Reviews
Markie Robson-Scott
Sheds have flourished in lockdown: they’ve always been places to escape to and in the past year, when spruced up as home offices, even more so. They’re also emblems of isolation. Poltergeist (main picture) and Doppelganger, the works that dominate Internal Objects, Rachel Whiteread’s powerful and moving new show at the Gagosian Gallery, imply isolation and are a vision of sheds destroyed, broken apart – structures that speak of a post-apocalyptic, unpeopled world. No home offices there.These are not her typical inside-out interiors cast in concrete, resin or steel, negative spaces Read more ...
David Nice
“You have to be careful you’re not judging the piece,” cautioned a pearl-necklaced Nicholas Daniel, great oboist and winner of the 1980 BBC Young Musician (of the Year, as it then was). Yet while the work, Japanese composer and marimba virtuoso Keiko Abe’s Prism Concerto for the instrument she's done so much to pioneer, was infinitely the most fascinating of the evening’s three, so too was the performance by 17-year-old Fang Zhang. Sometimes flash can win over more interior qualities, but this unpredictable tour de force had everything.What a long time it took, though, to get to the musical Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
It wasn’t Jane Austen’s subtlest move, naming her roguish soldier George Wickham. As countless GCSE English teachers have patiently read in generations of essays, his surname sounds a lot like "wicked" – and wicked he is. Adrian Lukis, who played him in Andrew Davies’ 1995 TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, reprises the role in the perfectly pleasant Being Mr Wickham, livestreamed this past weekend from the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds by the Original Theatre Company. It’s Wickham’s less-than-successful attempt to clear his name of the mud Austen dragged it through in her novel. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
WARNING - CONTAINS SPOILERSHalf the fun of this series of Line of Duty has been the crescendo of conspiracy theories surrounding it, fuelled by the way creator Jed Mercurio has skilfully kept tapping into the LoD mythology built up over the preceding five seasons. Craig Parkinson, aka the evil Dot Cottan from earlier series, has been hosting the Obsessed With… Line of Duty podcast, exploring secrets, theories and myths surrounding the show.With the air dripping with fear and paranoia, almost everyone has been fingered as being the potential Napoleon of Crime known as the Fourth Man (or woman Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
To accept or not accept a donation: that’s certainly the burning political question of the moment. So Isla van Tricht’s play Money – specially designed for Zoom – has proven more timely than even perhaps she suspected, though the question is made infinitely more complex by the fact that the target of the donation is not curtains but charity.This is the inaugural production of represent., a new company whose stated mission is "to increase access to the [theatre] industry for those from lower socio-economic backgrounds". Importantly and practically, this means it acts as a professional Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What a pleasure it was to go to the first drive-in date of 2021 as Mark Watson's Carpool Comedy Club, produced in association with The Alfresco Theatre, rocked up in the picturesque surroundings of the Hop Farm, near Tunbridge Wells in Kent. The gigs are a pleasurable affair, held in pretty venues with designer food on hand, far removed from the dark, sweaty enclosed spaces that every comic is now so desperate to get back to in just a few weeks. But I for one have become a great fan of alfresco comedy and hope it becomes a permament summer fixture – and that the British weather plays Read more ...
aleks.sierz
I think I can safely say that polymath playwright Philip Ridley has had a good lockdown. In March last year, when The Beast of Blue Yonder, his new show for Southwark Playhouse, was closed due to the pandemic, he came up with an idea called The Beast Will Rise, and wrote a new monologue for each cast member to be performed and streamed each week. These number 14 in all, and vary from River (two minutes in length) to Eclipse (almost an hour). Then he wrote The Poltergeist, a fantastic one-man show which streamed in November. Now he returns again to this venue with Tarantula, a new monologue Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Carolyn Crawford’s “Ready or Not Here Comes Love” is a 1971 recording. It sounds like a Motown classic from 1968 or so – a confident lead voice soars over backing vocals, light orchestration and a tight arrangement designed to get feet moving. Most of all, it’s about an instantly memorable melody.Kim Weston’s “It Takes a Lotta Teardrops” is as good. From 1967, it was co-written by Vicki Basemore, a Detroit-based writer who also co-wrote “Ready or Not Here Comes Love” and wrote for Motown too. Weston adopts a pleading tone on a similarly impactful track.Then there’s “The Intruder” by Melvin Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Kindred literary spirits who overlapped in any number of ways make for riveting stuff in Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation. Filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland folds archival footage of the legendary writers together with recitations from their life and art spoken by Jim Parsons and Zachary Quinto. Throw in footage of film adaptations of their work, ranging from A Streetcar Named Desire to Breakfast at Tiffany's and much more, and you have a riveting mosaic of two men marginalised by society who came to occupy pride of place in the cultural zeitgeist. It's not only Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Welcome to Commonworld, in the year 2143. It’s been built above the ruins of the old world, and the opening sequence of Sky One’s new interstellar thriller showed us the crumbling remains of Tower Bridge and St Paul’s Cathedral mouldering beneath glittering futuristic super-scrapers and sweeping skyways. Thanks to rising water levels, London has become an island.It looks good, and while there’s nothing here that’s going to out-imagine Blade Runner or the new generation of Star Treks, it’s only fairly recently that you’d find such advanced CGI in a TV show. Whizzing through this exciting Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester’s Psappha have been proudly flying the flag of new and radical music right through the year of lockdown, and last night’s livestream, with two-and-a-half world premieres, one of them by Mark-Anthony Turnage, showed they haven’t given up making waves.Engaging many of Manchester’s most distinguished solo musicians – and performing in ensembles whose numbers would daunt many another music-making organization right now – their enterprise and dedication are breathtaking. This live-streamed event brought together, as scene-setter Tom McKinney put it, “21 musicians, safely distanced’ at Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tiny Revolutions With Tiff StevensonThis gem is now in its second series and the back catalogue is worth searching out, as well as the most recent episode with US comedians W. Kamau Bell and Nato Green. It's a collection of conversations between Stevenson and fellow comics – all of them like her politically engaged – about how and why comedy can be a force for political change. Among her guests are American Desiree Burch, who talks about race and cancel culture; old-fashioned lefty Mark Thomas, who describes how he once set up a comedy club in a Palestinian refugee camp; and Irish comic Read more ...