Reviews
Saskia Baron
All is harmony as another day breaks in paradise. Kong yawns and stretches luxuriously, his furry brown musculature surely paying homage to Burt Reynolds’ iconic yet discreet Playgirl centrefold. Bobby Vinton croons Over the Seas over invisible speakers as the giant ape showers in a waterfall. If only Godzilla vs. Kong had continued in this genre, a relaxing portrait of life in an Eden where a lonely primordial primate’s main problem is that he can’t get trousers to fit him. But sadly this is not that kind of film. Kong’s nemesis, Godzilla, that scaly creature who has Read more ...
Tom Baily
The Drifters remakes the romance crime genre by placing the main themes of rebellion and freedom in the context of the race and migration divisions of present day Britain. It is a noble mission for a debut by British director Benjamin Bond. Sadly, this film never gets close to succeeding in either developing a unique aesthetic, or engaging robustly in politics.We begin in an English language class in London, where the Parisian waitress Fanny (Lucie Bourdeu) and African migrant Koffee (Jonathan Ajayi) meet and quickly fall in love. They are both escaping pasts of suffering. Fanny has a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Rumours keep swirling of pressing plants stumped by the effects of COVID-19 lockdown, and it’s true that vinyl editions of many albums have been delayed, yet still those records keep arriving. At theartsdesk on Vinyl, no-one cares if an album was streaming or out in virtual form months ago. Vinyl is the only game here and when those albums arrive, they are heard, and the best of them, from hip hop to Sixties pop to steel-tough electronic bangin’ to whatever else, makes it into 6000 words of detailed reviews. There’s no shortage of juice or opinion here. Dive in!VINYL OF THE MONTHSubp Yao Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Just what the Zoom era has brought to theatre – to performers and audiences alike – is something we will no doubt be pondering for some while yet, certainly still in the much-anticipated eventual hereafter when stages in their “traditional” multifariousness are once again standard. Watching director Jenny Caron Hall’s livestream rehearsed reading of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, an offshoot of the Suffolk-based SHAKE Festival and a loose follow-on from her December Tempest, raised some such questions rather intriguingly.Following one of the best-known phrases from this early Shakespeare comedy, Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The baroque music ensemble Arcangelo have been around since 2010 but I hadn’t heard them before this pair of concerts streamed from Wigmore Hall in the last week. But what I heard has certainly encouraged me to seek out more – and they have quickly built up a large discography ready to be tucked into. This includes the Bach violin concertos with Alina Ibragimova, who joined them for a journey through Vivaldi, Bach and Corelli last Friday, while frequent collaborator Iestyn Davies duetted with Carolyn Sampson in Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater on Tuesday.The Wigmore Hall has been a particular oasis Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Whether he’s making documentaries or dramas, director Kevin Macdonald has an eye for the bleak moments in our history, and a dynamic way of recreating them, from the Oscar-winning doc Four Days in September, about the Munich massacre, to the fictionalised account of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, The Last King of Scotland, which at times played like a horror film.Compared to those, The Mauritanian feels pretty conventional, a tale of righteous lawyers and their ill-treated client, amid the well-trod US malfeasance in its War on Terror. Yet there’s no denying the almost Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
A year into the pandemic, it is hard to imagine anybody relishing the prosect of Lenten austerity. But the liturgical calendar trundles on, and here we are in Holy Week. The aptly named Tenebrae Choir, under conductor Nigel Short here offer a traditional Lent programme, mostly solemn but with a few lighter numbers. At the heart were three Bach motets, contextualised by similar music from earlier and later centuries: Schütz, Reger and James MacMillan.The Wigmore Hall stage proved insufficient for the ten singers, given social distancing requirements, and an extension had to be added at the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The idea behind Tarzan Economics is, in its essence, that “if the vine we are holding onto is withering, we can have confidence to reach out for a new one.” This thesis expounded in Will Page’s highly engaging book is that the music industry “got there first”. It may have started out by getting things badly wrong when originally faced with the challenge of digital, but it then “worked out how to pivot and thrive.” And to grow again. The conclusion that Page draws from this chain of events is that the music industry – and also he – has lessons to teach other sectors. Media, finance, government Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Comedy promoters Just the Tonic have been keeping occupied during various lockdowns, and are continuing with livestreamed shows until comics can perform live in clubs and theatres again. This show was presented as part of JTT's fortnightly variety show Working From Home – which does what it says on the tin, comics doing their bit from the comfort of their homes livestreamed into ours. As ever, it was a cracking Saturday-night line-up with JTT's owner, Darrell Martin, compere for the evening. Matt Forde kicked off proceedings, appearing as Boris Johnson, complete with a blond fright wig Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Course In Fable is, as Ryley Walker albums go, pretty straightforward some sharp left turns indicate that the formerly Chicago-based, now New York-dwelling guitar whizz isn’t content with limiting a single musical line of attack to one song. Three-minutes, 30-seconds into the atmospheric, jazzy, King Crimson-meets-John Martyn nugget “Clad With Bunk” a sudden blast of “Spirit in the Sky” fuzz guitar opens the door on the song’s freak-out coda, a hard-edged outro nodding towards Swedish psych-heads Dungen. Next up, “Pond Scum Ocean” is more linear overall but odder: it evokes Flowers Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Some production concepts seem so obvious, in retrospect, that you wonder why they haven’t been tried more often. Traffic hums in the foreground in the opening shots of Grange Park Opera’s new film of Ravel’s L’heure espagnole, the passing cars reflected in the window of an antique clock dealer’s store. Ticking fills the soundtrack as we dive inside, like Mr Benn entering his magical shop; at the same time, the piano sounds Ravel’s perfumed opening chords. Reality or fiction? Opera or documentary? Torquemada’s clock shop is apparently genuine, and the setting could be any 21st century high Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The team of Stephen Langridge (director), Alison Chitty (design) and Paul Pyant (lighting) produced a quietly radical Parsifal at the Royal Opera in 2013, finding both beauty and horror in unexpected corners. On the strength of its third instalment – I haven’t seen the first two – their Ring in Gothenburg pursues a no less subtle course of rebellion against some tenaciously held conventions and traditions in staging Wagner.This is billed as a “green” Ring by an environmentally friendly opera house. It’s a notion which, I fancy, would have intrigued Wagner the theorist, dreamer and pragmatist Read more ...