Reviews
Robert Beale
Manchester Camerata’s series of in-concert recordings featuring Mozart piano concertos with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet is well under way now, and this programme, like others before it, included a couple of his opera overtures too. Why so? "Because all Mozart piano concertos are also mini-operas," to quote Camerata music director Gábor Takács-Nagy, who likes talking to his audiences about what he and his fellow-musicians are up to.Fair point – at least, it’s almost a truism that Mozart often introduces his themes as if they were full-fledged characters unveiling their personalities, that his Read more ...
Owen Richards
It’s been two years since Russell Howard last performed stand-up. That’s a long gap for such an established fixture of British comedy. As he points out, the world has changed, something reflected in his new show Respite. There are still the whimsical anecdotes that made him a star, but he now has bigger foils than his own family.Outrage culture doesn’t seem like an obvious subject for Howard’s ire – compared to some acts he’s never been particularly controversial – so there’s some tension when his opening gambit is how you can’t tell a joke these days. Has he joined the PC-gone-mad brigade? Read more ...
Russ Coffey
"The reason why it's so special to be here," says Ezra halfway through the show, "is because this is where I saw so many of my heroes". Tonight is the 26-year-old's debut at the Royal Albert Hall and the look on Ezra's face says he can't quite believe where he's standing. He holds his hands up with a shrug, stares out at the crowd, and smiles a Cheshire Cat grin.This has been a huge year for the unassuming young man from Hertfordshire. It's seen the end of a journey from unlikely pop star (the comedian Jack Whitehall once called him the "Milky Bar Kid all grown up") to bonafide Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Lucy Lawless achieved cult status in the Nineties fantasy classic Xena: Warrior Princess, and later became a regular in such disparate creations as Battlestar Galactica and Parks and Recreation. In My Life is Murder, she joins the ever-expanding ranks of TV ‘tecs as Melbourne-based investigator Alexa Crowe.We learned that Alexa used to be on the police force, but now spends her time making bread with a complicated German gadget called a Loobenschwegen (some fun was had with pronouncing the German instructions in a lubricious manner). Screenwriter Matt Ford must have a fetish for wacky brand Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
With The Laundromat Steven Soderbergh is trying to do for the Panama Papers what The Big Short did for the 2008 financial crash, namely offer an entertaining mix of explanation, exposé, black comedy and righteous anger. Sadly, it doesn’t come close. Soderbergh is an intelligent filmmaker, adept at tackling complicated, global issues (Traffik) and righting wrongs (Erin Brockovich). He’d seem a perfect fit for the whistle-blowing scandal in 2015 that blew the lid off billions of dollars of tax evasion, conducted on behalf of the rich and powerful through the use of Read more ...
Katherine Waters
There are two moons in Night Bathers, 2019 (pictured below) One is set in the sky, a great soupy plate with a greenish fringe creating an ugly smear of white across the night. The other is a treacherously hazy rectangle, floating like a cloud above a reclining bather — so inexplicable it could double as a cataract. The latter is, perhaps, a reflection of the former, but at a surreal remove — no reflection looks like that, no reflected light would fall there. The twinned moons, however — real and oneiric — neatly explain the power of Doig’s paintings.Fourteen are now on show across two Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Mother of Him was written a decade ago, but its most prescient moment happens in the first five minutes of Max Lindsay's production at the Park Theatre. Brenda Kapowitz (Tracy-Ann Oberman) presents a sheaf of papers to Robert (Simon Hepworth, excellent), a family friend who’s also her 17-year-old son’s lawyer. “Report cards, awards,” she explains. “Grade six one doesn’t seem to be here but that shouldn’t make a difference.” We’ve just learned that the son in question, Matthew (Scott Folan, struggling gamely with a Canadian accent), has raped three women. Robert’s doing his best to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Learning support officer. Student. Chip shop owner. Mobile caterer. Gym owner. These were the day jobs of some of the volunteers featured in this week’s portfolio of tales on BBC Two from the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, who would all doubtless deny that they do anything heroic. For the people they rescue, they most certainly do.If there was a moral in this week’s programme, it was “be prepared”. Mind you, that's probably the moral every week. For instance, if you were going windsurfing at Porthcawl, you ought to do a bit of research on its unusually powerful tides, which can rise 10 Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“It’s nice to make money – lots of money,” said Michel Cohen, former high-flying New York art dealer turned debtor, jailbird and fugitive. He made oodles of the stuff and then lost it all, leaving a string of wealthy art collectors and galleries to lick their wounds over the colossal debts he never repaid.Vanessa Engle’s film for the BBC's Arena strand was a portrait of the man and the big-money art scene of the 1990s, as well as a barely-believable detective story as the documentarist tracked down her quarry after he’d disappeared in Rio de Janeiro 16 years ago. Vengeful creditors and Read more ...
David Nice
It was said of the Venetian audiences randy for the satirical antique of Handel's first great operatic cornucopia in 1709 that "a stranger who should have seen the manner in which they were affected, would have imagined they were all distracted". The same could be said of spectators witnessing this Royal Opera cast for Agrippina going way over the top, and mostly not in the best way: surprising given the rigour with which Barrie Kosky usually directs his singers. Remember - once seen, who could forget it? - Max Reinhardt's visually beautiful film of A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which the Read more ...
Florence Hallett
If leafing through the pages of Vogue is a soothing balm, Wonderful Things is a bracing full-body immersion. Though it builds on the V&A’s reputation for blockbuster fashion exhibitions, this show, dedicated to one of the most celebrated photographers of the day, follows no known formula, steering a course somewhere between retrospective and walk-in fashion magazine, without being either. At a time when curators’ voices have a tendency to be dominant to the point of intrusive, falling down the rabbit hole of Tim Walker’s fantasy world feels a bit like stepping inside the photographer’s Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The only novel by the Hungarian dramatist Ödön von Horváth, Youth Without God was written in exile after he fled Anschluss Vienna and published in 1938, shortly before his death. In the English-speaking world, we know von Horváth for his plays, largely through the translations of Christopher Hampton, and it’s Hampton who has adapted the novel for its UK premiere at the Coronet (now minus its Print Room moniker), where Stephanie Mohr’s production plays very satisfyingly, making the most of the venue’s spacious, uncrowded stage as well as its striking sense of period dereliction. When it Read more ...