “created and written for television” a script “based on" the Dickens novel (much as he did with his 2019 reworking of A Christmas Carol). And that is what you get: a lurid Victorian gothic, so noir at times that you have trouble trying to follow what’s happening, and to whom, especially at night. A handful of the novel’s peripheral Read more ...
David Nice
Is Korngold a second-rank composer with some first-rate ideas? Most performances of the 23-year-old Viennese prodigy's Die tote Stadt make it seem so. Nearly smothered in glitter and craft, the story can compel – an oblique, promising stance on Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-morte, about an obsessive widower who thinks he sees his dead wife in a vivacious dancer. Does Annilese Miskimmon, ENO's semi-visible Artistic Director, carry it off?For much of the time, yes. Her collaboration with the best of set designers Miriam Buether and lighing by James Farncombe is especially successful when Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Last night at the Barbican was my first experience of a film with live orchestra, which has become a big thing in the last few years. The film in question was Alexander Korda’s extraordinary HG Wells adaptation Things to Come, from 1936, imagining a century of the future.As ever with sci-fi, while it is fun to see what predictions turned out right and which wide of the mark, the main takeaway is what the film tells us about the anxieties of 1936. Things to Come has a notable symphonic score, by Arthur Bliss, the first to be released as a commercial soundtrack album, and the film that first Read more ...