Reviews
Jon Turney
An army on the move must be as disturbing as it is, on occasion, inspiring. In E.L. Doctorow’s startlingly good civil war novel The March, General Sherman’s column proceeds inexorably through the southern United States like a giant organism. It appears as “a great segmented body moving in contractions and dilations at a rate of 12 or 15 miles a day, a creature of 100,000 feet. It is tubular in its being and tentacled to the roads and bridges over which it travels.’'The image came repeatedly to mind while reading Nichola Raihani’s exploration of how and why organisms co-operate. Some do it so Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Fourteen months after the Manhattan premiere of John Krasinski's A Quiet Place Part II – and three years after his taut, spare original spawned the most suspenseful sci-fi horror franchise of recent times – the movie is setting post-pandemic box office records. Not unexpectedly, it finds the reduced Abbott family still in desperate survival mode in decimated upstate New York.Forced to abandon their farm for hopefully safer waters, newly widowed Evelyn (Emily Blunt), her deaf 17-year-old daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds, who herself is deaf), and her panicky adolescent Read more ...
David Nice
Two regrets and a tentative hope before full praise for what has to be the best complete Swan Lake in concert ever. Not everyone will be sorry, as I am, that Jurowski chose for his grand leavetaking as music director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra Tchaikovsky’s first ballet over his second, The Sleeping Beauty, with its far more elaborate and experimental orchestral palette (have any of the three been conducted in full until now at the Royal Festival Hall since I heard Rozhdestvensky and the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Beauty as part of a very sparse audience in 1978?). This film was made Read more ...
CP Hunter
Absorbed meets Allison at the end of her relationship with Owen. They are at a New Year's Eve party when she realises that their 10-year partnership has wound down. So far, so normal. But even within this introduction, we are drawn into Allison's head, the promise clear that the anxieties she hears on a daily basis will become secondary characters to the plot itself.It is after the party, in their hotel room, that Allison's paranoia transforms into the titular experience; instead of allowing Owen to break up with her, Allison absorbs him: “I began to feel that I was sinking… we are becoming Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
With the last series of Line of Duty having left portions of its viewership dismayed and disgruntled, one consolation prize has been the way the many fine qualities of HBO’s Mare of Easttown (on Sky Atlantic) have seen it promoted it into the “unmissable” bracket. It isn’t anything like LoD, of course, and indeed the way it has stepped nimbly around the conventional pigeonholes of thriller or cop-show is one of the keys to its success. The series even ended after a thoroughly unconventional seven episodes.But perhaps seven was the perfect number, not too short but not lumbering interminably Read more ...
David Nice
Sometimes the big musical institutions follow off-piste trailblazers. John Gilhooly of the Wigmore Hall has been a hero in lockdown year, keeping musicians paid up and performing to audiences live or via livestream (or both); but it was clarinettist Anthony Friend who pointed another way forward in the new environment late last summer with his series of chamber music concerts in Battersea Park Bandstand. He’s been duly awarded by the Royal Philharmonic Society, and now the Wigmore has taken its first steps outside with three Sunday concerts in nearby Portman Square. It’s safe to say they’ve Read more ...
Lydia Bunt
According to Rosie Wilby, “breaking up and staying together are simply two sides of the same coin. They are a flick of a switch apart, separated only by one fleeting moment of madness, or perhaps clarity.” Wilby’s book The Breakup Monologues: The Unexpected Joy of Heartbreak takes the view that breakups make us stronger, better people, and this collection charts the end – arguably for the better – of several of her relationships and those of her social circle. As she says, “breakups have been the biggest learning experiences I have had.”Wilby is a comedian and writer based in south London. Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
School assembly: one of the many great traditions to be upended by the pandemic. According to this novel, that might not be such a bad thing. It looks like hymns and barely secular thoughts-for-the-day have been swapped out for inspirational, aspirational presentations packaged and delivered by young, gifted and disillusioned City workers, such as the narrator of Assembly, Natasha Brown’s debut. Disillusioned is perhaps the wrong word for someone who has never been, at least in one sense, under any illusions. You get the impression our narrator has always been, if not above, then over it.It’s Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There’s something definitely inspiring about producer Sonia Friedman’s decision to reopen one of her prime West End venues with a season, called RE:EMERGE, of three new plays. The first drama is American playwright Amy Berryman’s ambitious debut, Walden, and this will be followed later in June by Yasmin Joseph’s J’Ouvert and then in July by Joseph Charlton’s Anna X. With top directors and excellent casts, this is a vote of confidence in the power of new work from one of our best producers. Berryman’s Walden, for example, is directed by Ian Rickson — who curates the season — and stars the ever Read more ...
Veronica Lee
“A real live audience,” said Arthur Smith delightedly as he kicked off the Brighton Fringe with Syd, his touching and funny tribute to his late father, “an ordinary man who lived in extraordinary times” – his life included a stint in Dad's Army (the Home Guard) and as a prisoner of war in Colditz Castle, and for decades he was a bobby on the beat in south London.Smith was glad to be in The Warren, as were the audience, in a pop-up space that he described as “a yellow metal Globe”, made from brightly painted shipping containers and metal railings, with the occasional, fitting, accompaniment of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“All the best bits of Dylan and the Velvets with a post-punk Eighties edge to it.” That’s how Alan McGee described The Loft to NME in November 1984. Their first single, “Why Does the Rain”, had come out on his Creation label that September. Their next, “Up the Hill and Down the Slope”, arrived in April 1985.It was some claim. The interview coincided with the release of the debut single by another rising Creation band, the Jesus and Mary Chain. McGee went on: “Jesus and Mary Chain are the shock troops in this war on pop, they'll smash down doors which more subtle bands like The Loft will Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Thirty years since its original release, Jungle Fever appears on Blu-ray for the first time, courtesy of the British Film Institute. Some aspects of the movie have aged well – it’s electrifying to revisit Samuel L Jackson’s breakthrough performance as a crack addict plumbing new depths to feed his habit. But other aspects haven’t fared so well, primarily the script’s sexual politics and the casting of Wesley Snipes as the (anti) romantic male lead.Racial politics are the overt subject of Jungle Fever, a cautionary tale of a black man and a white woman having an affair. Read more ...