Reviews
Saskia Baron
La Mif is French slang for family - it’s the cool kids practice of reversing key words known as ‘verlan’ (itself l’envers backwards) to create their own language. Director Fred Bailif definitely wants to be down with the kids with this drama that uses many of the tools of documentary filmmaking. Set in a care home for troubled teenagers on the outskirts of Geneva, the cast of feisty girls and well-meaning keyworkers are non-professionals. The script draws on improvisation sessions with the performers, who all have experience of living or working in the care Read more ...
Ian Julier
With a predictable Sheku sell-out in the hall, the context of post-Eunice clean-up and current teetering on the brink with Russia lent a strangely unsettling and salutary resonance to the programme of Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concerto framed by Mussorgsky and Borodin.A palpable sense of coded autobiographical artistic angst, Nature, and festive celebration reflecting both truth and beauty from two different Russian centuries onto the much changed homeland and world view of present times seemed inescapable.In Mussorgsky’s unfinished opera of political and religious intrigue Khovanshchina, Read more ...
David Nice
Two Royal Opera staples, Verdi's La traviata and Puccini’s Tosca, now come round with too much frequency for critical coverage. It looks like Director of Opera Oliver Mears’ Rigoletto will do the same. Yet the production’s September 2021 debut was clouded by routine performances from its protagonist baritone and tenor Duke of Mantua, so a second visit was due to see if fresh casting might make a difference.It has, and very excitingly. True, we no longer have Royal Opera Music Director Antonio Pappano’s surest guidance and illumination in the pit. Stefano Montanari is in many respects Pappano’ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Suddenly bogus-identity stories are all the rage. Netflix has been scoring big with Inventing Anna, the story of fake heiress Anna Delvey, as well as the The Tinder Swindler, a cautionary tale about a high-rolling conman who scams money from women he meets online.Meanwhile the BBC has brought us Chloe, screenwriter Alice Seabright’s drama about a woman who cloaks herself in a new identity to investigate the death of her childhood friend. Once again, Chloe is about the obsessional allure of the web. It all begins with Becky Green (Erin Doherty) poring over the seemingly gilded life of Chloe Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Carey Crim’s 2017 play arrives from the US at north London's Park Theatre trailing a feminist playwriting award for its dissection of what happens when a smart college senior raised by two women starts to question her parentage. Eleanor wants to know who her biological father was and to this end has employed a private investigator. Her mother Allison is aghast. What will Eleanor do if what she unearths about her father is not what she hopes for, and indeed is abhorrent to her?Cracks begin to appear almost immediately in (Caucasian) Allison’s relationship with her long-term partner Nadine, an Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There are moments when nothing can – or should – stand in the way of the sheer expressive and communicative power of music. Only a few days ago, Gidon Kremer had changed the programme for his 75th birthday concert at Wigmore Hall, to include a short section of pieces by two Ukrainian composers. “The whole world is focused on the dramatic events in Ukraine,” said Kremer.His performance of the first of the two pieces, a four-minute Requiem for solo violin by Igor Loboda, could not have been more deeply soulful. The piece is based on a folksong about the river Dnieper, was written in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Con artists in film or TV need to be clever, charming, mysterious or at least entertaining (for instance Leo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can or Michelle Dockery in the much-underrated Good Behaviour). Bafflingly, Anna Delvey, the notorious fake heiress whose story has been fictionalised by Shonda Rhimes’s Shondaland company in Inventing Anna (Netflix), is none of these things.Between 2013 and 2017, Delvey bilked, scammed and fleeced hundreds of thousands of dollars from an array of wealthy New Yorkers and financial institutions. Her real name was Anna Sorokin, the daughter of a fairly Read more ...
David Nice
Nature in the form of Storm Eunice stopped this Cunning Little Vixen in her tracks on Friday evening. ENO shrugged off the cancellation and rescheduled for Sunday afternoon. And here we were, getting the essential message that humans must reach an accommodation with the natural world or die in despair. So much for a cute animal fable.Director Jamie Manton understands the essence in the nearly-70-year-old Janáček’s fashioning of this trickiest-to-stage opera from Rudolf Těsnohlídek’s newspaper stories about a vixen with human qualities: in the composer’s own words, “I caught the Vixen for the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The death of U-Roy was announced on 17 February 2021. A year on, the reappearance of his oft-reissued 1971 debut album Version Galore brings the opportunity to celebrate the music which brought him his earliest success; the music which propelled him into Jamaica’s top ranks.U-Roy – born Euwart Beckford – had been testing his skills as a DJ since the early Sixties. His initial inspiration was Count Macuki who, from the late Fifties, had performed with Tom Wong’s and Clement Dodds’s sound systems. U-Roy passed through Wong’s, Sir George The Atomic’s and Dodds’s set-ups before he came to King Read more ...
stephen.walsh
If Don Giovanni is not the greatest opera ever written, it’s at least one of the very, very few that even in erratic performances have the capacity to seem it. There was so much wrong, in detail, with WNO’s revival of John Caird’s now eleven year-old production in the Wales Millennium Centre on Friday that one might well have expected the whole marvellous edifice to fragment into nothing much more than a series of Mozartian gems. Yet somehow it stayed intact, and ended by generating a degree of real theatrical and even musical power.Both the problems and the solution were with the music. Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
It might seem odd to start with the encore, but I’ve never seen one like it. At the end of its two-night residency at the Festival Hall, having just romped through the rigours of The Rite of Spring, the players of the Budapest Festival Orchestra put their instruments down, shuffled to their feet and sang for us. Stravinsky’s humble, minute long Ave Maria made the perfect counterpoint to the violent paganism of the Rite, and the sound made by the untrained voices of these highly trained musicians added a vulnerability and sincerity to what had gone before.The two all-Stravinsky programmes that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
You generally find that a movie with Andrea Riseborough in it is worth a look, and so it proves here. Written and directed by Belfast-born Stacey Gregg, Here Before is a nicely-focused story which plays echoes of the supernatural off against a taut family drama set in a naturalistic, usually rain-dampened Northern Ireland. Refreshingly refusing to outstay its welcome, it profits from recognising its limitations (ie a small budget) and working within them.Laura (Riseborough) and Brandon (Jonjo O’Neill) are maintaining an even strain, keeping the family home ship-shape while bringing up their Read more ...