Reviews
Kieron Tyler
It’s not about spontaneity. Bar switching the order of a couple of songs at the beginning and during the encore, the set was the same as a couple of days earlier in Paris. And, just-before that, in Turnout, Belgium. The first UK date on Mark Lanegan and his band’s European tour didn’t deviate much – odd other songs have cropped up during this excursion – from what they’ve been doing since hitting the trail in the last week of October.Instead, it’s about reiterating what Mark Lanegan is about. The gruffness. The lack of chit-chat – beyond a couple of acknowledgments, he limited himself to one Read more ...
The Duchess of Malfi, Almeida Theatre review - a radically original perspective on Webster's tragedy
Heather Neill
This play can be a challenge for modern audiences: a woman who is ostensibly in a position of power, "a prince" in Renaissance terms, is nevertheless constrained by social expectations and a prisoner of the will of her overbearing brothers. A widow, she defies them to marry her steward Antonio in secret and tragedy ensues. The action can seem to move from one set-piece of madness or terror to the next, including scenes of visceral violence, while the onlooker is expected to accept unlikely possibilities such as that the Duchess (who is never named) could have given birth to three children in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Alibi is usually your one-stop shop for re-runs of Father Brown or Death in Paradise, so well done them for commissioning this new murder mystery. It comes with a glittering pedigree, having been created by actor-turned-writer Amelia Bullmore (Scott & Bailey etc) and bestselling crime novelist Val McDermid, but despite a cracking cast it struggles to pass the credibility test.Emma Hedges (Molly Windsor) is an aspiring young lab technician who’s landed herself a prestigious job with the Scottish Institute for Forensic Science and Anatomy (SIFA) in Dundee, where she works under the auspices Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The appalling fate of the allegedly unsinkable liner Titanic in 1912 has fuelled endless feature films and documentaries, not to mention a dismal drama series by Julian Fellowes (there was also a proposed Titanic II vessel which would have been built in China, but which remains mysteriously un-launched). However, it’s difficult to see why this film has appeared 107 and a half years after she sank.Part of an intermittent series called Great British Ships, it was presented by Rob Bell (pictured below), who ends every sentence with at least three imaginary exclamation marks. I lost count of how Read more ...
David Nice
There is no mention of Marc-Antoine Charpentier in David Cairns's comprehensive Berlioz biography. It seems extraordinary that the master of the most intimate and moving of musical Christmas stories, L'enfance du Christ, knew nothing of the next best, Charpentier's Pastorale sur la naissance de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ composed 175 years earlier, with its similar move from darkness to light, its music of tender intimacy and childlike joy as well as sorrow, an elaborate metaphysical final chorus common to both. Charpentier's moments of seemingly small but potentially momentous drama were Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
She’s back. Dido stopped touring in 2004 and stayed away from it for 15 years. But since starting again in March of this year, she has gone at it with gusto and performed well over 50 concerts, with last night’s Maida Vale session for the series BBC Radio 2 In Concert, introduced by Jo Whiley, her last-but-one of 2019. And she will be setting off again next summer.Dido racked up sales of over 40 million with the albums from the 1999-2004 period, so these songs and above all that distinctive voice have left their imprint on public consciousness. With the benefit of two decades of hindsight, Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
A pas de deux is normally an opportunity for two dancers to express the pinnacle of their skill and the choreographer's art. In the case of McGregor + Mugler, the duet receiving its world premiere as part of a Russian-sponsored triple bill, it became an opportunity for a big-name designer to strut his stuff."My Little Pony From Outer Space" seemed to be the theme as Bolshoi prima ballerina Olga Smirnova and the Royal Ballet’s Edward Watson (main picture, and below) stepped out on the stage of the Coliseum virtually naked but for chrome helmets, chrome shin-guards and a membrane of glittery Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“How many times have you heard the conductor sing?” asked William Christie after the final number, but before the two encores, of Sunday night’s 40th birthday celebration for his ensemble Les Arts Florissants. Well, lovers of old recordings know that you sometimes get plenty of impromptu vocalisation from the likes of Bernstein and Barbirolli. But what the august founder of the Baroque super-group (and super-chorus) meant on this occasion was the bravura performance of his co-conductor, and assistant director, Paul Agnew. In several of the pieces he led at the Barbican, Agnew would turn round Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Dinosaur Pile-Up may have been around for more than a decade, but it would be fair to say that their career has been something of a slow burn. Indeed, while thanking tonight’s support acts, main man Matt Bigland claimed that they’d supported more bands than any other group in the UK. The release of 2019’s Celebrity Mansions album looks like it may be the shot in the arm that Dinosaur Pile-Up have been waiting for, though. This weekend saw them sell out Birmingham’s O2 Institute. The smallest room at the Institute to be sure, but a sold-out gig nevertheless: last time they played Britain’s Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
“Hieronymus!” bellowed David Wilson Johnson from the Barbican Hall’s circle on Saturday evening. “Hieronymus Bosch!” Commissioned by Dutch radio for a big piece to mark 500 years since the passing of the Dutch painter in 1516, the German composer Detlev Glanert wrote a Requiem. There is a precedent for his grand design in the War Requiem of Britten, where poems of Wilfred Owen are interleaved with the text of the Requiem Mass. Glanert alighted on the Seven Deadly Sins, as described in the medieval collection of Carmina burana on which Orff drew for his barnstorming, perennially popular Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Actor James McAvoy is much in demand: in the BBC's His Dark Materials he is busy saving a parallel world, while in the poetic universe of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac he is tasked with soothing more than one aching heart. Opening at the Playhouse Theatre, in a brilliant new version by master penman Martin Crimp, this classic tale is directed by Jamie Lloyd, whose company's revival of Harold Pinter's Betrayal – starring Tom Hiddleston – has this year wowed both West End and Broadway. This time, McAvoy comes up with a breathtaking career-best performance, and the entire evening is a Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
In films, as in life, unreliable narrators are not hard to find. But there is something remarkable about the unreliable narrator of Elizabeth is Missing, BBC One’s newest feature-length drama. Its protagonist, Maud (Glenda Jackson), is unreliable in the extreme – confused, forgetful and emotionally wounded. Yet unlike most unreliable narrators, we never fear that Maud is trying to sell us a false story. She is so clearly fighting to understand the truth.Here’s the thing: Maud has advancing dementia. She’s a strong-willed 80-something, trying to remain independent as the disease wreaks havoc Read more ...