Reviews
Gavin Dixon
Handel’s Brockes-Passion is a curious piece - sacred but not liturgical, and with a strong influence from opera, though it is a concert work. Solo voices predominate, and the singers assembled at Wigmore Hall were mostly fine. Jonathan Cohen and his Baroque ensemble, Arcangelo, provided imaginative and sensitive accompaniment, the playing relaxed and accommodating. This isn’t music of the scale or emotional depth of the Bach passions, so the light touch from the performers seemed appropriate. And if Handel’s score sometimes underwhelmed, the quality of the singing usually compensated.Several Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Marriage Story, shown at the London Film Festival, feels like an instant classic, that intimate, tangible, resonant kind of classic that touches a chord with almost anyone. It’s not just a film about a divorce, but that added nightmare of a divorce with kids involved, and the yet more despairing experience of separating when there is still love. And it’s heart-breaking.It’s also funny, smart and, perhaps most significantly, balanced. As accomplished as the Oscar-laden Kramer v Kramer was, in 1979, one couldn’t help feeling that the cards were unfairly stacked against Meryl Streep’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
What did we learn at the end of The Capture (BBC One)? A rice jar is a good place to hide USB sticks. It’s possible to withhold the opening credits for 11 whole minutes. A green coat works exceptionally well with light blue eyes and shoulder-length auburn hair. And Ben Chanan, who originated the script and directed it himself, is a television dramatist to watch, and watch again.Whether we’ll be watching another round of The Capture remains to be discovered. We were left with the possibility that DI Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger), having weighed up her options, has set herself up as a mole Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sienna Miller’s career has been short on leading roles, though she excelled in the TV drama The Girl and has notched up some memorable supporting roles. However, if there’s any justice, her commanding and deeply-felt performance in American Woman should move her career up a gear.She plays Deb, a single mother in blue-collar Pennsylvania struggling to pay the bills by working as a waitress, while bringing up her teenage daughter Bridget (Sky Ferreira). Her relationship with a married man gives her nothing except lurid sexual gratification and horrifies her deeply religious mother (Amy Madigan Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Monday night’s first episode of this three-part series was a bit ordinary, as it introduced its cast of British recreational cocaine users and explained why their habit may be ill-advised. We learned that the British take more drugs than any other nation in Europe, the cocaine you buy on the street has probably been cut with lactose and caffeine and, according to a professor of Addictive Behaviour Science, cocaine plunders the brain’s dopamine reserves and causes violent heart palpitations (cocaine and heart attacks often go together). Then the volunteers flew to Medellín in Colombia, home Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
What’s extraordinary about Bake Off is not just the staggering complexity of the cooking challenges, but the amount of technical shenanigans that go into turning it into a finished programme (actually, spoiler-averse Channel 4 had teasingly left the ending off my preview version of this week’s show, but you catch my drift).Capturing the elaborate contortions of the bakers as they went about making things like Chocolate Kardemummabullar (with cardomom glaze and pearl sugar), Sicilian Cassatelle or Kek Lapis Sarawak layer cake (“imagine Battenberg with more layers”), never having seen or heard Read more ...
Florence Hallett
“Gauguin was undoubtedly self-obsessed” begins the National Gallery’s latest dead cert blockbuster, as it cheerfully hijacks a de facto series begun next door at the National Portrait Gallery. Unlike Picasso and Cézanne, Gauguin is not known for his portraiture – all those young Polynesian girls are empty vessels, awaiting the thoughts and fantasies of the artist, the viewer, men, anyone but themselves.Still, only two female nudes are included in this exhibition, though the absence of clothes can hardly have been grounds for exclusion. Instead we have less familiar, but no less sensual works Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
The conductor Thomas Søndergård turned 50 on Friday. He marked the occasion, which coincided with the opening concert of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s winter season, with a short homily on the contradictions of age – “the young seek experience, adventure and wisdom, the old seek only one thing: youth” – addressed to the audience before a programme of three works whose composers were all in their early twenties at the time of writing: Richard Strauss’s Don Juan, Berg’s Seven Early Songs, and Mahler’s First Symphony.It was a bold start to a season that promises rich pickings from the Read more ...
Owen Richards
There’s been no avoiding Rob Beckett in recent years. His high beam smile and infectious personality have made him a mainstay of comedy shows. Now he’s back on the road with what he calls the best job in the world, stand up. You can tell he means it, with a show that thrives on enthusiasm if not consistency.“Wallop” is a show of two halves, quite literally. There’s no tour support, instead favouring a cheap selection of inappropriate songs to introduce two 45-minute sets from Beckett. He uses this time to zip through a mass of topics, including cookware, soft play, family weddings and Kinky Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The most arresting thing about Dada Masilo’s contemporary South African take on Giselle is Masilo herself. Tiny and boyishly slight, she inhabits her own fast, fidgety, tribal-inspired choreography with the intensity of someone in a trance. Costumed she may be in the familiar tight-bodiced little dress of traditional productions but her boldly shaven head suggests that this Giselle is no wallflower. And she's not going to take betrayal lying down.We first meet her at work in the fields alongside other villagers. The action, like composer Philip Miller’s electronic nod to Adolph Adam’s score, Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Shuck 'n' Jive is an hour-long two-hander about writing a play about being black in a white industry. The industry? Theatre. Performance. The stage.Simone (played by Olivia Onyehara), an opera singer, is from Lincolnshire. Cassi (played by Tanisha Spring), an actress, is from south London (so south, in fact, it's the part of Croydon where you can see countryside). But hold on. Is the play really about what it says it is? On the one hand, yes: the anecdotes come thick and fast. Meta-pastiche minstrel shows take over the auditions which Cassi and Simone attend. Hamilton and Porgy and Bess are Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Barbican’s latest offering – a look at the clubs and cabarets set up by artists mainly in the early years of the 20th century – is a brilliant theme for an exhibition. Established as alternatives to galleries and museums, places like the Chat Noir in Paris, Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and Bal Tic Tac in Rome were hotbeds of creative exploration where members exhibited work, explored ideas and experimented with radical new art forms. If artist’s studios are spaces primarily for solo achievement, where great artworks are produced and reputations made, these clubs were social spaces Read more ...