Reviews
Veronica Lee
Jack Dee has made a career out of being a grumpy old man, even though he started on the comedy circuit in 1986 when he was 25. Back then, his dour, seen-it-all-and-not-impressed material was wonderfully at at odds not just with his age but also the same generation of alternative comics and their high-energy political sets.But now, at the age of 58, he has grown into the stage persona, and his unsmiling, deadpan shtick suits him perfectly.He dismisses the audience's welcoming applause with a sarcastic “Thanks anyway” but the more he disses them and their town, the more they lap it up. Of Read more ...
India Lewis
Gillian Wearing’s Arena documentary Everything is Connected (BBC Four) is a quietly innovative biography of an author whose works still resonate with their readers and the country within which she wrote. Wearing and George Eliot are a sympathetic match, both playing with a multiplicity of voices, delighting in the layman’s opinion as well as that of the expert. We see Eliot’s intellectuals, but also the modern version of her farmers, priests, and wayward sons. Wearing puts her words in their mouths, allowing them at times to slip into one another, blurring the boundaries between the speakers Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In September 1944, a heavily pregnant Resistance activist in the north of German-occupied Italy was arrested on a visit to Milan. Lisetta Giua, a law student and fiancée of the Jewish anti-Fascist chief Vittorio Foa, worked as one of hundreds of women staffette: vital underground operatives whose roles might stretch from courier and spy to liaison officer and saboteur. Lisetta, captured while away from her home in Turin, soon found herself in Milan’s notorious Villa Triste – a torture centre where a half-German Fascist degenerate named Pietro Koch practised almost indescribable “scientific” Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Visceral, gaudy, alien, otherworldly to the point of being almost improbably imaginative, the nudibranch serves as an appropriate figure for Nigerian-British writer Irenosen Okojie’s muscularly surrealist prose. Look up a picture of one if you haven’t before: the nudibranch is an exuberant, kaleidoscopic variety of sea slug. In the story that gives her newest collection of short stories its title, Okojie provides a short definition of the creature, which serves as a kind of epigraph: "Soft-bodied, marine gastropod molluscs which lose their shells after their larval stage. They are noted Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It's Gonna Take a Miracle” just missed out on a mainstream US Top 40 placing after The Royalettes issued it as a single in June 1965. But the song had staying power. In 1971 Laura Nyro covered it, choosing it as the title track for the album she made with LaBelle. Deniece Williams’s version hit big in 1982.The song’s co-writer was Teddy Randazzo. He had arranged and produced The Royalettes’s interpretation, the first time it was issued. Their reading is as he conceived the song: the template for what followed. The other vocal group most associated with Randazzo is Little Anthony and the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is there anything Tim Minchin cannot do? He sings his own songs, plays hot bar-room piano and tells jokes about the existence of God. He composes musicals, performs in Lloyd Webber and Stoppard, writes a multimillion-dollar Hollywood cartoon which he is allowed to direct – until he isn’t. As he explains in this riveting new show, the sell-off of a chunk of DreamWorks, the consequent nixing of his Aussie animation Larrikins in 2017 and his retreat to Sydney, brutally slapped a glass ceiling on his manic multitasking.The film’s cancellation plunged Minchin into a period of morbid self-pity. The Read more ...
Chris Harvey
Ólafur Arnalds is almost secretly huge. Millions adore the melancholy beauty of the Icelandic composer’s music, yet his name still brings blank stares from some. The Royal Festival Hall was predictably full to bursting, though, to see Arnalds perform as part of his mini OPIA festival, in which he took over the auditoriums and foyers of the Southbank to showcase an eclectic mix of experimental music. Melodic piano structures and looped electronica loomed large.“Opia”, from John Koenig’s compendium of made-up words, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, means “the ambiguous intensity of looking Read more ...
Robert Beale
Everyone’s doing Weinberg now, or so it seems. The Polish-born composer who became a close friend of Shostakovich was born 100 years ago, and there’s plenty of his music to go round. Raphael Wallfisch gave the UK premiere of his Cello Concertino (Opus 43B), with the Northern Chamber Orchestra in Manchester last night. The “B” is not insignificant – it’s a reworked and shortened version of his Cello Concerto of 1948, scored for string orchestra accompaniment only, and wasn’t published until two years ago.At 16 minutes in length but still with four movements, the piece is certainly an Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In 1922 Hussein Abdel-Rassoul, a water boy with Howard Carter’s archaeological dig in the Valley of the Kings, accidentally uncovered a step in the sand. It proved to be the breakthrough for which Carter, on the hunt for the final resting place of King Tutankhamun, was looking. The tomb they uncovered showed signs of having been robbed in ancient times but inside thousands of items remained, selected for a journey to the afterlife, which had lain undisturbed for millennia. The survival of some was almost inconceivable: wooden boxes, linen gloves, unguents and cases packed with food. Others Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ian McKellen, his Mr Holmes director Bill Condon and Helen Mirren play clever, nasty games with conman clichés and presumptions about the elderly in this sometimes absurdly twisty thriller.McKellen’s Roy Courtnay is an irascible, whiskery cad, Mirren’s Betty McLeish the trusting, rich widow he entraps. His slow courting of her in her genteel, suburban estate home is only part of a wide portfolio of dishonesty, aided by his avuncular partner in crime Vincent (Jim Carter), a fake lawyer ever ready with dummy investment papers, whether enticing a widow over cream teas, or luring a businessman Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Director Roland Emmerich has been trying to make this movie since the 1990s, and battled hard to raise its $100m budget from individual investors. But why? The result is an old-fashioned war film in praise of the heroic American servicemen who defeated the Japanese fleet in the battle of Midway in 1942, which turned the tide of Japan’s imperialist expansion in the Pacific, but while it sticks diligently to the historical facts, it feels bizarrely out of time and out of place. It doesn’t reinvent the war movie, as Spielberg did with Saving Private Ryan or Christopher Nolan did with Dunkirk, Read more ...
Heather Neill
This is one play by Shakespeare ripe for tinkering. It's well nigh impossible now to take it at face value and still find romance and fun in the bullying: the physical and psychological abuse as a supposedly problematic wife is "tamed" into submission. And there have been experiments. Earlier this year, the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff presented a new play by Jo Clifford based on this source but set in a matriarchal world, and in 2003 Phyllida Lloyd directed a sparky all-female version at the Globe with Janet McTeer as Petruchio caricaturing male crudity to hilarious effect.If something radical Read more ...