Reviews
Matt Wolf
18 months or so after it opened in Chichester, Flowers for Mrs Harris launches a sequence of streamed productions from the West Sussex venue just in time to allow a new British musical to join the ever-swelling ranks of theatrical offerings online. This stage adaptation of the 1958 novel by Paul Gallico, directed by Daniel Evans, who brought the title along from his previous tenure running the Crucible, Sheffield, may be a show that really benefits from what advantages there are to experiencing theatre in this way.For starters, one can really zoom in on (you’ll forgive the choice of verb) Read more ...
David Nice
Praise be to quarantine days for the chance to savour this, the crowning glory of the Wolf Hall trilogy - if not with the supernatural vigilance and attentiveness of Thomas Cromwell himself, then at least with something of the leisurely diligence it deserves. Before the reading came the very public coronation of The Mirror & the Light, Mantel ubiquitous throughout, but always her unique, authentic and incorruptible self. Never, surely, has a greater novel deserved such a fanfaring blaze of publicity.How, then, to incorporate an element of thriller to an end we already know? It's all in Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Olivia Laing’s non-fiction has become well-known for the way it moves by means of allusive shifts, hybridity, and pooling ideas, making a roaming, discursive inspection of one broad primary subject (rivers, alcoholism, loneliness). Her latest book, which brings together essays, columns, interviews, obituaries styled as “Love Letters”, and other occasional writings from the past decade, is more declarative in approach. Following the tendency of any published collection, it seeks to make a statement about Laing as a writer, explaining and defining the shape of her career. In contrast to the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“An exercise in bizarre mixtures, combining the bleak acid hangover of half-hearted Velvet Underground impersonators with muted razzmatazz: a long and rather stylish joke.”The April 1980 New Musical Express review of The Monochrome Set’s debut album wasn’t entirely favourable but it captured the difficulty of getting to grips with the band. A combination of raised-eyebrow archness and dolefulness confirmed the band was setting-out its own path. Further confirmation of their slipperiness came in October 1980 when a second album was released.Strange Boutique, the debut, and its follow-up Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
There’s a sort of enduring mystery about short stories. They rarely have the reassuring arithmetic of poetry or – with apologies to Murakami – novelistic sweep of longer fiction. They don’t respond kindly, either, to theories and formulas – no matter how many writers, critics and, yes, reviewers choose to dabble in that imperfect science – as to exactly what makes them work. More often than not, short stories are content to leave you hanging in open air, with more questions than answers.Many of the fourteen stories in How to Pronounce Knife, the debut collection from Souvankham Thammavongsa, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In 1018, the Princess of Chen – a member of the Liao dynasty that ruled northern China – was buried in a treasure-filled tomb in Inner Mongolia. Excavated in the 1980s, her grave contained luxury items sourced in Egypt, Syria, Iran, India, Sumatra – along with prized adornments in carved amber imported from the Baltic shores of Europe, 6500 km away. It hardly counts as news, perhaps, that the Chinese elites of a thousand years ago stood at the wealthy heart of an international trading and information system that spanned distant continents. “They lived in a globalised world, pure and simple,” Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The battle of Long Tan in Vietnam isn’t well known to the casual observer, but it has entered the military folklore of Australia and New Zealand. On 18 August 1966, 108 men of Delta company, 6th Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment found themselves under ferocious attack from 2,000 Vietnamese troops, and only some stubborn leadership, dogged resistance and the New Zealand artillery saved them from complete annihilation.Kriv Stenders’s film tells the story with an unpretentious straightforwardness you wouldn’t get in a bigger-budget Hollywood production, even though the story isn’t Read more ...
David Nice
Bach, being The Greatest, can take any amount of adaptation. I'm especially addicted, for instance, to CDs on which the Japanese percussionist Kuniko plays cello suites and violin sonatas on the marimba. So it was going to be fascinating to hear a truncated St John Passion for Good Friday arranged, in this needs-must time, for percussion and harpsichord/organ, with a tenor taking all the lines bar the chorales, livestreamed by ensembles which would have participated in this year's Bachfest in Leipzig plus a vocal quintet in the same church, the Thomaskirche for which Bach wrote his great Read more ...
Veronica Lee
I must confess the sum total of my knowledge of Clarence Clemons before watching this documentary was that he was, for many years before his death in 2011 at the age of 69, the mighty saxophone player in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band. And what a sax player...Nick Mead's film shows him to be much more than The Boss's sidekick (although that would not be a bad epitaph). Much of it is from Who Do I Think I Am?, which was about the saxophonist’s spiritual pilgrimage to China in 2003; Mead and his subject hit it off, so he kept shooting material after they returned to the US.Clemons, known Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Welcome to the second of our lockdown specials. It’s a small but vital dip into what’s new on plastic. Other than that, theartsdesk on Vinyl wishes you well in these strange times. Stay at home, play records, turn up the volume.Various Cadence Revolution 1973-1981: Disques International Vol. 2 (Strut)Welcome second volume of Strut Records’ carefully collated history of Guadeloupe’s Disques Debs International, “the longest-running and most prolific label to have come out of the Francophone Caribbean”. It follows An Island Story: Biguine, Afro-Latin & Musique Antillaise 1960-1972 which Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Crying never solves anything. Be strong.” An admonishment from a stern grandmother haunts this low key first feature film by Alan Yang (Parks and Recreation, Master of None), loosely based on his father’s 1950s immigrant experience of leaving Taiwan and coming to New York City (his father does the voice-over in the film) and on Yang’s own recent trip to Taiwan with his father.No tigers in evidence here, kings, tails or otherwise. It’s a gentle, elegiac Asian-American story of lost love and emotional repression, told, in Mandarin and English, from the perspective of a disappointed middle-aged Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The National Theatre’s online broadcasts got off to a storming start with One Man, Two Guvnors – watched by over 2.5 million people, either on the night or in the week since its live streaming, and raising around £66,000 in donations. Let’s hope that engagement continues with their next offering: Sally Cookson’s dynamic adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s novel, a Bristol Old Vic and National Theatre co-production which also toured the UK.Cookson’s devised work blows past the problems associated with transferring literature to stage. There is nothing stuffy or static about her version; on the Read more ...