Reviews
Gavin Dixon
This latest revival of the Royal Opera’s Nabucco production has suffered more than most from COVID disruptions. At the first night, on 20 December, the chorus were obliged to wear masks, news that was greeted by boos from the audience. Then the next two performances were cancelled.This one did take place, but without conductor Daniel Oren or star soprano Anna Netrebko, the latter grounded by travel restrictions. But we got a performance, no doubt a relief in some quarters, as the occasion marked the 75th anniversary of the company.The production, directed by Daniele Abbado, first appeared in Read more ...
David Nice
After a too-much-too-soon debut disc, Lisa Davidsen has just rolled out the gold on CD with her great fellow Norwegian Leif Ove Andsnes in songs by their compatriot Grieg. The visuals last night, in the first concert of a Barbican mini-residency, made the Grieg first half better still: Davidsen lives each world, communicates so well with her audience – as she moves so beautifully on and off stage, too, she looks around as if to engage – and has the benefit of a well-lit stage, the auditorium duly darkened, with translations projected on a screen above (why doesn’t the Wigmore do that?) Read more ...
David Nice
Most dystopian satires are located in a nightmarish future, but their scripts build on the worst of our world today. Adam McKay's Don’t Look Up is different: this is now, and the notion of a comet hurtling towards the assured destruction of planet Earth is the hub for a heaping-up and jamming-together of how media and government respond to the worst imaginable crisis.Clever, often brilliant, luxuriously but pointedly cast, sprawling – I was never bored but I understand the plea for the shedding of 20 or so minutes – and stylishly filmed. Don’t Look Up doesn’t disappoint in its bid to say many Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The BBC have billed this as a “four-part thriller about sexual politics in the modern workplace”, which is slightly misleading because it looks as though it’s taking place in about 1983. The action centres on a sportswear company called Fly Dynamic, based somewhere in the north of England, a company which began as a market stall and now allegedly threatens the supremacy of JD Sports. It’s doing so well it’s about to float on the stock exchange.Screenwriter Ruth Fowler has evidently steeped herself in the history of #MeToo, the abuse of female employees and the deplorable “toxic masculinity” Read more ...
Gary Naylor
In the 80s, An Audience With... gave a television studio to an actor who then recounted stories culled from a life in entertainment. The best subjects were the natural raconteurs with plenty to say - Billy Connolly, Barry Humphries, the incomparable Kenneth Williams - and it's a testament to the format's longevity that Adele did one as recently as November. With a few crucial differences, David Suchet - Poirot And More, A Retrospective captures the warmth and easy pleasures of that much-loved format.Two chairs, placed the required two metres apart on stage, set the tone for the evening: Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, they say. I'm not sure One-Woman Show, written and performed by comic, writer and actor Liz Kingsman, is an imitation of a solo show that catapulted another female actor-writer to worldwide fame, but it's imitation-adjacent in a spot-on spoof kind of way.The elephant in the room for this wickedly funny hour is Phoebe Waller-Bridge's brilliant, zeitgeisty and deservedly lauded Fleabag, a play that I loved on its debut at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013; it previewed at this theatre and later had a successful post-Fringe run on the same Soho stage. How' Read more ...
Jack Barron
It might be said that Paula Rego’s subject is light: but rather than painting it, she gives it. She paints deep into social corners, affording generous and often unnerving representation to worlds forgotten or forced out of sight. This isn’t always a comfortable experience, and her figures are frequently refracted or distorted, bent out of shape in a desperate need to be seen. They are, in many ways, acts of resistance. Take, for instance, her suite Dog Woman, 1994, which depicts a series of women bestially poised: crouched and self-grooming, cornered, supine and submissively wide-eyed Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Storm Queen begins forcefully with the suitably tempestuous “Heaven,” the most affecting track on the second album from Melbourne’s Grace Cummings is the sparse, reflective “Two Little Birds.” The two performances capture the opposing poles defining Cummings: whether to go full-bore with her malleable voice, or whether to keep it direct within a delicate instrumental framing.“This Day in May,” the ninth track, takes both approaches with highs and lows comparable to Leonard Cohen’s now played-out “Hallelujah.” It’s followed by the title track, which has the stately, windswept majesty Read more ...
David Nice
It sounds like the title of a play by Rattigan. No such luck: “Force Majeure” – a legal term with which all too few will be familiar, in which circumstances beyond anyone’s control cancel a contract – is how Ruben Östlund’s 2014 film Turist is known beyond Sweden (an American remake with Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, not good by all accounts, has much the best title, Downhill).This tragicomedy about the consequences of a husband and father running away from his family when an avalanche seems about to overwhelm a ski-resort restaurant has been adapted for the stage by Tim Price and Read more ...
David Nice
One of the galvanizing wonders of the operatic world happened when David McVicar’s production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro was new, back in 2006: the sight and sound of Royal Opera music director Antonio Pappano in seamless dual role as conductor and recitative fortepianist.Now he’s back, and better than ever, with more than a gimmick to offer in this latest revival: there are no big names in the cast, but six out of the eight principals are Italian – this Figaro is, of course, sung to Lorenzo Da Ponte’s original, dazzling adaptation of Beaumarchais’ play – and young when the characters Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A small film that packs a significant wallop, The Humans snuck into view at the very end of 2021 to cast a despairing shadow that extends well beyond the Thanksgiving day during which it takes place. Adapted from the much-traveled Tony-winning play of the same name, writer-director Stephen Karam's screen iteration of his own one-act seems even bleaker in this iteration than it did in my twofold experience of it on stage (including at the Hampstead, with its original New York cast, in autumn 2018). .Those who think American drama too often offers its characters the easy way out won't find that Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“The Gun Club were true originals and Jeffrey Lee Pierce a genius. They were the inspiration behind many bands, I myself never thought about being a singer until I dropped the needle on Fire Of Love and in that instant I knew what I wanted to do with my life. Jeffrey was funny, smart and generous. He taught me so much about songwriting that I could never repay.”Mark Lanegan’s tribute to Jeffrey Lee Pierce – who died in 1996 at age 37 –and the band he co-formed is revealing as it makes plain an often unacknowledged truth. Now it’s said, it’s obvious. The spirit of Pierce, his LA-born band and Read more ...