Reviews
Katie Colombus
Elf Lyons’ new show, Love Songs To Guinea Pigs, has moved away from her usual slapstick and absurdist mimicry into new realms of traditional stand up. She cites the reason as being unable to do mime on the radio, but there’s a more serious reason for the switch.After ChifChaff, her Edinburgh show last year, and a string of shows involving ballet, hula hooping and ice skating, the comic found herself in bed, paralysed from the waist down. What came next was corrective spinal surgery, adoption of two guinea pigs, a bout of depression, a break up, and a return to the stage.Her personal Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Will Smith’s giant hand looms out of the screen towards you, gripping his gun’s trigger with weird realism. Director Ang Lee’s lonely devotion to filming in 120 frames per second 4K 3D, already widely loathed by audiences in less developed form in his own Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2014) and Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, is a huge, largely successful element in everything we see here.A script which had gathered dust for 20 years due to being technically unfilmable then sees Smith’s government hitman Henry Brogan forced out of retirement after being betrayed by his boss Clay (Clive Owen), Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If ambition were all, Groan Ups would get an A*. Marking the first of a very welcome three-show residency at the Vaudeville Theatre, this latest from the cheerfully unstoppable Mischief Theatre tethers the japery we have come to expect from the team behind The Play That Goes Wrong – mishaps aplenty, verbal hi-jinks – with a newfound interest in the human psyche. Think of an amalgam of, say, Alan Ayckbourn mixed with Feydeau, and you get somewhere near the landscape of a terrifically likable, if overlong, study of how we got here from there. Or how they got there, that is Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Among the numerous exhibitions marking the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt’s death, this small show at the Dulwich Picture Gallery stands out. A select but high quality group of paintings and works on paper provides the focus for this study of Rembrandt’s use of light, which he deployed not only in virtuoso displays of imitative naturalism but, just like a film-maker, as a tool to establish mood, narrative sequence, and hierarchy.Perhaps if Rembrandt were alive today he might have chosen film over paint. It’s not such a radical proposal, and follows on from Peter Greenaway’s 2010 film which Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This ingenious short work deftly investigates themes of love and identity with a breezy assurance that marks first time playwright, Ruby Thomas, out as a daring and exciting new voice. In an age where gender fluidity and polyamory are becoming increasing part of the daily discourse, Either casts a simultaneously humorous and breathtakingly bold light on whether or not gender affects the way you love.In 1897, Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler wrote the play Reigen, known more widely as La Ronde, which was initially banned by the censors and subsequently condemned Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
A new film by Chris Morris ought to be an event. The agent provocateur of Brass Eye infamy has tended to rustle feathers and spark debate whatever he does. His last film, Four Lions, dared to find comedy in Islamic terrorism in 2010, when so many wounds were still so fresh. But that was almost a decade ago, and the signs are that Morris is losing his edge, while also in dire need of a new topic. The Day Shall Come again has terrorism as its subject, and moving countries and targets doesn’t overcome the sense of this being old ground. The starting point is the FBI Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Now in her mid-seventies, Anna Maria Maiolino has been making work for six decades. Its a long stretch to cover in an exhibition, especially when the artist is not well known. Perhaps inevitably, then, this Whitechapel Gallery retrospective seems somewhat sketchy and opaque, a feeling compounded by having titles in Portuguese. The work is so interesting and so diverse, though, that engaging with it is well worth the effort.Puzzling over this odd feeling of disconnect, it occurred to me that it is central to Maiolino’s practice. Born in Italy, she moved to Venezuela at the age of 12, to Brazil Read more ...
Matt Wolf
“Every now and then the country goes a little wrong”: so goes one of the many lyrics from the Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman musical Assassins that makes this 1990 Off Broadway musical (subsequently chosen to open Sam Mendes’ Donmar Warehouse in 1992) a piece of theatre very much for our time. Some shows need textual tweaking when they come around again but not this one. If anything, this musical's excavation of an abiding societal fury seems more pertinent than ever today.Building in resonance every time I see it (at least if done well), Assassins has now been revived in a very smart co- Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Prior to this week, it had been 35 years since hardcore punk firestarters Black Flag had set foot in the UK. That said, it was not without some trepidation that I made my way to one of Birmingham’s more compact venues to see a band who had once been genre-defining, get on stage and do their stuff. After all, Black Flag’s golden years were more than a generation ago, in the mid-1980s, and with a very different line-up. Iconic vocalist, Henry Rollins has long since hung up his microphone to write books, tour his spoken word show and appear on all-manner of TV documentaries – mainly about punk Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You wonder about the title of French dramatist Sam Gallet’s Mephisto [A Rhapsody], an adaptation for our days of Klaus Mann’s 1936 novel about an actor unable to resist the blandishments of fame, even if they come at the cost of losing himself. Those who know the story from Hungarian director István Szabó’s celebrated 1981 film with its mesmerising central performance by Klaus-Maria Brandauer might come to this looking for an element of tragedy, one moderated by the merciless accusation of complicity directed at a character unable to resist the enticements offered by Nazism, a figure who Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Ol’ Black Eyes is Back Tour celebrates Alice Cooper’s 50 years using his stage name. He’d been around under other names before 1969 but Alice Cooper – originally the title of the band rather than the man – achieved success as the Seventies began by combining trash-glam drag with stompin’ riffy music. He’s famed for his theatrical shows but needed to be on especially fine form tonight to match support acts who are both riveting.First on are MC50, a supergroup iteration of Sixties Detroit countercultural rockers MC5, consisting of original MC5 guitar warrior Wayne Kramer, Soundgarden Read more ...
Marianka Swain
A hit comedy about a textile scientist? It might sound unlikely, but Ealing Studios’ 1951 sci-fi satire, starring Alec Guinness, was one of the most popular films of the year in Britain. Now, Sean Foley hopes to repeat its success with his new West End stage version, which tweaks the formula to go big, broad and occasionally Brexit-referencing – with varying results.Stephen Mangan, who also collaborated with Foley on the similarly goofy, high-energy Jeeves and Wooster: Perfect Nonsense, plays chemist Sidney Stratton, whose great invention is fabric that never gets dirty or wears out. But Read more ...