Reviews
Rachel Halliburton
If Russia is, as Winston Churchill once so memorably said, “a riddle, wrapped inside a mystery, wrapped inside an enigma”, then this play is an outrage, wrapped inside a farce, framed by a bittersweet love story. Through the prism of the polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, playwright Lucy Prebble reaches into the surreal, unknowable power-structure of what would eventually become Putin’s Russia, to create a bold, resonant piece of political theatre evoking the contradictions of our post-truth world.This is an evening that is as devastatingly moving as it is bitingly funny, anchored by Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
There is no equivalent of the Ailey phenomenon. This is a modern dance company with a New York square named after it. It’s a dance company that has performed at the inauguration of two presidents. Its calling card, Revelations, a suite of dances first performed in 1960, is the most-watched modern dance work anywhere, ever.And how could it not be, when the Ailey bills it as a closer at every show? No matter which of three programmes you book to see at Sadler’s Wells, you will get the signature sign-off. It’s half an hour and a bit of kinetic joy drawing on Ailey’s memories of the Baptist Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright and performer Tim Crouch is one of Britain's most innovative creatives, with a big back catalogue of challenging and stimulating stage work. Typically he tells stories about profound loss, while simultaneously questioning the basis of theatrical representation: how is what we see on stage true? In what way is it real? And how can you tell? His latest, which comes hotfoot from the Edinburgh Festival to London's Royal Court – in an already much praised production from the National Theatre of Scotland – is, as its title archly suggests, about a messianic cult.As the audience files Read more ...
Marianka Swain
William Finn and James Lapine’s musical – which combines two linked one-acts, March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland, set in late 1970s/early 1980s New York – picked up Tony Awards in 1992 for its book and score, and was nominated again in 2016 for an acclaimed revival. Yet the UK hasn’t sighted this landmark piece until now, with Tara Overfield-Wilkinson directing and choreographing an engaging if somewhat chaotic production.Daniel Boys plays Marvin, who recently left wife Trina (Laura Pitt-Pulford) for lover Whizzer (Oliver Savile, pictured below) – while maintaining close ties for Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Neu!, Neu! 2 and Neu! 75. For many a committed collector of rock’s more interesting corners, these three albums are the motherlode of 1970s Kosmische Musik, or Krautrock, the fruit of an intense and far-out focus on musical essentials, combining guitarist Michael Rother’s trippy lyricism with wild-man drummer Klaus Dinger’s motorik drive. The sound of Neu! was a mixture of sigh and scream, meshed in a grid of minimal rhythms, maxed-out thrash and Dinger (who died in 2008) expressing what sounded at times like a bad acid trip in sound.Rother and Dinger, along with their contemporaries – Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Just two years after It Chapter One became the most successful horror film ever made, Pennywise the Dancing Clown is once again giving the American town of Derry absolutely nothing to laugh about. But this time around it’s audiences who may feel unable to enjoy the irony of a killer clown. For Chapter Two feels like a pointless, nay horrific case of déjà vu. Andy Muschietti’s decision to divide his adaptation of Stephen King’s horror novel into two – the first part dealing with the characters as children, the second with their adult selves – initially seemed a strong Read more ...
David Nice
His movements are minimal (perhaps they always were). A more intense flick of the baton, a sudden wider sweep of the expressive left hand, can help quicken a tempo, draw extra firepower from the players, but Bernard Haitink's conducting is still the most unforced and, well, musicianly, in the world. His decision to retire from official concert-giving - a "sabbatical", his biography says - after the season in which he celebrated his 90th birthday with two LSO concerts in March means we'll miss him terribly. But it was a timely gesture, like everything he's ever done. This Prom will not be Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ben Chanan's The Capture (BBC One), which he wrote and directed, is a bang-up-to-the-minute dystopian thriller about the increasingly surveilled society we live in. In last night’s opening episode of six, he set out his stall from the first frame, where the bored staff in a CCTV control room were doing routine scans of the neighbourhood, until one of them saw a violent crime taking place in which a soldier attacked a woman in the street.Then we flashed back several hours to see the soldier, Shaun Emery (Callum Turner), winning his appeal against his conviction for murdering an insurgent in Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In the current feverish atmosphere at Westminster, with arguments about Brexit becoming increasingly shrill, the time is right once more for political theatre: serious plays about serious issues. Oddly enough, however, while television has effectively dramatized the current crisis, in films such as Channel 4's Brexit: The Uncivil War, theatre seems to take a more oblique approach by setting its stories in the past. So James Graham's perennially interesting This House was set in the late 1970s, while Hansard, actor Simon Woods's smartly-written debut play, which gets an astonishingly generous Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This was the first of a two-part investigation into... well, I don't know what. The voiceover of High Society: Cannabis Café said it was an experiment “to test the alleged benefits of weed” and the people featured all had “a personal motivation for getting stoned” as they visited an Amsterdam coffee shop, where dope is sold legally.The jaunty music and lack of scientific context suggested that it was essentially a voyeuristic exercise where we watched normally uptight Brits getting giggly, having the munchies and (a few) telling someone they loved them.There were occasional funny moments Read more ...
David Nice
So we never got the ultimate Proms spectacular, the four brass bands at the points of the Albert Hall compass for Berlioz's Grande Messe des Morts, in the composer's 150th anniversary year. Yet Sir John Eliot Gardiner has learnt how to work the stage - here via director Noa Naamat - so that the performers use his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique as their sounding board - Glyndebourne, please take note for next year's visit - weaving through it as well as around it, with some of the players sharing in the action. This culminating performance in his four-year Berlioz odyssey, shot Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A tale of teenage depression and its family resonances, Florian Zeller’s The Son has a devastating simplicity. It’s the final part of a loose trilogy, following on from the playwright’s The Father and The Mother, but the new play eschews the obliquely experimental structure of its predecessors for something much more direct. Where the earlier works explored the nature of dramatic perception itself – through the prisms of dementia and psychosis respectively – The Son concentrates its stark energy on the experience of mental illness in a story that’s partly about the consequences of divorce but Read more ...