Reviews
Adam Sweeting
It seems Covid-19 may not be the only plague threatening mankind. The virus is nowhere to be seen in Netflix’s grippingly twisty mystery Clickbait, but it’s the use and abuse of social media that drives its tale of malice, murder and deception.The journey of one of the central characters, Nick Brewer (Adrian Grenier), mirrors the switchback ride of the narrative as it jumps between viewpoints and keeps throwing a new light on aspects of the story. Nick is a physical therapist at a school athletics department, apparently a popular guy with a perfect wife and two kids. Imagine everybody’s Read more ...
aleks.sierz
For more than three decades, playwright Winsome Pinnock has been at the forefront of new writing, often experimenting with form as well as documenting the lives of black Britons. Her new play’s original opening at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester was halted due to you know what in March last year, so it was then broadcast as part of the BBC’s Lockdown theatre festival on Radio 3, and it now arrives at the National Theatre, having already won the 2018 Alfred Fagon Award. As the story moves between London in the present and in 1840, multiple perspectives on the black British experience Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Choral singers have suffered more than most from erratic and irrational Covid prohibitions while riskier mass pursuits have gone ahead. So when one of the world’s great choirs returned to the Proms with the conductor who has guided them for over half a century, the sense of occasion was palpable. Last night the Monteverdi Choir numbered 30 – not huge by Royal Albert Hall standards – but the joyfully exultant music that they made filled the dome with a boundless grandeur. Sir John Eliot Gardiner led his singers and the English Baroque Soloists through a programme that nicely reflected the mood Read more ...
David Nice
“Now I’ve conducted Tristan for the first time,” the 27-year-old Richard Strauss wrote from Weimar to Wagner’s widow Cosima in 1892, “and it was the most wonderful day of my life”. Robin Ticciati, over a decade older but still young in terms of his profession, has just crowned his first run of Glyndebourne Tristans with this Proms performance, and I don’t know whether he felt the same on opening night; but it’s clear that with the house’s latest music director a new golden age of Wagner conducting has begun.You could sense it in the London Philharmonic Orchestra cellos’ opening tone-swell, Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
An ageing Nazi, stuffed into a slightly too tight white linen suit, sits at the opposite end of the dining table to a young Jewish woman. Between them is a dish of chicken stew that we, just moments beforehand, have seen her lace with poison.The tone is darkly comic – "I’ve dreamed about killing Nazis," she tells him. Drily he replies, "Do you want to talk about that?" Still he eats the stew, declaring "Poison can make you foam at the mouth, bleed from the eyes." There is a chilling silence. "In that way it’s very similar to gas."Playwright Josh Azouz – who is descended from Sephardic Jews – Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Composer George Benjamin has dazzling talent, but he is difficult to showcase. He is not a naturally extrovert type, and most of his projects take years to formulate, and only come about through collaboration with close and trusted performers. But this Proms programme cleverly exploited that trait, presenting a varied portrait of the composer through his many friendships and collaborations. Benjamin himself conducted, leading the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, with whom he has worked for many years, also giving a concerto with Pierre-Laurent Aimard, another regular collaborator, as part of a Read more ...
Douglas McDonald
This lively interpretation of Richard Strauss’s opera within an opera provides a feast for the senses as a musical highlight of the Edinburgh international Festival. As with the rest of the festival’s 2021 programme, the opera is performed outdoors, in a hangar designed to protect the audience from the Scottish elements and to allow for social distancing.While the venue has proven challenging for some concert performances, it feels appropriate for the setting of Ariadne auf Naxos.The two-hour show is an excellent choice for a slightly chilly evening, as Strauss delights in revealing the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Bedknobs and Broomsticks has always suffered from not being Mary Poppins, the movie delayed in development and released in 1971 (it is a Sixties film in tone and technology) and always seeming to appear later on the BBC’s Christmas Disney Time programmes, after a bit of Baloo boogieing and a spoonful or two of sugar. It was probably more liked than loved. All of which may have played a part in its half-century long journey from screen to stage – but this new adaptation, on tour around the UK and Ireland through next spring, proves the wait was well worth it. The show's co- Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja has a joyous hunger for communication through music. She sometimes seems to dance through it. This was at its most vivid when she lunged towards BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra leader Laura Samuel to invite her to start the encore at the end of the first half of Saturday’s Bartók Roots Prom, “Baladă și Joc” (ballad and dance), a duo for two violins by György Ligeti.This friendly challenge – gleefully accepted – was made in the spirit of bringing the energy and vitality of folk fiddling into the formal arena of classical music. As Kopatchinskaja has said in a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As we saw recently in M Night Shyamalan’s Old, a visit to a holiday resort in a tropical location can have ghastly consequences. In Mike White’s expertly-wrought six-parter The White Lotus (Sky Atlantic), the title refers to a pricey but tacky beach hotel in Hawaii, where a group of characters find that what was supposed to be a vacation ends up more like an exhaustive psychological examination.Happily, White is able to put his characters through the wringer with wit and panache, and everything that befalls them is a way of prising them open a little more to explore what makes them tick. For Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When I Hit You - You’ll Feel It opens with “When I Was Walt Whitman”. A French-language answer-phone message is abruptly cut off by a massive-sounding percussive pulse over which a borderline menacing voice enigmatically murmurs words which are hard to make out. There’re snatches about “repeating tiny fragments” and “when I was Walt Whitman you should have seem me…the words wrote themselves.”It ends with “Fragment #2”, a comparatively lighter piece which comes across as a distant relative of Suicide’s “Cheree”. Again, Leslie Winer's close-miked voice is near to a mumble. Full attention is Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Anaphylactic shock, anyone? Candyman, both the 1992 original, directed by British director Bernard Rose and based on a story by Clive Barker, and its stylish, sharp sequel by Nia DaCosta, co-written and produced by Jordan Peele, features an awful lot of bees.Swarms of stripy insects, however, are far from the most severe problems besetting the new hipster residents of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green luxury lofts. These were formerly a crime-ridden high-rise public housing project, as pictured in the 1992 film, now partly torn down and in the midst of gentrification.“White people built the ghetto, Read more ...