Reviews
Richard Bratby
There’s nothing like practising what you preach. “I say straight out that I regard all so-called 12-tone music, so-called serial music, so-called electronic music and so-called avant-garde music as utter rubbish, and indeed a deliberate conning of the public” said the composer Ruth Gipps to her biographer Jill Halstead. And sure enough, her Second Symphony – premiered by the then City of Birmingham Orchestra in 1946, and the opening item in this fascinatingly left-field programme from Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla – is unmistakably the work of what Arnold Bax would have called a “brazen Romantic”.It’s Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Peter Nichols died aged 92 last month, just before the opening of this starry West End revival of his most celebrated masterpiece. A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1967) is based on his own family experience of bringing up his disabled daughter in the 1960s, and it has the reputation of being one of the most ground-breaking plays of its generation. This revival stars Toby Stephens and Claire Skinner as the parents, Patricia Hodge as the mother-in-law, and Storme Toolis, who has cerebral palsy and is familiar from New Tricks, playing the daughter Joe. As a campaigner for the rights of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Time has been kind to Athol Fugard's "Master Harold"...and the Boys. It's a stealth bomb of a play that I saw in its world premiere production in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1982 and that has been a regular part of my playgoing life ever since. Yes, the apartheid-era South Africa that Fugard dissects with terrifying force has been dismantled, and we live in (supposedly) more enlightened times. Yet the ongoing lesson of a play first directed by Fugard is that racism and hate start from a place of self-loathing. Roy Alexander Weise's beautiful National Theatre production sends that point Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
English National Opera chose a curiously low-key production to open their season. Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice has only three singing roles and very little action. For this production, Wayne McGregor has reimagined the work as an opera/dance hybrid. That brings a valuable dynamic element to Gluck’s stately discourses, but there are few interpretive insights here, and the almost non-existent sets made more demands on the dance than even McGregor’s sophisticated choreography could sustain.The opera itself contains many ballet numbers, so the dance element makes sense. And McGregor resists the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
There was a time when hip hop in a theatre was all about showing off. It was about dancers spinning on their head or their elbow so fast and for so long that the audience gaped in disbelief. Although it had long ago migrated from the concrete stairwells of inner city estates, the culture remained rooted in the idea of a battle, a dance-off, a show of virtuosity.Then along came Kenrick Sandy and Michael Asante, whose work with their company Boy Blue inched towards the territory of psychodrama. The hip hop movement is still there – the locking and popping, the smooth-as-silk floor work – but Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Five episodes ago, BBC One's The Capture set off at a cracking pace with the apparent abduction and murder of barrister Hannah Roberts by army lance-corporal Shaun Emery. With Roberts’s help, Emery had been acquitted of killing a Taliban fighter in Afghanistan in cold blood, the defence’s case hingeing on a timing glitch in the video taken at the scene by Emery’s body-camera.It didn’t make sense that he’d want to bump off the woman who’d dug him out of a huge legal hole, especially as he’d also become more than slightly enamoured of her. The feeling between them appeared to be mutual. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The themes of food and cookery have already been boiled until the bottom of the saucepan melted, but TV commissioning editors can’t stop searching for new twists in the formula. So how about this one – get a couple of prestigious superchefs, and challenge them to make a perfect copy of that famous mass-produced snack, the KitKat.Our host was French maitre d’ Fred Sirieix (from Channel 4’s First Dates), though could one really expect a Frenchman to grasp the cultural resonance and mythic history of this hallowed name in British confectionary? The four-fingered marvel was originally launched by Read more ...
Veronica Lee
What a joy Laura Wade's latest play is. Transferring from its successful run at the Minerva Theatre at Chichester last year, The Watsons is developed from Jane Austen's unfinished novel (started in 1804 and abandoned the following year). But rather than give us a period homage or a modern pastiche, Wade serves up a delightful concoction that has elements of both, but also much, much more.She sets the scene by dramatising the surviving pages of Austen's story. Emma Watson (Grace Molony) returns home to Surrey after being raised by a moneyed aunt in Shropshire for 14 years. Her father is dying Read more ...
Tim Cumming
So it’s your birthday. Not just another one but your 70th. So who’s on the guest list? Let’s see – master concertina player Alasdair Anderson, the "guvnor" Ashley Hutchings, Husker Du’s Bob Mould, bassist extraordinaire Danny Thompson, Fairporters Dave Mattacks and Dave Pegg, Floyd’s David Gilmour, Spinal Tap’s Derek Smalls (yes, you read that right), Martin and Eliza Carthy, onetime Strangler Hugh Cornwell, premiere folk singers Maddy Prior, Kate Rusby and Olivia Chaney, family members Jack, Kami, Teddy and Linda Thompson, son-in-law James Walbourne, old mucker Loudon Wainwright III, and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s a fine balance between the cosmic and the closely crafted in director Paul Miller’s Macbeth, his first production in the expansive space that is Chichester’s main stage. It comes across as a drama unravelling in the wide open spaces of nature, with a design approach that feels operatic in style – generous use of projections accentuate the big stage picture, backed up with a complex sound palette – set against playing, John Simm’s Macbeth especially, that feels finely wrought. Simm offers a strikingly intelligent interpretation of the role, more considered than instinctual, a hero who’ Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Berry Gordy, who founded the Motown label in Detroit in 1959, borrowed his star-maker machinery from the car assembly line. When he worked at the Lincoln-Mercury plant he was inspired by how a bare metal frame would emerge as brand new car. “What a great idea! Maybe I could do the same thing with my music. Create a place where a kid off the street could walk in one door, an unknown, go through a process, and come out another door, a star.”That process worked. Motown became the largest black-owned business in America. This joyful 60th anniversary documentary by British directors Ben and Gabe Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Putting a radical spin on a fish-out-of-water story, The Last Tree explores troubling aspects of the African diaspora experience in an England riddled with xenophobia and black-on-black racism. Shola Amoo’s semi-autobiographical second feature is distanced from Brexit by its early 2000s time frame, but its young protagonist’s identity issues speak to the current moment.The film begins with a sunlit idyll in the Lincolnshire countryside. An 11-year-old British Nigerian, Femi (Tai Golding) runs around outdoors and gets “all over mud” with his three schoolmates – but for the colour of his skin Read more ...