Reviews
Thomas H. Green
The usual summer vinyl release slump doesn’t seem to apply this year. During the COVID-19 crisis, the demand for vinyl has risen rather than fallen and theartsdesk on Vinyl reflects that again this month with another monster round-up of reviews, covering everything from extreme metal to country’n’western to contemporary jazz.VINYL OF THE MONTHVarious Come Stay With Me (Come Play With Me)August 2020’s Vinyl of the Month is an Arts Council-backed compilation on bright red vinyl from Leeds label Come Play With Me. It’s designed to help support the contributing artists from the area as they deal Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
The timing couldn’t be more perfect for a series like Lovecraft Country (Sky Atlantic) in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. Here we have a spectacular show in which fantasy, horror and America’s racist legacy collide with remarkable results.Adapted from the 2016 novel by Matt Ruff, it depicts the journey of a black family in Jim Crow-era America. Across 10 episodes, they must not only survive encounters with supernatural monsters straight from the work of the father of Cosmic Horror, HP Lovecraft, but also contend with real monsters, like racist cops in sundown towns, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A lot of rain and untold bliss: those were the takeaways from Saturday night’s alfresco Opera Holland Park concert performance of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s eternally glorious 1973 musical, A Little Night Music. I doubt any of the 200 or so people in attendance will soon forget that night's music, and not only because those who stayed the course are very likely still drying out from a belligerently sustained summer squall that mattered little set against the immediacy and necessity of art. Among the 90-year-old composer's most popular titles, and showcasing his best-known Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Warren is normally to be found in Brighton city centre, where it stages shows during the Brighton Fringe. But there's nothing normal about 2020, so its organisers are now producing The Warren Outdoor Season at a pop-up space on Brighton beach, in sight of the Pier and the Brighton Zip, and it's reassuringly Covid-secure.There's an obvious attention to detail: the well-spaced bench tables seat up to six and each has its own speaker, there's table service from the bar, plenty of loos and hand sanitisers, with a strictly (but politely) enforced one-way system in operation. And the Read more ...
David Nice
Before the not-quite-clear all-clear was given for distanced performances indoors, Bold Tendencies already had the perfect summer solution in the floor space beneath its rooftop terrace in Peckham’s former multi-storey car park. Never was its covering more needed than on Saturday night, when the perfect storms, apocalypses and incantations of pianists Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy in Messiaen’s gobsmacking Visions de l’Amen gradually magicked away the torrential rain beyond and the city skyline slowly came into focus again.Nothing in all this, for me, quite matches the God-in-everything Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
I have a confession to make: I don’t like Alice in Wonderland. I know, I know, a lot of people disagree. I do appreciate its place in the cultural pantheon – I just find all the caterpillars and tea parties and pointless riddles really, really dull. So it’s hard to be sure if it was the subject matter of Alice, A Virtual Theme Park that left me a little chilly, or its form. Creation Theatre’s Zoom adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s stories is over-ambitious at times, but it works well when it’s reminding us of life’s fundamental absurdity – and how leaning into that can bring us together Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s somewhat dispiriting to watch a coming-of-age rom-com that rarely rises above clichés and limps along as slowly as Yes, God, Yes. It's set in the early 2000s, and 16-year old Alice (Natalie Dyer) is struggling with sexual desire, idling on saucy chat rooms on her parents’ basement computer and guiltily enjoying how good her phone feels when set to vibrate in her lap. After malicious gossips spread a story around Alice's strict Catholic high school that she has "tossed the salad" of another girl’s boyfriend, she’s sent to an intensive retreat run by the school priest. Father Murphy ( Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
It is as unsurprising as it is vital that a spotlight has been thrown on writing by people of colour this year. It is unsurprising, too – looking at bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic since June – that most of that light is being shed on particular kinds of writing by people of colour: stories and histories of struggle and suffering. These books, non-fiction and fiction alike, are typically said to “bear witness” – as they should. The forgetting, overlooking or erasing of these stories and histories is just one of the things that makes having conversations about race, and trying Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bill Nelson’s views on his band Be-Bop Deluxe’s debut album are measured. In the essay accompanying its reissue, he writes “Axe Victim is one brief snapshot of a band in the process of becoming something else…a modest beginning, flawed but not without charm. And not the end of the story. I’ll always be grateful for the way that it helped launch a more appropriate vessel for my music, a ship which sails onward to this very day.” He sees the album as transitional.When it was issued in June 1974, NME’s dismissive Ian MacDonald was less restrained in his review: “I confidently predict that Be-Bop Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Since snobbery and deference have a big part to play in Nick Hayes’s exhilarating book, let’s start with the obligatory name-drop. I have lunched – twice, in different country piles, and most enjoyably – with one of the principal villains of The Book of Trespass. Richard Scott, tenth Duke of Buccleuch, owns around a quarter-million acres of Britain (no individual has more, although the Crown Estate, the National Trust, the Forestry Common, the RSPB and MoD outgun the Buccleuchs). So he sits at the apex of the system of private landed property that grants total control to elite proprietors, Read more ...
Florence Hallett
In the gloomy splendour of Drumlanrig Castle in Dumfriesshire, the 10th Duke of Buccleuch gazes up at Rembrandt’s Old Woman Reading, 1655. The painting has belonged to the Scott family for more than 250 years, and like generations before him, the duke has known it all his life. “She is the most powerful presence in this house.” He pauses: “Do you see what I mean?”It is a statement of spine-tingling acuity, hinting at the peculiar magic that hangs like a charm around Rembrandt's paintings, and leaves its mark on this documentary by Oeke Hoogendijk, which follows on from her 2014 film The New Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Babyteeth gets off to a terrific start. A semi-naked, manic Moses (Toby Wallace, full of scabby charisma) almost pushes 15-year-old Milla (Eliza Scanlen; Sharp Objects, Little Women) on to the Sydney train tracks as she waits on the platform in her school uniform, carrying her violin. It’s a thunderclap: she’s smitten. The next scene is just as intriguing, with Ben Mendelsohn (The Outsider, Bloodline, Animal Kingdom) on fantastic form as Henry, a psychiatrist, eating a sandwich and having sex with Anna (Essie Davis; The Babadook, True History of the Kelly Gang) in his consulting room.The fact Read more ...