Reviews
Marianka Swain
A musical featuring two people who are physically separated? Jason Robert Brown’s work is a shutdown natural – as this new digital theatre version demonstrates. Lauren Samuels and Danny Becker, who play doomed lovers Cathy and Jamie, recorded their parts entirely in isolation, with Samuels (previously starring as Cathy in 2011 at Chiswick Playhouse) also directing.The result is a piece that firmly retains its theatrical DNA – in contrast to the Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan-starring movie adaptation, which changed up the format to have the characters sharing space. Of course, current social Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Ten years in the making, Thomas Clay’s third feature, starring Charles Dance and Maxine Peake, is a remarkable and potent example of genre-splicing British independent filmmaking. The story opens in 1657. Cromwell is in power and, on a small, fog-bound farmstead in Shropshire, lives put-upon housewife Fanny Lye (Peake). Her much older husband John (Dance) is a bible-bashing brute who, with cane-whip frequently in hand, rules over the lives of Fanny and that of their child Arthur (young talent Zak Adams) with puritanical zeal. Their simple life is turned upside down by a young couple Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Why don’t you have children? Why aren’t you married? Why don’t you own your own home? Why are you a failure? These are the societally enforced questions that, as a 34-year-old woman, Nadine Shah finds inescapable. Much like the rest of us. When talking to friends who also considered themselves “non-achievers”, she realised something was very wrong. And that nothing much has changed in what used to be termed “the battle of the sexes” (hence the Abigail’s Party style artwork). Having covered the refugee crisis, suicide and the state of the nation, now sexual inequality comes under her Read more ...
Anonymous
The eyes have it in Alan Bennett's Talking Heads, which is in no way to discount this venerable writer's gift for words. Time and again in this vaunted series of dramatic solos, ten of which have now been remade alongside two new ones, a character will interrupt a thought only to be seen peering at us or into the middle distance or directly into the dark heart of psychic disturbance. Now 86, Bennett anatomises lovelessness and despair with a mastery second to none, and the timing of these as we emerge from lockdown tallies directly with a collection of people who themselves know a thing or Read more ...
David Nice
Solitude, mortality and transcendence have never been more profoundly expressed in music than by Mahler, who composed Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) in the valley of the shadow of death (too superstitious to give it the name of Ninth Symphony, though that and a sketched-out Tenth did follow, he never lived to hear it performed). It seems like the perfect work to benefit from a silent background in an otherwise empty Royal Opera House - though there's no substitute for the intense silence of a full audience. Gluck, too struck his deepest note with the highest ones of the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Singing in a choir can be terrific therapy for anxiety, depression or loneliness, but one of the cruellest effects of the coronavirus is the way it has restricted normal human interaction. The notion of social distancing might have been designed to sabotage the proximity and togetherness which is so much a part of collective singing.However, choir supremo Gareth Malone (now sporting a shaggy lockdown hairstyle) doesn’t give up easily, so he’s made the best of what technology has to offer to create an online facsimile of the choir-singing experience. He’s the first to admit that hooking up a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It fell out of the sky in the summer of 1947, and crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. UFO-logists and conspiracy fanatics insist it was an alien spacecraft, but the US Air Force says it was a meteorological balloon.For the purposes of this entertaining, if slight, new US drama series (on ITV2), the object was a flying saucer, and unknown to the locals, unearthly survivors from the crash have been living among them ever since. The secrets of the past begin to unravel when Liz Ortecho (Jeanine Mason) returns to this “sleepy cowboy town” and starts re-establishing contact with her old Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Picture an antiquarian book dealer. Typically, it’s all Harris Tweed, horn-rimmed specs, and a slight disdain for actual customers. At the beginning of D.W. Young’s new documentary we are guided around New York’s rare book dealerships, and witness how, in the age of the internet, this rare breed may be going the way of the Gutenberg press.Whilst the impact of Amazon (specifically the Kindle) as well as Barnes & Noble are mentioned, the heart of Young’s work focuses on the dozen or so booksellers who are trying against the odds to make a living trading in leather-bound books and literary Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Last Tuesday’s offering from the Wigmore Hall’s series of live broadcasts was a fiery recital from Russian violinist Alina Ibragimova partnered by pianist Kristian Bezuidenhout. Beginning with Schubert’s Violin Sonata "Sonatina" in A minor, Bezuidenhout’s opening bars had a restrained urgency, giving just a hint at the passionate flourish Ibragimova was to provide as she entered. Dialogue between violinist and pianist was intense, as they moved very much as one unit through the movement towards a rounded end.The second, Andante movement opened with a serene poise with some Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Rather like David Suchet’s Poirot, the world will always think of Raymond Burr as the doughty defence lawyer Perry Mason, whom he played in nine TV series and 26 TV movies between 1957 and 1993. But Burr’s Mason existed before the age of the prequel, which now brings us HBO’s impressively-mounted back story of the battling attorney (showing on Sky Atlantic).The original Perry Mason novels by Erle Stanley Gardner told readers next to nothing about Mason’s history and background, so creators Ron Fitzgerald and Rolin Jones had a huge canvas to splash about on when they devised their new show. Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The note of longing scored into this exhibition’s title is well-judged: as things are now, it is the sight of the elderly in the company of friends, watching the world go by from a doorstep or park bench, that provokes a pang of nostalgia, far more than the surface details of the mid-20th century, when these pictures were taken.Produced in response to the virus, this selection of 20 photographs by Shirley Baker (1932-2014), focuses on her depictions of the elderly, who blossom under her gently satirical gaze. The online exhibition includes examples of Baker’s colour work as well as her Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Alarm bells start ringing whenever you discover an author is adapting their own work for a screenplay. In the case of New Zealand novelist Eleanor Catton, the alarm proves to be false. Over the course of seven years, and apparently 200 drafts of the first episode alone, Catton has eloquently distilled her 848-page novel The Luminaries into six 60-minute episodes for the BBC. In the process, she’s stripped away the novel’s structure and a lot of its detail to create something more appropriate for a visual medium. The result is spectacular, but very different from the original Read more ...