Reviews
Veronica Lee
It’s a long time since Lenny Henry performed live comedy, and a lot has happened in that interval. He has reinvented himself as a serious actor on stage and screen, become a spokesman for the black British experience, was knighted in 2015 and is now a national treasure. Oh, he has also written the first volume of his autobiography, which has just been published.So it was good to welcome him back with An Evening With Lenny Henry: Who Am I, Again?, even if it is an unashamed exercise in shifting more copies of his book of the same title, which covers the years 1958-1980 – or “birth to Tiswas”, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In 1930, a couple of romantically involved Chinese expats in Berlin – both revolutionaries in their own way – went on a farewell date. One of them, Deng Yan-da, was due to return home to continue his clandestine political work. The pair saw Marlene Dietrich smoulder through The Blue Angel. Two decades later, Deng’s former partner, Soong Ching-ling, asked a German friend to send a disc of Marlene singing “Falling in Love Again” to her in China. She had not forgotten her Berlin affair. What complicated Ching-ling’s amorous nostalgia was her current role: as vice-chair of the newly installed Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Lucian Freud died in 2011 after a career spanning some 70 odd years. Over the decades, he painted and drew himself repeatedly, creating a fascinating portrait of a man who spent an inordinate amount of time scrutinising himself and others.One of the first images in the Royal Academy’s splendid exhibition is an ink drawing made in 1949 for a book on Greek myths. Freud casts himself as Actaeon who, according to the myth, accidentally came across Diana, goddess of the hunt, bathing naked. In punishment for the transgression, she turned him into a stag to be hunted down and torn apart by her Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Movement, flight, searching, the quest for a destination: as its title might suggest, Sarah Hall’s latest story collection Sudden Traveller is preoccupied with journeys of one kind or another. From the Cumbrian moors to a city in the near East, a time-bound version of Cambridge to a Turkish forest and the anonymous urban sprawl, the territory of these tales spans a wide, varied geography. Yet where onward momentum is often suggestive of adventure or the quest for positive self-realisation, Hall’s characters stand at an awkward angle to travel’s hopeful restlessness. These are dislocated Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Rough Trade’s first album was Stiff Little Fingers’s Inflammable Material. The label followed up its February 1979 release with Swell Maps’s A Trip to Marineville, The Raincoats’s eponymous debut, Cabaret Voltaire’s Mix-Up and Essential Logic’s Beat Rhythm News Waddle Ya Play? Inflammable Material was avowedly punk but though they could not have emerged without the punk upheaval, the others inhabited their own musical continua. There was a further difference: Inflammable Material charted – on the proper charts – while SLF's idiosyncratic labelmates could never have done so.Rough Trade’s Read more ...
India Lewis
My Mother Laughs was first published in Chantal Ackerman’s native French in 2013. This year it has been translated into English for the first time, twice. Silver Press’ elegant version is framed by a foreword by the poet, Eileen Myles (who also has a poem on the back flyleaf) and an afterword by the academic, Frances Morgan. These women’s voices are sympathetic, and naturally turn the book as a whole into a kind of conversation.The book, which loosely records the decline of Ackerman’s mother, reads like a diary or monologue, its confessions interspersed with family photos and stills from her Read more ...
Nick Hasted
San Francisco has rarely looked more unattainably golden than in Joe Talbot’s Sundance prize-winning gentrification parable. Jimmie (Jimmie Fails) once belonged inside the city’s Californian Dream, symbolised for him by the grand Victorian-style house built by his granddad for their black family, only to be repossessed as the city soared out of their reach in the Nineties, a legend that has become his identity’s beating heart. This is Jimmie Fails’ own family story, fictionalised with childhood friend and director Talbot into a film of awkward, homemade, sometimes overweening beauty.It’s a Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
Pose offers something that is really rare in the TV world: it’s a show that manages to be both darkly sombre and completely uplifting. The drama, which is about New York City’s 1980s ball culture, focuses on the lives of trans women and gay men competing for glory in the ballroom while fighting for their lives on the streets.The first series was intoxicating. It was fast-moving, beautifully shot, and more camp than the Met Gala. It introduced us to a sprawling cast of talented trans actors. It told a nuanced and harrowing story about the love and loss of a community torn apart by HIV. Pose’s Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's a wonderful thing when a talented comic goes from niche performer to international star almost overnight, and that's what happened to Australian stand-up Hannah Gadsby. In 2017, she announced that her award-winning Edinburgh Fringe show, Nanette, was to be her last as she felt ground down after a decade in a misogynistic and homophobic industry.The show, which recounted her experiences of sexism and homophobia, and of being raped several years ago, was a searing, emotional, heart-rending experience, as well as a call to arms against the patriarchy. And what a swansong. But then...Nanette Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This recital finds Angela Hewitt nearing the end of her “Bach Odyssey”, a project to perform all of Bach’s keyboard works, in five cities around the world, between 2016 and 2020. That’s an impressive feat, especially as she performs from memory. Here she presented the English Suites Nos. 4-6, plus an early Sonata, BWV 963.At first glance, none of these works have immediate audience appeal. The English Suites, although mostly based on dance forms, are elaborate contrapuntal constructions, long and with little melodic character. But they proved an ideal vehicle for Hewitt’s pianism, the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Botticelli is a household name, but who knows the true story behind his most famous painting? The painter's 1480s masterpiece, The Birth of Venus, is one of the most striking images of Renaissance Florence – and has achieved iconic status. Because it has been minutely dissected by generations of art historians, it takes a bold playwright to smash through the scholarship and give a memorably fresh, in not necessarily accurate, account of its commissioning. Enter Jordan Tannahill, the Canadian polymath whose work spans theatre, film, dance, novels and everything else. And he's still only 31. Read more ...
stephen.walsh
One of the more harmless pastimes of us retired academics is rummaging around among the so-called minor contemporaries of great and famous composers. It often turns out that quite a few of them aren’t minor at all, or at least not minor enough to have to have retired academics dig them out. And two such composers made up nearly the whole of this fascinating opening concert of the annual Brecon Baroque Festival, an event well worth battling through floods, high winds and falling trees to be present at, as was necessary on this occasion.The 2019 festival is all about Bohemia, and the stars of Read more ...