Reviews
Helen Hawkins
The Bush studio space is proving a fruitful launch pad, not just for new writing but for new performers. It previously showcased actor-writer-musician Anoushka Lucas’s multiple skills in her exciting debut piece Elephant; next up is the similarly multi-skilled Tania Nwachukwu, with The Kola Nut Does Not Speak English, an engaging playlet about her struggles with a split identity.It’s a deceptively simple 60 minutes, in which Nwachukwu, as London-born Watford resident Tasha, has her talk directly to the audience about her life and concerns, while relating a folktale about Eze in Nigeria that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There was originally a plan to make Tokyo Vice a movie starring Daniel Radcliffe, but it has ended up as a TV series starring Ansel Elgort. It’s almost certainly the better for it, because the eight episodes of this first season – the way it ends, or rather doesn’t, makes a second helping inevitable – give it space to explore Japanese culture and its often mutually uncomprehending relationship with American or European values.It’s based on the book of the same name by Jake Adelstein, a Missouri-born journalist who relocated to Tokyo, joined the staff of a Japanese newspaper and worked his way Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
There is no mistaking Christian Gerhaher. His voice is a light, agile baritone, and it is utterly distinctive. He is a very verbal singer, and is as happy delivering his lines in a toneless parlando as he is full voice. But when he does increase the colour, a burnished, slightly nasal tone appears, rich but still light. Emotions are always controlled, and the passion will often build gradually but steadily.All of which made this Schubert programme ideal, with Gerhaher tracing the emotional journey of each of these short Lied, without ever imposing his own drama, and without a hint of irony. Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“You’re filmin’ a movie or something – can you explain this?” the radio DJ turns to Neil Young, a laugh underpinning his question and setting the scene: light, jovial.“We’re just makin’ a film about…” Young pauses for a second. “I dunno, just the things we wanna film… I’m making it like I make an album, sort of… It’s like… I’m cutting it, instead of… so it’s personal, like an album.”“So some day someone’ll be able to go to a theatre and see it maybe?” the DJ asks.“Yeah, I hope so, maybe pretty soon,” comes the reply. This reasonably edited conversation occurs toward the closing act of Read more ...
stephen.walsh
There are conductors, and then again there are choral conductors. I sang under David Willcocks in Tallis’s 40-part "Spem in alium" and remember vividly that long-armed semaphoring that he later applied so notably with the Bach Choir.Sofi Jeannin, choral conductor par excellence (of, among others, the BBC Singers), is likewise a semaphorer, not always comfortable to watch, effective if not outstandingly individual in the outcome. In this typically hybrid BBC National Orchestra of Wales concert she conducted three tricky choral works with the dependable BBC National Chorus of Wales, and, Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The elation in the queue was palpable as people stood laughing and chatting in the November cold waiting for the doors of the Jazz Café to open for the latest crowd-funded event organised by Through the Noise. This 13th Noisenight – which brings major classical soloists to nightclubs – was a chance to see Sheku Kanneh-Mason and pianist Harry Baker at a key moment in Through the Noise’s history, the start of its first national tour. While much of the buzz was around Kanneh-Mason, from the moment the two musicians started playing it was clear that what was special was their Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
For his final bow as artistic director of the Orange Tree, Paul Miller has decided to go out with a bang, amid much giggling and snorts of laughter. This isn’t George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man as a barbed but fairly conventional comedy: Miller and his excellent actors are really gunning for it.That's true of none more so than Alex Bhat, who gives a master class in physical comedy throughout as a buffoonish Sergius Saranoff, the Bulgarian cavalryman whose wayward horse has led him, inadvertently, to charge the Serbian invaders and rout them. In the satirical terms the play sets out, he Read more ...
mark.kidel
Justin Adams has been exploring music that produces trance or near-trance states for a number of years. Along with being Robert Plant’s lead guitarist for a long while, he has followed his own path, seeking out what he had dubbed the secret heart of rock’n’roll.For a while he played with the Gambian horsehair fiddle virtuoso Juldeh Camara, creating a heady musical brew designed to blow the most guarded minds. More recently, he has worked with the Italian percussion and violin player Mauro Durante, combining blues licks – as he did with Juldeh – with the whirlwind of rhythm and Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Even those with the most tangential connection to pop music will be aware that K-Pop is all conquering, and the likes of BTS and BlackPink are on some metrics the most successful of recent acts anywhere. But at the same time, there is also a growing awareness that there is a burgeoning Korean indie and art music scene, the flames of which have been fanned by what has become one of London’s most interesting and enterprising annual festivals, K-Music.This year's K-Music had another bumper crop of talent, the most intriguing being Park Jiha, a Korean multi-instrumentalist who creates immensely Read more ...
Matt Wolf
I bow to no one in my affection for Matilda the Musical onstage, which I've loved across multiple iterations, from Stratford-upon-Avon to the West End and Broadway, and numerous cast changes, too.But Matthew Warchus's screen iteration of his Roald Dahl-inspired ongoing London hit is an entirely separate triumph in and of itself, smartly adapted and ever so slightly reconceived so as to sneak the occasional nifty political reference into its universal tale of childhood angst.As in the theatre, how can one not immediately warm to material in which the mere mention of literature excites the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
What is the best way of talking about the Middle East? Should plays take a documentary or verbatim approach, all the better to educate and inform, or is there another path, with includes entertainment, and that magic ingredient called theatricality?At the Royal Court the imaginative way has recently been explored in plays such as Sabrina Mahfouz’s dreamy A History of Water in the Middle East. Now, Jasmine Naziha Jones’s debut play, Baghdaddy, in which she also stars, also gets the magic realist treatment. But how successful is it?Beginning in 1991, this coming of age story is seen through the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Half a century ago, Michael Tippett’s A Child of our Time felt inescapable. For a youth-choir singer in the London of that period, his wartime “modern oratorio” supplied a reference-point of ambition and achievement to which our exasperated elders always seemed eager to refer – and to defer.Later, if it never quite vanished, Tippett’s epic updating of the sound-world of Messiah and the Bach Passions to dramatise 20th-century tyranny, persecution and revolt slipped into relative neglect.The five African American spirituals that anchor it began to look suspiciously like “cultural appropriation Read more ...