Reviews
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 ...
Adam Sweeting
After arriving with a bang in 2018, Keeping Faith (BBC One) disappointed many (though not all) of its fans with 2019’s second series. It’s had a bit of a breather before this third – and final – series, first seen in its Welsh version Un Bore Mercher on S4C last November. So, how is it shaping up?While the ravishing Welsh scenery of Laugharne and Carmarthenshire is almost reason enough to watch the show, the story has moved on, with Faith Howells (Eve Myles) now running her own law firm, while still trying to work out divorce and child-custody arrangements with disgraced husband and ex- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Close to the back of Jon Savage’s 1991 book England’s Dreaming, there’s a section titled “Discography.” In this, he goes through the records which fed into and were spawned by punk rock and the Sex Pistols, the book’s subject. The wide-ranging selection begins with Fifties rock ’n roll and Max Bygraves, and ends with the “post-house dance music” of The Justified Ancients Of Mu and Renegade Soundwave.When the mid-Seventies are reached, he says “the Murray Head 45 ‘Say it Ain’t so’ referred to in Chapter Nine is long deleted.” This chapter examines the birth of the Sex Pistols: tracking John Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Spanish director Fernando Trueba’s Memories of My Father adapts the Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince’s 2006 family memoir, which was published in English as Oblivion: the Spanish-language title of both book and film, El Olvido Que Seremos (“Forgotten We’ll Be”), more literally catches the mood of the writer’s tribute to his father, Héctor Abad Gómez, a doctor and prominent social reformer who was murdered by paramilitaries in his native town of Medellin in 1987.The writer realised that, two decades after his father’s death, his achievements were starting to be forgotten, even in close Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I get to see all these beautiful places and look passengers right in the eye and say the word trash.” Meet Cassie Bowden (the excellent Kaley Cuoco), flight attendant on Imperial Atlantic Airways. In firm denial about her alcohol problem, she knocks back myriads of vodka miniatures onboard, parties hard in cities the world over, has one-night stands after black-out benders (“Thank you for the effort. Good job,” she says to one man, unclear as to who he is or what he’s doing in bed in her New York apartment) but still makes the JFK to Bangkok flight by the skin of her teeth, looking fresh as Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It’s a dog’s life, this lockdown; if only I could meet my friends whenever I want to and roam around freely without obeying these annoying restrictions! Stray is a documentary about the street dogs of Turkey in which film-maker Elizabeth Lo plays with our preconceptions about the relative merits of life as a dog and a person, especially now that our freedoms are being curtailed and our lives controlled more than ever.Shot mainly in Istanbul, her pavement-level view of the city suggests, in fact, that feral dogs may have something to teach us about freedom, choice and independence. For Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It can't be easy maintaining dignity when everyone in your vicinity is losing theirs. But that's the position in which the inimitable Judi Dench finds herself in Six Minutes to Midnight, a bewildering movie in which star and co-author, Eddie Izzard, spends a lot of time running hither and yon even as the film itself refuses to budge.Based on the tantalising existence of an English finishing school for daughters of German higher-ups and the like that shut its doors in 1939 just prior to England's entry into World War Two, the director Andy Goddard's quasi-thriller suggests The Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Does a subjective theatre piece encourage a subjective critical response? I think it might, especially when it’s a memory play about dementia, so here goes: first I turn off the lights, then I press play. From the darkness comes jaunty music – it’s a dance class. The teacher says, “We’re not used to having a man in class, are we ladies? But you’re very welcome Mark.” Fade out, but don’t forget: at the age of 50 playwright Mark Ravenhill starts doing a ballet class at the same time as his mum, Angela, is suffering from Alzheimer’s in her mid eighties.Fragments: Mark telephones his mum in Read more ...
Robert Beale
For the newest performance of their part-postponed “Winter Season” on film, the Hallé return to their rehearsal and performance centre in Ancoats, and with the help of piano soloist-director Paul Lewis and guest leader-director Eva Thórarinsdóttir offer a display of the capability of their orchestra members as chamber musicians.So first we see again the little sequence of musicians heading through Manchester city centre to Hallé St Peter’s, and before the music starts Paul Lewis introduces Mozart’s Piano Quintet in E flat K452, and Sergio Castelló-López, clarinet, and Elena Comelli, bassoon, Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
“This book is a journey of historical discovery, set out sequentially in order to convey a sense of what has changed over time.” Add to this sentence, the title of the work from which it is taken, The Art Museum in Modern Times, and you’ll probably have a reasonable sense of Charles Saumarez Smith’s latest book. Simple, effective – Smith presents us with a series of case studies of museums, placed in chronological order according to each’s unveiling. Following a brief introduction to the Traditional Museum (“bastions of intellectual and scholarly conservatism, dedicated to the understanding Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
“Your task is to imagine the future.” That’s what the citizens of Assembly, a new streamed production performed and devised by the Donmar Warehouse’s Local Company, are told. It can be anything they like, so long as they make it together – which is the catch, of course. Since when did a citizens’ assembly ever agree on anything? Assembly marks the Donmar Local Company’s first production, co-created with writer Nina Segal and director Joseph Hancock. It was originally scheduled for 2020, but the virus intervened, rendering it basically a beefed-up Zoom production. The technical Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Praise gets heaped on the already well known. And that often leaves others in the shadows. I’m not saying that Abdullah Ibrahim doesn’t deserve the accolades – notably, “our Mozart” from Nelson Mandela – but there have been other genius level South African pianists: one was Moses Molelekwa who died at just 27. The other is the very great Bheki Mseleku (1955-2008).Mseleku’s album Timelessness, recorded with a host of American jazz super-heavyweights in 1993, has been widely hailed as a masterpiece. And this newly-released solo piano album Beyond the Stars (Tapestry Works), recorded in Read more ...