Reviews
Helen Hawkins
A new Giselle? Not quite: the production that Japan’s national company has brought over for its first British visit isn’t a radical Akram Khan-style makeover. What it offers is a tasteful refreshing of a great classic, like meeting an old friend with a new haircut. This is a Giselle with many local connections. Behind it is the company’s artistic director, Miyako Yoshida, a favourite principal at both Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Royal Ballet, where she danced the title role many times. Staging and additional steps are by the Royal Ballet dancer turned choreographer Alastair Marriott Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Buxton International Festival this year was lavish in its smaller-scale productions in addition to Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet, the heavyweight offer of the opera programme. And outstanding among them was the combination of Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti and Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine: seen by director Daisy Evans not just as a double bill with an overlapping need for telephones on set, but as two sides of the same story.She took Bernstein’s picture of an American middle-aged couple whose marriage is on the rocks, and Poulenc’s of a woman on the verge of committing suicide after her lover Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There aren’t many comics like Eddie Pepitone any more – the veteran comic’s shtick harks to back an earlier age, pre-suitable for TV and Netflix specials. As the New Yorker says drily in his latest special, The Collapse, he was never going to be considered as a host of either a reality programme full of beautiful people or a smarmy late-night chat show.No, he tells it as it is as he rants and rails against the indignities of getting older, reflects on his career and what irritates him – seemingly most things.He starts the way he means to go on, talking about his Apple Watch and why he loves Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Despite the title of Matthias Glasner’s award-winning drama, and the death that swirls around its characters, dying isn’t really its subject, but the mess of living. Dysfunctional family, eccentric love affairs, addiction, depression, creative obsession that teeters towards suicide, and the worst advertisement for dentistry you will ever see – it’s all here, in a German canvass of misery and survival so casually engaging and provocative that its three hours pass far more smoothly than any number of action-packed, plot stuffed franchise pictures. Writer/director Glasner won the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Today gradually blossoms from unpromising beginnings. LouderUK’s On The Beach event series takes place throughout the summer and runs the gamut from indie pop-rock, such as Kaiser Chiefs and Bloc Party, to dance events featuring DJs such as Bonobo and Carl Cox. As the name suggests, it all happens on Brighton’s pebbled seashore, overseen by clifftop Georgian houses. Success is dictated, to some extent, by the whims of British weather. Today is Eighties day. It’s a case in point.Beneath cloudy skies, on a muggy early evening, to a less-than-quarter full arena, Toyah (pictured left) starts her Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Michael Shannon's long legs reach to the stars – or perhaps one should say the moon – in the Almeida's hypnotic revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten, the late Eugene O'Neill play that hasn't been seen in London since Kevin Spacey and Eve Best led an Old Vic revival of it in 2006. And Shannon, seen in London early in his career Off West End in Tracy Letts's Bug, makes an occasion of a play that I, for one, am always happy to welcome back to the repertoire.Sure, there will always be those for whom O'Neill goes on too much, and for too long, and who resist the heightened tendency to Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"It all starts with a snap," or so we're told early in the decidedly un-snappy Burlesque, which spends three hours borrowing shamelessly and tediously from far-superior sources to arrive at an artistic dead end.Preceded by acres of press heralding the results as a train crash, this summer production at the Savoy (a place-holder for Paddington, due in the autumn) may please those astonished that Nate Bertone's set can make it through the evening without toppling over. But the overall effect of this adaptation of the 2010 film of the same name is wearying in the extreme and indicative of the Read more ...
Robert Beale
At first sight, it seemed that Clonter Opera’s decision to tackle Tosca this year might be a leap too far. Its once-a-year complete production, dedicated to nurturing emerging talent in the security of the Cheshire countryside, must always be an essay in miniaturization, and a singing cast of six and an orchestra of 12 might seem hopelessly small for Puccini’s grand passions and shuddering shocks.In the end, it was a happy surprise that so much of beauty and musical integrity emerged from the exercise – and that the production by Steve Elias brought a convincing fresh interpretation to the Read more ...
David Nice
It started like Sunday afternoon band concert on a seaside promenade, a massive ensemble playing it light. But while there were several too many Shostakovich pops, the Ravel concerto and Walton symphony ahead sailed for deeper waters, And the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra is on top form, lucky to have one of the world’s best conductors, Mark Wigglesworth, in charge. Having proved his credentials in dance music with a Portsmouth performance of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Act 2 last December, Wigglesworth struck a similarly spacious mix of control and relaxation in the Shostakovich Suite Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Following the success of its screen version of Michael Connelly’s veteran detective Harry Bosch, starring Titus Welliver, Prime Video aims to make lightning strike twice by televising Connelly’s series of Renée Ballard books. Like Bosch, Ballard works for the LAPD, but has been demoted from the Robbery-Homicide division after reporting a sexual assault by her supervisor, Robert Olivas.It’s a man’s world in the LAPD, people. She now heads a cold case unit, staffed by a motley group of part-timers and civilians, and one of the first cases it revisits is the unsolved murder of the sister of Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Now 45 years in the past, its dazzling star gone a decade or so, The Long Good Friday is a monument of British cinema. Its extraordinary locations, caught just before London’s Docklands were transformed forever, speaks to a past world. But the wheeler-dealer, Harold Shand, played by Bob Hoskins at the peak of his powers, left many ancestors, from his near contemporary, Arthur Daley, to a few who have ascended to the highest Offices of State.One such, conjured into life by Robin Hawdon in the early 90s, is Arthur Bullhead (of course, Arthur Bullhead) owner of The Bunty, moored on the Thames Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As a sometime writer of Poirot, Sherlock and Christmas ghost stories, Mark Gatiss is no stranger to enigmatic crimes and bizarre occurrences set in carefully-recreated versions of the past. He revisits similar themes in Bookish, his new series about a second-hand bookseller in post-World War Two London who is evidently concealing some hidden depths.The show is a bonanza for set designers and location-hunters. Gabriel Book, Gatiss’s lead character, is the proprietor of Book’s (wherein the apostrophe is a cue for some genteel grammarian jokes), and his shop is situated in a quaint and wearily Read more ...