Reviews
Sebastian Scotney
Six weeks ago, the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation announced that it the winner of its prestigious and extremely valuable main annual prize for 2020 "to a composer, performer, or scholar who has made outstanding contributions to the world of music" will be the viola player Tabea Zimmermann. She commented to an interviewer that what mattered to her most was neither well-paid concert appearances nor playing in large halls, but rather to be involved in things that are interesting for what she called their "Inhalt". The German language is blessed with words that have a whole field of Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Created in the mould of Made in Dagenham and Pride, Philippa Lowthrope offers up a cheery, kitschy British comedy centred around the 1970 Miss World Contest that was disrupted by feminist protests. Leading this crowd-pleaser are Keira Knightley, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Jesse Buckley. Rebecca Frayn and Gaby Chiappe divide their screenplay across the trio, but the central perspective is that of Knightley’s character Sally Alexander. As a young mum trying to make it as a mature student, her battles with the prevailing patriarchy are given a stiff kick when she meets Buckley’s Jo Read more ...
David Nice
That virtue can be fascinating and prayers to a just God dramatic have been proved in riveting productions of two late Handel oratorios, Theodora and Jephtha. Whether Susanna can ever be reclaimed for the stage as powerfully seems unlikely, but this showcase for the Royal Opera's Jette Parker Young Artists Programme may just have bungled it. Simple goodness surely needs a lighter touch than conductor Patrick Milne gave it through some numbing quarters of an hour early on, and director Isabel Kettle's heavy, often leaden, contemporary fishing community setting added nothing to the essence. Read more ...
David Nice
Eyes watering, heart thumping, hands clenched: no, not The Thing, but a spontaneous reaction to the opening of Bach's St John Passion in the urgent hands of Masaaki Suzuki. How his Bach Collegium oboes seared with their semitonal clashes while bass lines throbbed with pain, before the chorus added a different, supernatural turn of the screw. Immediate indeed, but this Passion was never too fast, only continuous in its drama so that even the chorales, with every word illuminated as Bach so expressively set it, hit home like a Greek chorus reacting to the immediate situation rather than as the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Jennifer Saunders is a one-woman tickle machine. As her countless appearances in television shows such as French and Saunders and Ab Fab prove, this triple BAFTA winner is box office magic. The mere incantation of her name is enough to sell out any West End show. So there is something really fitting about casting her as the spiritual medium Madame Arcati in this revival of Noël Coward's 1941 mega-hit, Blithe Spirit, which comes to London from the Theatre Royal Bath, where it opened last summer, in a production directed by the ever-reliable Richard Eyre.The plot concerns Home Counties novelist Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The final sequence of Levan Akin’s coming-of-age drama And Then We Danced is as gloriously defiant a piece of dance action as anything you’ll remember falling for in Billy Elliot.Merab, the film’s youthful dancer protagonist (played by Levan Gelbakhiani, pictured below, in his first screen role) has been through a lot by then – the trials of first love, exacerbated by the realisation that he’s gay – and those closing minutes see him asserting his right to be who he is at an audition that pits him against his highly conservative surroundings.It’s a clash of values in every sense. The Georgian Read more ...
Richard Bratby
No orchestra wants its conductor to cancel in the week of a concert. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s illness was announced only on Monday, but even in ideal conditions, if you needed to find a last minute replacement maestro for a programme of Bartók and Bruckner, you could hardly do better than Omer Meir Wellber: a conductor with whom the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has built a relationship that predates his recent appointment to the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester. And while it was unquestionably disappointing to be deprived of Gražinytė-Tyla’s first adventure into Bruckner (on these Read more ...
Fergus Morgan
If there’s one certainty about the Edinburgh Lyceum’s production of Mrs Puntila And Her Man Matti – and there aren't many in this unsatisfying, overlong revival – it’s that Elaine C Smith makes a terrific drunkard. The Scottish sitcom star, musical veteran and pantomime stalwart plays the erratic millionaire Mrs Puntila in Denise Mina’s re-gendered and relocated take on Brecht's 1948 original, hiring and firing staff with abandon as she totters and teeters, slurs and stumbles around the stage, sinking tumbler after tumbler of whisky. It’s an OTT, unsubtle performance, certainly, but her Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Channel 4 loves to walk the line between the compulsive and the repulsive, and this new dating show, complete with fake-salacious title, is a peerless specimen. The set-up is simple – one woman asks five guys who are “looking for love” to move in with her for a week, during which she chucks them out one by one and ends up with a winner.What’s amazing is how there’s never a shortage of volunteers desperate to make physical and emotional spectacles of themselves as they strip naked (only metaphorically, but that could change) and parade their insecurities. The hostess for this inaugural episode Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Steve Martin and Martin Short first met in 1986 on the set of The Three Amigos (in which they co-starred with Chevy Chase), became fast friends and have since worked on a few projects together. In what was quite a coup for the Glasgow Comedy Festival, the first night of their UK tour was a starry curtain-raiser to the festival proper, which starts on Thursday.The Funniest Show in Town at the Moment is a mix of stand-up, reminiscences and musical interludes (provided by pianist Michael Farrell and bluegrass band The Steep Canyon Rangers, while Martin gets out his banjo for a couple of tunes), Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Hard as it is to imagine the British dance landscape without Richard Alston, we’re going to have to get used to it. The touring company that for the past 25 years has been the chief purveyor of his uniquely lyrical brand of contemporary dance has disbanded, and not because the 71-year-old wanted to call it a day. Far from it. Having lost more than half his public funding, he decided against operating at half-strength. He wanted his company to go out on a high, and so it has.It says much about the man and his creative energy that four of the six pieces in this farewell programme were Read more ...
Katie Colombus
For those wondering if performance poet Kate Tempest would be upstaged or introduced by either pandemic panic or International Women’s Day – know that a) she’s fearless and b) she practices equality always. As such, there’s no pre-amble, other than a hope that her gig will “resonate into the night and the days to come”.Kate gets straight into her post-Brexit narrative track “Europe Is Lost”, she heaves “'Cause it's big business, baby, and its smile is hideous; top down violence, and structural viciousness” slowing down to deliver the line “Jail him, he’s the criminal”, to whoops from the Read more ...