Reviews
Kieron Tyler
After the evening’s second song “The Last of England,” Patrick Wolf cautions “I’ve got nothing left to say.” During the shows leading up to this outing promoting his new album Crying the Neck, he says he felt “like I’ve been drag-queen story hour” and, in Kingston, “a preacher.” He’s talked out. All that there is to say has been said.Of course, this does not prove to be the case. There is tons to relate. He says the album’s “On Your Side” was written on bus journeys between central London’s Gray’s Inn Road and the Royal Marsden Hospital. How, now he lives in Kent rather than London, that Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Sarah Kane is the most celebrated new writer of the 1990s. Her work is provocative and innovative. So it seems oddly unimaginative to mark the 25th anniversary of her final play, 4.48 Psychosis, by simply recreating the original production, with the original actors and the original production team in a joint Royal Court and Royal Shakespeare Company venture. Sadly this is typical of our reboot culture, which prefers the old to the new, nostalgia over experiment, but it does feel like a wasted opportunity. After all, when David Byrne, artistic director of this venue, was head of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Edith Wharton hadn’t finished her novel, The Buccaneers, when she died in 1937, but it was completed in 1993 by Marion Mainwaring. The result was not considered an unalloyed triumph, but there was certainly a lot more Edith Wharton in it than you’ll find in Apple TV+’s dramatisation.This second season carries on from 2023’s original eight episodes, and finds the American adventuresses of the previous instalments now firmly ensconced in their adopted English surroundings, circa 1870. The action centres around the goings-on at Tintagel Castle, where Nan St George (Kristine Froseth) has just Read more ...
James Saynor
Here’s a film you might not feel like seeing. After all, Red Path tells of a 14-year-old in Tunisia who is forced to carry home the head of his teenage cousin after the cousin is executed by jihadists. But see the film you really should.In an opening 10 minutes of pre-title exuberance, goat-herders Achraf (Ali Helali) and Nizar (Yassine Samouni) are seen fooling about, looking for water, helping a lost baby goat and sunbathing in mountains above the plains where they live, bouncing among canyons sculpted in umpteen shades of tan and salmon, and speckled with extremists.Like wolves descending Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Rarely has a revival given a firmer thumbs-up for the future of dance-theatre. Yet Matthew Bourne’s latest show, first aired at the tail-end of lockdown, is far from being a high-octane people-pleaser. It won’t send its audience out teary-eyed and shaken as his Swan Lake did and continues to do. It doesn’t have the delirious narrative sweep of The Red Shoes (set to return next Christmas). Nor a heart-stopping central moment such as in his Blitz-era Cinderella, when the Café de Paris takes a direct hit. The Midnight Bell, inspired by the novels of the mid-last-century English writer Patrick Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
This year’s Aldeburgh Festival – the 76th – takes as its motto a line from Shelley‘s Prometheus Unbound. The poet speaks of despair “Mingled with love and then dissolved in sound”. With or without words, music shapes and voices feelings that would otherwise lie beyond expression.Shelley’s high-flying Romantic ideals may feel abstruse but, as the Festival’s opening weekend showed, music’s power not just to charm but to heal and reveal can have striking, and practical, real-world effects. Pianist George Xiaoyuan Fu and mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean prefaced their “Solitude with Schubert” Read more ...
Bonnie Raitt, Brighton Dome review - a top night with a characterful, very American blues rock queen
Thomas H. Green
If you walked into a bar in the US, say in one of the southern states, and Bonnie Raitt and her band were playing, you’d have the best night of your life. They are the kind of purely American rhythm’n’blues experience, tempered with FM radio balladry, that somehow works best, and perhaps only, on those endless highways and dusty plains.Tonight she imports that spirit – the best of America at a time when the world is seeing the worst of it – to a 200-year-old hall full of septuagenarians on the British south coast.Raitt plays for an hour-and-a-half and has real presence, a gregarious chatty Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
"When I was your age, I worked in a corrugated cardboard factory!" is a phrase my father was fond of telling me as a teenager, presumably in an attempt to extol the virtues of a good Presbyterian work ethic.I wonder what he’d have made of his first place of employment as it was this weekend; all 15.5 acres of it covered with bright graffiti and transformed into performance space, dance floors and installations, complete with fully stocked bars and an array of food trucks. "The Paper Factory", as Edinburgh’s Hidden Door Festival have named it, is a former industrial site on the west of the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It’s unusual to leave an exhibition liking an artist’s work less than when you went in, but Tate Britain’s retrospective of Edward Burra manages to achieve just this. I’ve always loved Burra’s limpid late landscapes. Layers of filmy watercolour create sweeping vistas of rolling hills and valleys whose suggestive curves create a sexual frisson.Take Valley and River, Northumberland 1972 (pictured below right), for instance. A spring emerges from a fold in green hills that resemble limbs. The landscape doubles as a body, with an inviting recess nestling between parted thighs.These pastoral Read more ...
David Nice
It amuses me that Dubliners dress up in Edwardian finery on 16 June. After all, this was the date in 1904 when James Joyce first walked out with Nora Barnacle and, putting her hand inside his trousers, she “made me a man”. So it’s National Handjob Day. But Bloomsday too, celebrating the jaunts of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom over 24 hours around Dublin, the song of a great city in Ulysses.This year, four adaptations proved how Joyce is to be heard and acted out, perhaps creating an even more vivid impression than simply reading him. The little company of actors with big ambitions called Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The tag “the most Tony-nominated play of all time” may mean less to London theatregoers than it does to New Yorkers, but Stereophonic, newly arrived at the Duke of York’s, deserves the accolade wherever it plays.It has nothing to do with the Welsh band Stereophonics, though everything to do with typical rock band behaviour. Playwright David Adjmi hasn’t named the one we are watching, a band recording an album in 1976 that will make them megastars, as Rumours did for Fleetwood Mac, a band notoriously riven with breakdowns and divorces. But the internecine spats Adjmi’s group members engage in Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Tate Britain is currently offering two exhibitions for the price of one. Other than being on the same bill, Edward Burra and Ithell Colquhoun having nothing in common other than being born a year apart and being oddballs – in very different ways. And since both reward focused attention, this makes for a rather exhausting outing – I’m reviewing them separately – so gird your loins.I’ve always been intrigued by Scylla (méditerranée) 1938 (pictured below right) a painting by Ithell Colquhoun that Tate Modern has shown with Surrealists such as Salvador Dali. It’s a double image that, like a “ Read more ...