Reviews
Veronica Lee
Les Enfants Terribles is the theatre company behind several interesting immersive projects, including Alice's Adventures Underground and Inside Pussy Riot. Now it has joined forces with Historic Royal Palaces to tell the story of two women integral to the Georgian crown – George II's wife, Queen Caroline, and his mistress Henrietta Howard.The scene is set for the King's birthday party in 1734, and a lowly servant (Christina Ngoyi) leads the audience – guests of the King for the evening – into Kensington Palace, where we will be immersed in the court's business, its behind-the-scenes intrigues Read more ...
David Nice
Emblazoned on a drop-curtain in front of a mirror-image of the auditorium, the three great tenets of the French revolution seem to be mocking us right at the start, above all the second of them: equality, really, given the make-up of the Royal Opera stalls? But the last, more bitter laugh is on both the audience and the director, Tobias Kratzer, who cheats Beethoven's admittedly lopsided liberation opera of its significant events and, ultimately, some fine singers, above all the eagerly-awaited Lise Davidsen and Jonas Kaufmann, along with their conductor, Antonio Pappano, of what has to be Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“Nothing you’re about to see is true,” this adaptation of Peter Carey’s novel about Australia’s iron-clad Victorian outlaw Ned Kelly declares. Justin Kurzel’s wild investigation of the Kelly myth, Australian manhood and nationhood carves out its own truths anyway.Kelly grows up in an impoverished, outback Irish family led by necessarily feral mother Ellen (The Babadook’s Essie Davis, pictured below left). This maternal Lady Macbeth is glamorous, cunning, hopelessly defiant and fearsomely vicious. First recalled by Ned pragmatically giving a blowjob to the local policeman, she later violently Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Cosi fan tutte is, as the opera’s subtitle clearly tells us, “A School for Lovers”. But too often these days it can feel like a school for the audience. Joyless productions lecture us sternly on the battle of the sexes – on chauvinism, feminism, cynicism and sex – until we’re battered into fashionable discomfort. A happy ending? For Mozart’s most complicated comedy? Don’t be naïve.Director Laura Attridge has bucked the trend in her new staging for English Touring Opera, and it’s bliss. Against the odds we find ourselves in a colourful screwball-comedy – a sunny, funny musical game of kiss- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Scouting and Girlguiding may seem awfully old-fashioned to some, yet many youngsters are still keen to join the Scout movement. Be Prepared (the Scout motto) was inspired by Lucy Porter's two children joining the Beavers, its youngest iteration.Beavers lends itself to any number of filthy jokes – and, yes, Porter goes there, with a couple of good'uns – but her offspring take it very seriously, as she once did, when she was a Brownie. She remembers her Brown Owl fondly, the times they spent camping and trying to gain badges. Everyone got a Hostess badge – “basically making an old person a cup Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
To Christos Tsiolkas fans expecting something in the vein of his riveting bestsellers The Slap and Barracuda, the sixth novel by this Australian writer may come as a shock. We're not in Melbourne any more. Damascus is a serious historical enterprise, a biblical and rather heavy-handed one, exploring the story of Saul of Tarsus, later St Paul.There’s a lot of raw, visceral squalor in this brutal Roman world 35 years after Christ’s death, and the testament according to Tsiolkas is full of stonings, castrations and other ghastly punishments. Damascus addresses questions of class, shame and doubt Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Great writing about – or set in – London has one thing in common: voice. It’s tuned into the city’s multiple frequencies, its sometimes marvellous, sometimes maddening mix of different registers and rhythms. It adopts and adapts the capital’s various insider and outsider codes, and recognises and reproduces their translation across neighbourhood and postcode, political and class lines in a process of osmosis which proves London to be more of a melting pot than New York ever was.In this sense, academic and three-time novelist Michael Nath’s latest book, The Treatment, is a great piece of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The titles conveyed the enthusiasm. “A Girl Named Sandoz”, “Gratefully Dead”, “Monterey”, “San Franciscan Nights” and “Yes, I am Experienced”. LSD, The Grateful Dead, Monterey Pop Festival, San Francisco and Jimi Hendrix. There they were, explicit tags confirming that The Animals’ Eric Burdon had been psychedelicised. Three years on from 1964's “House of the Rising Sun”, he was a changed man.It wasn’t unusual for British pop. Whole bands and members of outfits who had traded in edgy R&B and blues had tuned in. The Pretty Things did so. Zoot Money turned his Big Roll band into Dantalian’s Read more ...
Owen Richards
Think of the phrase “music memoir”, and you might conjure images of wild nights and heavy mornings. You’re unlikely to think of suburban West Bromwich and tributes to Mike Batt’s Wombles back catalogue. But then, Pete Paphides’s story is comprised of unlikelihoods. What were the chances of one of the country’s leading music critics being the mute son of Greek Cypriot chip shop owners? Broken Greek tracks Paphides’s childhood from four to thirteen. In his early days, he was selectively mute to everyone outside of his family for reasons not quite clear to anyone, including himself. It was Read more ...
David Nice
Three works two centuries apart, two of them rarities, with 100/200 years between each: that's no guarantee for programming success, and no way to fill a hall (though the London Philharmonic Orchestra admin deserves a good medal for the intricacy of its “2020 Vision” series planning, linked to the Beethoven anniversary and explained by Gavin Dixon in his review of Vladimir Jurowski’s launch concert earlier this month). Yet focused, febrile energy connected it all, from the solo-piano chords at the beginning of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto – a rare start to an orchestral concert, and from Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
It’s hard to believe that Jesse Armstrong (Succession, Veep) co-wrote the screenplay for this feeble American remake of Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s Force Majeure (2014). Where Force Majeure is subtle, dark and original (never have electric toothbrushes seemed so significant) Downhill is an unfunny flop in spite of comedy stars Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus (she’s also a co-producer) as leads.It might have been more successful, perhaps, if directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (The Descendants, The Way, Way Back) hadn’t stuck so slavishly to the original storyline about family Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
Scotland was at the cutting edge of culture in 1988, when the Edinburgh International Festival hosted the UK premiere of Nixon in China in the Houston Grand Opera production at the cavernous Playhouse. John Adams’ first opera, documenting the historic meeting between Richard Nixon and Mao Tse-tung in 1972, was about as hot off the press as you can get, having been premiered in the USA only the year before, and came to Scotland with most of the original cast in the now iconic production directed by Peter Sellars.Over 30 years later, for Scottish Opera to mount its first production of Nixon is Read more ...