Reviews
aleks.sierz
Film is the new theatre – this we know, but does the distance imposed by the change of medium increase or decrease the impact of the story? The latest example of this problematic switch from stage to screen is the strongly acted Shook, Samuel Bailey’s debut play, which won the 2019 Papatango New Writing Prize and had a run at the Southwark Playhouse in November of that year. Although its planned transfer to the Trafalgar Studios in the West End was curtailed when the pandemic hit, the drama has been superbly filmed and is available to watch online on the Papatango website.Set in a Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Straight off the bat, Tabitha Lasley’s soon-to-be ex-boss points out the fatal flaw in her life-changing project. Jettisoning her job at a women’s magazine, a long-term boyfriend, a cramped London flat (after it’s broken into) and friends in her mid-30s, Lasley heads to an austere Aberdeen to find out with her own eyes and ears what oil-riggers get up to when they’re “on” and “off”, that is, offshore and on-land. What she discovers about the latter is perhaps unsurprising: they drink (gallons) and/or find a mistress; something Lasley learns firsthand. She falls for Caden from Stockton ( Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The theme of a parent haunted by the loss of a child can have powerful dramatic potential, and this is the premise behind The Drowning, Channel 5’s new four-night mystery. Nine years earlier, Jodie and Frank’s four-year-old son Tom vanished during a family outing to a local lake. His body was never found, and he was presumed dead.But the supposed death itself only heightens the lurking suspicion that this show has a few screws loose. Tom’s disappearance occurred on a sunny day at a relaxing popular beauty spot, rather than in rough seas during a sudden storm, so surely somebody would have Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There's something in the water, as no fewer than three comics are launching podcasts related to the one thing we can't do at the moment – travel. They're having a laugh, aren't they? Other offerings include escapist fun with superheroes, music collections and a spoof true-crime series.Available on all podcast platforms unless stated Alan Carr's Life's a BeachThe comic invites a celebrity guest each week to talk about their travel adventures, either for work or pleasure. If you enjoyed Carr's television chat show, you love this, and it has added domestic drama as the podcasts are recorded Read more ...
David Nice
It’s second time lucky for OperaGlass Works, whose previous production at Wilton’s Music Hall, of Stravinsky’s The Rake's Progress, hit the mark for me in the singing but not the staging. I suspect that had we been there in the auditorium with performers all too palpable, the same might have been true of The Turn of the Screw in this venue. But Britten’s tricky adaptation with Myfanwy Piper of the ambiguous, first-person-narrated Henry James ghost story, a musical masterpiece, works best here when the camerawork allows distance on the ghosts of the former valet and governess who haunt Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
On 25 November 1944, a German V2 rocket struck the Woolworths store in New Cross at Saturday lunchtime. It killed 168 people. Francis Spufford’s second novel begins with this “hairline crack” in existence; a mere nanosecond of high-explosive combustion, “measurably tiny, immeasurably vast”. In a matter-dissolving flash, it closes the book of time for five of the small children in the shop. What, Light Perpetual asks, if that particular V2 had not fallen there and then; if “some other version of the reel of time” had played, and that handful of kids had lived into “All the would-be’s, Read more ...
Heather Neill
Swaggering rakes, posturing fops, sexual intrigue, illicit encounters, wit, artifice, wigs, fans and beauty spots - these are familiar ingredients of Restoration comedy. It is a louche world where the word "mask" is associated with naughty goings on under cover of darkness rather than health worries, and where social distancing and restraint have no place. On the face of it, Hermione Gulliford's choice of William Wycherley's first play, Love in a Wood or St James's Park, for a rehearsed Zoom reading "with a few mates" is surprising.The project began as a diversion, like many another during Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Arrival Of The New Elders is unlike anything Norwegian trio Elephant9 have done before. Previously, their jazz-prog mélange was as full-on as it could be. Attacking, hard and heavy. Now, a previously unfamiliar pensiveness has been revealed.While Elephant9’s sixth studio album still sounds like keyboard player Ståle Storløkken, bassist Nikolai Eilertse and drummer Torstein Lofthus, there’s a more measured, clearly less improvised approach. Tempi are slower and the interplay between the players is easier to discern. There’s a new space too. Storløkken plays more electric piano than before, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If this had to be the end of Spiral, the final episodes of Series 8 (BBC Four) at least ensured that justice was done. We saw evidence that on occasion lawyers may be human after all, and there was even the somewhat disorientating semblance of a happy ending (or at least not the bloodbath that had threatened to erupt).A series of Spiral often takes a few episodes to crank up a full head of steam, as this one did, but once character, situation and plot start to knit together, it has been as tense and addictive as anything on TV. The story of Moroccan teenager Amin, whose murdered body got the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Dorian Benediction” begins with a muted organ and spectral chorale. Minimal drums, an electric piano, vibes, melancholy saxophone and a jazzy solo guitar fill out the picture. Over its four-and-a-half minutes, the atmosphere is haunted and haunting. This is music which appears to have seeped from the walls of a baroque church. It’s the final track of The Free Design’s third album, 1969’s Heaven / Earth.“An Elegy” is more direct but still as mysterious. It’s also jazzy and strings colour the arrangement, but there’s an epic quality as the song moves though a series of crescendos. This time, Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
The bleak isolation and lonely angst felt in Schubert’s Winterreise is only too appropriate for a lockdown January. However, one positive to shine from this gloom is tenor David Webb’s own "Winter Journey". Cycling around his home in London every day since "Blue Monday" – 18 January, supposedly the most depressing day of the year – Webb has clocked up 500 miles and is raising money for both MINDS and Music Minds Matters, to help pay for at least two people to have counselling and therapy for a year. This concert – streamed live from the Wigmore Hall on Friday – celebrates the culmination of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The 2017 killing of Kim Jong-nam, older half-brother of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un, was a chilling expression of merciless Pyongyang realpolitik. Labyrinthine planning by a team of North Korean undercover agents went into the attack, carried out by a pair of seemingly unwitting women at Kuala Lumpur airport by smearing Jong-nam (pictured below) with VX nerve agent.Ryan White’s documentary about Jong-nam’s death may contain material familiar to keen conspiracy fans, but it’s still an extraordinary story. White has buttressed his narrative with accounts from witnesses and lawyers, as well Read more ...