Reviews
Jenny Gilbert
Ballet dancers, even the greatest, don’t expect longevity. There are no Maggie Smiths or Helen Mirrens in the ballet world – there just aren’t the roles. So the news that Alessandra Ferri was to mark the 40th anniversary of her association with the Royal Ballet (she joined aged 17) with a run of performances of a one-woman show was of more than passing interest. L’Heure exquise was created by the choreographer Maurice Béjart in the late 1990s as a vehicle for another great Italian ballerina, Carla Fracci, when Fracci was 62, and it has been performed very little since.The 70-minute piece is Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
I’d venture that Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi classic is an almost perfect adaptation. It’s difficult to imagine the novel being better visualised, or its characters better cast; at the same time, the director’s own sensibility is very much in evidence – we can feel Blade Runner 2049 and Arrival in Dune’s DNA. The result is a great coming together of source and adaptor, an awesome, breathtaking epic.And Dune is a daunting monster to adapt (that’s just the first volume), as proven by the visionary David Lynch’s honourable, but Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Single-composer programmes can be a bit dicey and there was a bit of trepidation approaching this one as Steve Reich is not a composer of massive range: he has been diligently tilling the same patch of soil since the 1970s. But alongside some Reich-being-Reich was a fascinating UK premiere that visits new territory and the revival of an often-overlooked masterpiece from his imperial phase.The Colin Currie Group has had a long association with Reich (pictured below), including commissioning two of Tuesday night’s four pieces. It is at heart a percussion ensemble, expanded here by the addition Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Say what you like about Dave Chappelle, but if nothing else he's an equal-opportunities offender, as his latest Netflix special, The Closer, proves. The last of his six specials for the network, all of which have drawn criticism – as well as plaudits – for his uncompromising “I tell it as I see it” material has again provoked ire in some quarters.Whatever some may think of his work, he is an accomplished comic, weaving stories – often around a grain of truth – that move from the factual to the fantastical in mid-sentence. He tells the tales with such a straight face that in many it's Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Rufus Wainwright believes opera to be “the greatest art form that has ever existed on the planet” and of course he’s written an opera himself – Prima Donna, which has been described as “the work of a man who loves opera and the sensations it delivers, without understanding how it is paced, or how it generates dramatic tension”.Maybe so, but Wainwright certainly knows how to pace a concert, and the performance he gives borders on the operatic, pushing his voice to highs and lows that seem sometimes to defy the odds. And he knows how to be on stage, using his body to dramatic effect, most Read more ...
David Nice
So Helen of Troy arrives at a church in Fulham via Poseidon’s island palace and a pavilion at the foot of the Atlas Mountains. She’s trickier than ever in the golden but tangled web Richard Strauss and his myth-and-symbol-mad poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal weave around the story of a phantom beauty wreaking havoc on Greeks and Trojans while the real version gets whisked off to the Egyptian desert. Given an ultimately voluptuous first act and a disastrously wambling second, it’s the most perilous Strauss opera of the lot, and it seemed like madness for a pocket group in west London to take it on. Read more ...
Love and Other Acts of Violence, Donmar Warehouse review - snappy and tightly intelligent but flawed
Rachel Halliburton
This is simultaneously a love story and an archaeology of hate, a sparky, spiky encounter between two individuals whose chemistry proves as destructive as it is explosive.Love and Other Acts of Violence opens with a comedic encounter on a dance floor – the man is a torrent of flustered polemic while she leans backwards like a faintly amused angle-poise lamp. He’s a poet and a political activist, she’s a physicist and keeps her emotions in test tubes. Yet there’s something that neither of them can explain that keeps them coming back to each other.Cordelia Lynn’s snappy, tightly Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“Careful, there’s a hole in the floor.” The warning’s an unusual one, passed along conscientiously by the stewards at the door of the tiny Orange Tree Theatre.The hole in question is long and angular and will soon be filled with water, stretching around one side of the pristine white set of Rice, a new play by Australian-Hmong writer Michele Lee. It’s an intimate two-hander about immigration and belonging, directed ably by Matthew Xia – but, like its characters, it’s suffering an identity crisis.Our heroines are two women of colour: Nisha (Zainab Hasan, pictured below), a young executive at Read more ...
David Nice
Neo-Nazis held a Trafalgar Square rally under the banner "Free Britain from Jewish Control" in the year of my birth; I had no idea until I watched Ridley Road. Most of us know about the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, but, until now, next to nothing about the Jewish resistance against fascist Colin Jordan and his gang of thugs, some of them cynically recruited from borstals and children’s homes, 17 years after the end of the Second World War.Sarah Solemani's adaptation of Jo Bloom’s novel plays with the chronology a bit – arsonists did kill a boy in a Jewish theological college, but after Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
“You can’t kick a cow in Leenane without some bastard holding a grudge for 20 years,” sighs Pato Dooley (Adam Best) prophetically; he has already started making his escape from that particular Galway village, doing lonely stints on London building sites. For 40-year-old unmarried Maureen Folan (Orla Fitzgerald), the woman Pato had dubbed "the beauty queen of Leenane" in her youth, departure is a national pastime: Ireland, in this 25th anniversary revival of Martin McDonagh's breakout play, means “always someone leaving”, she suggests. For her conniving mother Mag (Ingrid Craigie), Read more ...
graham.rickson
Leonard Bernstein’s one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti enjoyed a relatively trouble-free gestation, at least compared to his other stage works. Its seven short scenes last around 50 minutes, Bernstein providing his own libretto and completing much of this acerbic, occasionally bitter study of a marriage in crisis whilst on his own honeymoon in 1951.The edginess is reflected in the music, Bernstein perpetually on the cusp of giving us a jazzy showstopper, only to pull back at the last minute. The big numbers, when they come, are as affecting as anything Bernstein ever wrote – especially a Satie- Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Conway Hall in London has hosted chamber music concerts since it was built in 1929, and for 40 years this included a composition prize, in abeyance since the late 1970s. This has now been revived by the hall’s enterprising director of music, pianist Simon Callaghan, to help young composers post-pandemic. Sunday night saw the final concert in which the shortlisted pieces were played and the winner announced.The competition rubric called for new string trios by composers under the age of 35 – the finalists ranged from 19-31 – and they gave a snapshot of the music younger composers are Read more ...