Reviews
aleks.sierz
All theatre is local — if you can’t get to where a show is playing you can’t see it. That is, until a pandemic closes all theatres and forces their shows to go online. The latest offering from Sheffield Theatres, now streaming to your home, is local in another way: Chris Bush’s The Band Plays On is an entertainment that has place at its very heart — it is a musical and historical love letter to the city of Sheffield. Over about 100 minutes, we get a mixture of female monologues and some spirited covers of mostly well-known songs by local heroes, from Dave Berry to Jarvis Cocker.This is a show Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“They think it’s all drugs and sex up here, Mrs H.” “Bless me.” The reality, at Kitchenly Mill Race, runs more to a nice pot of Tetley’s and a plate of Gypsy Creams. But “people are funny around famous folk”. At this Tudor manor house in Sussex – boldly enhanced in the 1930s by an Arts-and-Crafts wing – resides none other than Marko Morrell, lead guitarist of prog-rock legends Fear Taker. Or rather, he doesn’t, save for the odd impromptu overnighter with his lofty Danish consort Auralie and little daughter Molly, being otherwise engaged with his Chelsea townhouse, his Manhattan recording Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Which of Shakespeare’s plays is most plagued by misperception? For my money, I would argue A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Most people encounter it at school age because of the ease with which it can be dressed up as a light comedy involving fairies. Yet at heart this is a deeply primal work which draws upon the raw power of the elements to look at the arbitrary nature of desire and how radically it can rewrite any individual’s life.This aspect of the play has informed the RSC’s latest interpretation, though it is rightly the high-tech nature of its Dream that has dominated all the preview Read more ...
Charlie Stone
If it weren’t for the warning on the blurb, the first chapter of Double Blind would have you wondering whether you’d ordered something from the science section by mistake. It's a novel that throws its reader in at the deep end, where that end is made of "streaks of bacteria" and "vigorous mycorrhizal networks" that would take a biology degree (or a browser) to decipher. As is often the case, though, it’s worth it once you’re in. Double Blind is one of those rare books that does everything the blurb claims it will do. Humorous, philosophical, gripping and – yes – scientific in turn, this is a Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Trilogies (it is noted, in the term’s Wikipedia entry) “are common in speculative fiction”. They are found in those works with elements “non-existent in reality”, which cover various themes “in the context of the supernatural, futuristic, and many other imaginative topics”. All of these apply in some sense to The Things We’ve Seen, the latest novel from Spanish writer Agustín Fernández Mallo. The title owes itself to a line by the poet Carlos Oroza; the full version (“It’s a mistake to take the things we’ve seen as a given”) is one of a number of cut-phrases that loop and reverberate at Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We last saw John Simm on ITV in 2018’s Hong Kong-based murder mystery Strangers, a product from the Jack and Harry Williams script factory which wasted its exotic backdrops with a plot which mooched about in a dispirited fashion before dozing off entirely. This new two-hour detective drama, adapted from Peter James’s novel Dead Simple, starred Simm as Detective Superintendent Roy Grace. No doubt the hope is that Grace will blossom into a hardy perennial destined eventually for permanent rotation alongside Poirot, Morse, Foyle and the rest of ITV3’s roster of indestructible ‘tecs.It's by no Read more ...
David Nice
Some pianists would take the chance of a birthday celebration to pioneer a solitary epic. Not the ever-collegial, unshowy, some would even say visionary Steven Osborne. For this ultimately unforgettable Wigmore Hall concert, he’s devised a programme of two Schubert and two Ravel masterpieces, trios from himself and four ladies encasing piano works duo and solo. It’s all first rate, but technical weaknesses in the sound presentation mean it only all comes into proper focus in the second half of what remains, owing to the nature of the times, a relatively short event.Why, you wonder, can’t we Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Bringing out a luxury magazine in a blitzkrieg is rather like dressing for dinner in the jungle,” wrote Audrey Withers, editor of British Vogue, in December 1940. No slacking was allowed, even in the midst of an air raid. Everyone kept a suitcase beside their desks, not for spare clothes or a toothbrush, but for lay-outs and copy, though Withers put on her gas-mask and carried on writing anyway as shelling blew out the windows around her. And in the basement shelter, six floors down, everyone resumed work immediately. Even fashion shoots took place underground. Nothing can stop Vogue. Beauty Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bill Nelson knew February 1978’s Drastic Plastic was the last Be-Bop Deluxe album. In his essay for the book coming with the new “deluxe expanded” box-set reissue, he writes “that, as far as I was concerned, was that, the final Be-Bop Deluxe studio album, an era ended and a new one was about to begin. As the songs developed, I felt that the album might provide a kind of bridge to what might happen further along the road. It was definitely a half-way house between Be-Bop Deluxe and Red Noise.”Be-Bop Deluxe split in August 1978 and Nelson’s new band Red Noise first played live on 2 February Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s something of an anomaly in Filipino director Raymund Ribay Gutierrez’s debut feature between its fast-moving dramatic opening, defined by an agile hand-held camera, and the much slower, more static scenes that follow. That early material, charting the moment when recurring domestic abuse finally pushes a wife to break from her violent husband, has an impressive immediacy that seems largely dissipated when, about a third of the way into this two-hour film, Gutierrez’s focus moves into the protracted courtroom procedure that, as its title suggests, comes to dominate Verdict.That Read more ...
Tom Baily
Like the sun-happy LA of this film’s setting, there’s a hard-to-pinpoint sham quality to Wander Darkly. It feels like too much phoney dialogue crept in to the final script of this “serious” film by writer-director Tara Miele. Sienna Miller is a formidable centrepiece in the drama about a couple forced to review their relationship history after a car crash. But she is held down by a story that feels like it was clipped together in a rush.Adrienne (Miller) and Matteo (Diego Luna) are in an unmarried relationship with a young child, and they’re struggling. Adrienne is in and out of creative jobs Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Chinese Arts Now was founded in 2005 and aims to produce and present work that explores Chinese themes, stories and art forms in the UK. Its annual festival includes a comedy night (presented in conjunction with Soho Theatre), and this year three comics of Chinese heritage – Evelyn Mok, Ken Cheng and Phil Wang – performed.The event, livestreamed from the comics' homes, was in a novel format; Mok (who was born in Sweden and describes herself as Scandinasian) introduced, and we saw clips of them performing, followed by them discussing the themes in their material.It kicked off with a clip from Read more ...