Reviews
stephen.walsh
With a lapse of three years between Das Rheingold and Siegfried, and with only a semi-staged Walküre in between, it’s been hard to stay tuned to Amy Lane’s Ring production at Longborough.Here, for instance, is Mime in his cave (rather well, if shabbily, furnished in Rhiannon Newman Brown’s bric-à-brac set), struggling to mend the sword which we haven’t seen broken, for the young Siegfried, of whose all-important parentage we as yet know nothing (Adrian Dwyer's Mime and Bradley Daley's Siegfried pictured below). Here, later, is Brünnhilde asleep on her mountain-top for reasons we haven’t Read more ...
Robert Beale
An opera in the Hallé concert series, conducted by Sir Mark Elder, is rather like a blend of a religious observance and a masterclass in orchestral playing and singing technique.The season finale at the Bridgewater Hall was Madama Butterfly, the first time in all his years in charge that Sir Mark has chosen Puccini for this treatment in the concert hall. He is a wizard at conveying this composer’s music, and, with a starry cast and a full symphony orchestra on the platform, the score came to life as probably never before for most of its hearers, even those who have experienced it in the Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Sacre isn’t your average big-top show. Created by Brisbane-based company Circa, this is modern circus meets contemporary dance – a conceptual deconstruction of the traditional experience, represented in a show of impressive strength, with real people reacting and responding to one another’s energies and intentions.A group of 10 acrobats all in black dart around the stage with breathtaking speed and vigour, coming together and pushing apart in a series of lifts, throws and catches with alarming alacrity. They run, jump and fling themselves at each other at unexpected moments, hurling back Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
By 1970, John Barry had composed music for Born Free, The Lion in Winter, Midnight Cowboy, You Only Live Twice and about 38 other films. His work with cinema began in 1960 and averaged around five films a year. In 1965, eight films were released with his music. He was busy.Yet when the album Ready When You Are, J.B. appeared in 1970, its liner notes said “he’s invisible most of the time.” Although he had recently appeared briefly in the film Deadfall, Barry was principally a backroom presence; his name less prominent than those of the songs or films he contributed to. Earlier, he’d hit the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Roger Michell’s films described a range of Englishness, from Notting Hill’s foppish comedy to acerbically humane Hanif Kureishi scripts (Venus, The Mother, The Buddha of Suburbia), Cornish Gothic (My Cousin Rachel) and his last feature, The Duke, which warmed working-class malcontent Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren’s frozen marriage with Wellington’s stolen portrait.The Duke’s docu-slivers of early ‘60s London dovetail into this film, finished the day Michell died. Other subjects were considered: Nick Drake, or apartheid-busting cricketer Basil D’Oliveira. It might as well be the Queen, Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Playwrights return to classical myths for two main reasons – to shine a light on how we live today and because they're bloody good yarns.Marina Carr's re-telling of Clytemnestra's story is boldly innovative in its conception and execution, but it never loses sight of its source material's power – and we wonder how, if "Enough is Enough" didn't work thousands of years ago, how is it going to work now?King Agamemnon needs to do something as his men are mustered for war and the blood is up, but the winds will not come to fill their sails for the passage to Troy. Worse still, a potential Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
For die-hard Juliette Binoche fans – don’t cross us, we get angry – Between Two Worlds is heaven. The French star hardly ever leaves the screen during the film’s 106 minutes. It was her unwavering detemination that ensured the film came to be made in the first place. Binoche’s early attempts to bring to the screen Florence Aubenas’s best-selling 2010 book Le Quai de Ouistreham (published in English as The Night Cleaner) met with major resistance from the journalist. But Binoche persisted, as she does, and Aubenas eventually agreed it could be made on the condition that the Read more ...
Samson et Dalila, Royal Opera review - from austerity to excess, with visual rigour and aural beauty
David Nice
Words and situations are one-dimensional, but the music is chameleonic, if not profound, and crafted with a master’s hand. What to do about Saint-Saëns’s Biblical hokum? In Richard Jones’s new production, the end justifies the means, with persecuted Hebrews and mocking Philistines circling two essential star turns, and Antonio Pappano’s handling of a hard-to-pace score is vivid from opening keenings to final cataclysm.Let’s be clear: Saint-Saens started with the music of the second act, which is pure opera – an aria and two duets threaded by a brewing storm – while it’s Act One which starts Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Boris Johnson was of course not the first British leader to engineer a split with Europe for personal gain. This strikes you with full force halfway through this production. While there are no photos of Johnson rushing around at a Downing Street party wearing an erect golden phallus, we are living in a world where – as Peter Pomerantsev has said of another leader – "nothing is true and everything is possible". In this play the leader with the gilded willy happens to be Henry VIII, but as the female chorus sings "He has everything an honest man should not" to a guitar accompaniment, the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
In Maltese-American Alex Camilleri’s debut feature, it’s a case of follow the swordfish. This terrifically atmospheric, almost documentary-like film – Camilleri cites Italian neo-realism, including Visconti’s La Terra Trema, as an influence – tells the story of Jesmark, a real-life Maltese fisherman (Jesmark Scicluna). It also encapsulates a dying culture.His brightly coloured wooden boat, known as a luzzu, with eyes painted on its bow, has been handed down to him through generations, but making a living on this ancient vessel in the bureaucratic modern world is fraught with difficulty. Read more ...
Rojbîn Arjen Yigit
In this best-selling Korean novella, recently translated into English by Jamie Chang, Kim Hye-jin offers us the perspective of a Korean mother. It’s narrated entirely from the perspective of a woman of around 60 who has a daughter in her thirties and focuses on her inability to understand what her daughter, Green, wants from life and why she’s decided to live openly as a lesbian with her partner Lane: “Gay? The word rushes into my head and shoots through without permission. Words come to me so violently, without warning, before Lane can say another word, I quickly manage to correct her. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With Jurassic World: Dominion due in June, which will mark the end of the “Jurassic” movie franchise, here’s Apple TV’s alternative, science-based history of dinosaurs and their world. It’s produced by Jon Favreau, a key player in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and narrated by David Attenborough in his trademark “Whispering Dave” style. Attenborough likens it to his Planet Earth documentaries, except transported 66 million years into the past.Prehistoric Planet claims that it has incorporated all the latest research into the lives of the creatures that used to rule the earth, though much of Read more ...