Reviews
Ismene Brown
So it wasn’t Cinderella but Hamlet who was first out of the post-lockdown starting blocks – Andrew Lloyd Webber’s much trumpeted musical premiere being foiled by a ping at the weekend. Instead the historic first curtain-up was 20 miles up the River Thames in Windsor, on a Shakespeare production that itself has been disrupted over and over during the past 16 months – possibly with even more urgent, unspoken worries, as the star is Ian McKellen, who was 80 when rehearsal began, and Covid began devastating the older generation, and is now 82.Pingless so far, Sean Mathias’s production, on a plain Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Earlier this year, Steve McQueen addressed the forgotten history of black British people through the Small Axe dramas he made for the BBC. Now McQueen has turned to documentary for Uprising. It airs over three successive nights and was co-directed with documentarist James Rogan; this viewer found it far more gripping than the dramas.In the small hours of Sunday 18th January 1981, a fire ripped through a house in New Cross, south London. Thirteen young people died, many more were left with life-changing injuries. They had been enjoying a birthday party for two teenage girls; Yvonne Ruddock was Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
There just isn’t enough there, with ANNA X. Daniel Raggett’s production is the third and final of the RE:EMERGE season at the Harold Pinter Theatre, with Emma Corrin of Lady Di fame in the lead. The graphic design – the brightly-striped faces of Corrin and her co-star, Nabhaan Rizwan, on a dark background – is impeccable. Joseph Charlton’s writing, not so much.Based on “true events”, ANNA X is about a young Russian woman with an art degree who cons people into believing she’s rich, and a tech entrepreneur who falls for it. They’re both living in New York, which in Charlton’s nightmare vision Read more ...
David Nice
Instant sell-out would have been guaranteed if the Royal Opera had advertised this as “Cardiff Singer of the World finalist Masabane and fellow Young Artists”. No doubt about it, South African soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha is indeed the most polished performer, crying out star quality in every move and note. But that’s not the point. These singers have bonded through a difficult year or two, and they all have so much to offer, if also in some cases some way to go.The Royal Opera mentoring culminated on Saturday afternoon in a showcase of operatic scenes where they got to work with Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
If you’re looking for a distraction from the apocalyptic headlines that seem to be the norm right now, then it may appeal to descend into the pleasantly air-conditioned surroundings of Jermyn Street Theatre and take a trip to 1888. Here you will be greeted by literature’s most famous nobody, Charles Pooter, whose comic fictional diary – after an initially lukewarm reception – came to be celebrated by figures ranging from Hilaire Belloc to Evelyn Waugh.In this stage version, written by Keith Waterhouse in the 1980s, his account of his life commuting between Holloway and the City of London, Read more ...
Nell Whittaker
In the opening poem of Samantha Walton's 2018 collection, Self Heal, the speaker is on the tube, that evergreen metaphor of capital's specific barrelling momentum. The tube "will help you see yourself properly for once, all the way through", the poem goes, ie. as one of urbanity's little facilitators, one automaton amongst many. The toll of this is self-negation: "it only takes a moment to cut a line into yourself gently / it's a wonder everyone isn't doing it." So the book, ostensibly about healing, opens with harm (the play is made explicit by the prefix "self"). We are not well; how Read more ...
Tim Cumming
What is the Shadow Kingdom and how do you gain access to it? In Bob Dylan’s case, it may be found in the film noir classics of his birth – 1941’s The Maltese Falcon onward – and it’s those noir settings, artfully condensed and reduced to a signature sauce, that dictate the tone of the dim-lit tableaux that decorate the settings for Dylan’s first foray into online streaming.It’s something of an event, given the cessation of the Never Ending Tour as a result of pandemic – he last played here in August 2019, that now-bucolic, innocent summer before Covid, and his last stage performance anywhere Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Baptiste (BBC One) has two powerful weapons in its armoury, in the shape of its stars – Tchéky Karyo as the titular French ‘tec, and Fiona Shaw as the central character in this second series. Both of them are astonishingly persuasive at conveying unfathomable depths of pain and loss, and it looks like they’ll have plenty of opportunities to prove it across these six episodes.Products from the Harry and Jack Williams thriller factory can be erratic in quality (remember The Widow?), but this one gripped with steely fingers right from the off. Emma Chambers (Shaw), the British ambassador to Read more ...
Richard Bratby
They showed Clash of the Titans the other night – not the wretched remake, but the original 1981 sword-and-sandals cheesefest, complete with Ray Harryhausen’s Kraken, Ursula Andress as Aphrodite and that rip-roaring Laurence Rosenthal score. And, of course, Sir Laurence Olivier playing Zeus and keeping it old school as he and his nightdress-clad fellow deities debate mortal destinies in Shakespearean tones, from an Olympus that resembles nothing so much as the old Blue Peter set plus Ionic columns. We don’t do the classics like that any more, and especially not in opera where Graeco Roman Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What a great idea Just the Tonic's Comedy Shindig is; outdoor gigs at lovely locations under a huge awning - so who cares if the British summer turns out to be a bit wet this year? The season kicked off – in beautiful weather – in the grounds of Melbourne Hall near Derby, where a sunken Victorian walled garden provided a natural amphitheatre. Chuck in a barbecue and a bar, and it was a perfect way to enjoy an evening of comedy.Host Lou Conran was terrific, and gloriously rude about the audience from the off. Much of her material is filthy – she's the co-host (with Sally-Anne Hayward) of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Karen Black’s connection with music was never hidden. In Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville she played a country singer. In 1970’s Five Easy Pieces she was a would-be country singer. In Nashville, two of the songs she sang were self-penned. She also dueted with Kris Kristofferson in 1972’s Cisco Pike.Hollywood logic usually dictates that an actor with musical inclinations – however shaky – issues a record. Hence releases by William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Peggy Lipton, Annette Funicello and a million more. Yet nothing from the evidently musically capable Karen Black. (In 1965, there had Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We’ve come to learn what socially distanced means but, 72 years ago, the distance that concerned Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers was that between racial groups in the United States. With a catalogue of hits behind them, they turned to South Pacific, and fashioned a velvet glove comprising some of musical theatre’s greatest songs into which they packed an iron fist of a condemnation of prejudice – popular entertainment with an uncompromising message. They knew they would have to stand by their principles, especially when the show toured the Jim Crow states, and they did. Their Read more ...