Reviews
Veronica Lee
Count Arthur Strong, the character created by Steve Delaney, started life in the late 1990s and became a cult figure at the Edinburgh Fringe over several years. Radio shows and three series of a television sitcom (written with Graham Linehan) followed and now he’s taking the character back on the road with Is There Anybody Out There?The Count is a meticulously constructed character, a cantankerous, pedantic, mostly out of work former variety artist whose world view - of his talent, his intellect - is gloriously wide of the mark, and whose hopelessly confused syntax and malapropisms are Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The cancer weepie is knocked off its tear-jerking axis by Lulu Wang’s sly and heartfelt autobiographical tale. Drawing on the first-generation immigrant, internal culture-clash she experienced after her Chinese grandmother’s terminal diagnosis, and the absurdly elaborate lengths their family went to hide it from her, The Farewell is a funeral-com with a fable-like structure, and a highly personal tone. Billi (rapper-actor Awkwafina) is Wang’s alter ego, a 30-year-old, Chinese-American scuffling writer, who we first see on the phone telling relentless, reassuring white lies about her New Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
There have been a number of excellent science fiction films of late – Gravity, The Martian, Annihilation among them. But Ad Astra may be the most complete and profound addition to the genre since 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick’s masterwork has set the bar for 50 years now and its proposition – from prehistoric ape to star child – remains in a league of its own for imaginative bravura. So it’s striking to what extent the new film, directed by indie stalwart James Gray and starring a scintillating Brad Pitt, has similar ambitions and narrative trajectory Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Connoisseurs of gnarly Boston-based crime sagas like The Town, The Departed and Black Mass will quickly find themselves at home in this sleaze-ridden new show, made by Showtime and brought to us by Sky Atlantic. Created and largely written by Chuck MacLean, it’s umbilically linked to the aforesaid movies in various ways, being produced by Boston’s finest Ben Affleck and Matt Damon (from The Town and The Departed) and starring Kevin Bacon – an FBI man in Black Mass – as another FBI man, Jackie Rohr.It’s 1992, and though there’s change in the wind, the Boston police are an incestuously-knit Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Celebrating the friendship between the two great 20th-century composers, the Britten-Shostakovich Festival Orchestra launched this year. Founded by British conductor Jan Latham-Koenig and British Ambassador to the Russian Federation Sir Laurie Bristow, it’s a way to leave a lasting legacy for the 2019 Year of Music between Britain and Russia. 87 of the finest young musicians from both countries were selected by audition, and after a week’s residency at the Sirius Park of Science and Art in Sochi, where they received coaching from a wide range of musicians drawn from major orchestras and opera Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Goethe’s Die Leiden des junges Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) was a vital spark in the ignition of the German romantic movement. The story of a young man driven to kill himself for love of a woman, Charlotte, who loves him but marries someone else out of duty to her family, it was first published in 1774. It triggered a fever across Europe ranging from fashion trends (Werther wears blue with a yellow waistcoat) to a spate of copycat suicides. Among its admirers were Beethoven, Brahms, Napoleon and Frankenstein’s Monster. Strange that the only operatic version is by Jules Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Three women decide to take over their husbands’ criminal activities, proving more than a match for the men who dominate the underworld. If this outline of The Kitchen sounds familiar, it’s because it was just last year that Steve McQueen’s lauded crime thriller Widows had much the same premise. That said, screenwriter Andrea Berloff’s first film as a director is a very different animal, far less polished but an entertaining thriller in its own right.The differences are instructive. Widows was based on a highly regarded British TV series, relocated to contemporary Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The work isn't finished on Big, if this stage musical of the beloved 1988 Tom Hanks film is ever to, um, make it big. A Broadway flop in 1996 where it was among the last shows directed by the late, much-admired Englishman Mike Ockrent, the material finds a sweetness in its West End incarnation that eluded it Stateside. But even with onetime boyband member Jay McGuiness adroitly capturing the manchild played by Hanks onscreen, the show remains awkwardly positioned between the satiric and the sentimental. And a ruthless pruning wouldn't go amiss either: by the time we'd got to the long-aborning Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This new legal comedy is based on a well-received book by Alex McBride, but the transition from print to the BBC Two screen hasn’t been an unalloyed success. It stars Will Sharpe as trainee barrister Will Packham, who’s only been on the job for three months and faces cut-throat competition from three eager rivals for a post at a plush London law firm. He’s learning the law under the tutelage of Caroline, played with acidic cynicism by ever-reliable Katherine Parkinson (pictured below).Written for TV by Kieron Quirke, Defending the Guilty is an A-Z of the chaos and pitfalls of the law, where Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Alexander Zeldin continues his devastating analysis of modern Britain in this culminating play of a (very loose) trilogy that started with 2014’s Beyond Caring, followed by LOVE two years after that. These are bleak dramas that show human beings washed up on the edges of a society in which levels of social support have been brutally pared down, even as they contend with change that has drastically disbalanced established ways of life, from zero-hours contracts (Beyond Caring) to homelessness (LOVE). The Dorfman has become a signature setting for the anonymous, dilapidated institutional Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you’re a farmer who works round the clock to feed sheep, milk cows and so forth, how on earth do you make time to find a partner and reap a harvest of marital bliss? Well you could ask Sara Cox if you can join in her dating game for “lonely rural romantics”, back for its second series on BBC Two, but success cannot be guaranteed.Still, Cox, who grew up on a Lancashire beef farm, makes a cheery and plain-speaking host as she drags together suitors and suit-ees. This week’s contestants were Grace (23), who’s about to take over running the family farm in the Welsh borders when her father Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Kasper Holten left a mixed bag of productions behind at Royal Opera when he left in 2017, but the best of them - though not all my colleagues on The Arts Desk have agreed - is this Don Giovanni, now back for its latest revival.Visually, the production is stunning. The set (designer Es Devlin) is a full-sized house, onto which videos are projected (video designer Luke Halls). The house rotates, and the projections follow, a high-tech effect that manages to keep the eye tricked for the entire length of the opera. The two storeys of the house create a double-tier set. The action typically takes Read more ...