Reviews
Veronica Lee
Jordan Brookes Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★Jordan Brookes doesn’t tell gags. Well, he does but not in a traditional stand-up way. Rather, his jokes are subtly inserted into I’ve Got Nothing’s seemingly disjointed narrative.Brookes’s previous shows were similarly non-traditional and challenging, and last year’s required his audience to wear headphones as he experimented with a high-tech, high-concept hour. But this his new Fringe show pared back and much more accessible than his previous shows, and it works a treat.The show’s starting point is that he’s “got nothing”, that the show is a free- Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It may sound perverse to say it, but Albert was the perfect twenty-first century prince. Thrust into the heart of the British monarchy he was simultaneously an oppressed outsider who – despite his reputation as the most handsome prince in Europe (not least when wearing white cashmere pantaloons) – struggled to make his voice and intelligence heard. This curiously female aspect of his plight certainly adds a frisson to a story that would be remarkable by any standards. Thank goodness for historians that it is: for two hundred years after both he and Victoria were born we are being Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
As Penny Lane’s documentary shows, America and Satanism have a long history. From the Salem Witch trials to the moral panic triggered by the Manson murders and films like William Friedkin’s The Exorcist in the 1970s, mass panic in America of the occult is nothing new. But, as Hail Satan? demonstrates, today’s worshippers of Lucifer are closer to being humanist activists involved in performance art and fighting for religious pluralism than they are the black robed, goat sacrificing clichés that are populated in the media. At the not-so-black heart of the documentary is Lucien Greeves, who Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
After Thursday night’s concert I celebrated the Proms’ exploration of unfamiliar repertoire via the CBSO. The following evening saw the festival diving back into mainstream repertoire – as it must also do – conducted by the CBSO’s previous music director. But although Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony is now central to the canon, it wasn’t always so: Henry Wood only ever programmed Bruckner once during his entire reign at the Proms, writing later in his autobiography “the public would not have it then; neither will they now.” Fast-forward 80 years and the public very much will have it, as evidenced Read more ...
Owen Richards
There were some early warning signs that A Faithful Man might be another box-ticking French romcom. The poster of two women kissing one man, his bemused look in the middle. The lethargic narration referencing childhood and the mysteries of the female mind. Here we go again. But director, writer and star Louis Garrel (pictured above left) subverts expectations just enough to make this French fancy stand out from the pack.Abel (Garrel) is caught off guard by his girlfriend Marianne (Laetitia Casta, pictured below right) when she announces she’s pregnant. For you see, it’s not his. It’s Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
”Cunts Are Still”. Well, that got your attention, didn’t it? Not my words, merely the title of one of JARV IS’s new tracks. In case you didn’t get it, JARV IS is a play on words and the name of given to Pulp frontman and founder Jarvis Cocker’s latest outfit. Cocker still is releasing new material. He still is an exuberant and energetic performer. He still is wearing those glasses. And still is very good.The title of the aforementioned track refers not, however, to Britpop heroes playing major international arts festivals, but to those in political power who are “still ruling the world”. A Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Guillermo del Toro considered directing this adaptation of Alvin Schwartz’s bestselling campfire tales, and his sensibility can still be discerned in its kind sort of fantasy and concern with outsiders. He finally settled for producing, and turning Schwartz’s beloved, gory stories into incidents within a wider saga about the sort of American high school kids who read them, rather than an anthology film (a horror format with rotten box-office form).It’s Halloween, 1968, with Vietnam at its height, Nixon about to be elected, and "Season of the Witch" on the radio. The screenplay tries to tie a Read more ...
David Nice
Puccini's and Abbé Prévost's glitter-seduced Manon Lescaut might have been inclined to linger longer in the salon of dirty old man Geronte if he'd served her up not his own madrigals but Bach's music for various harpsichords and ensemble. Five such concertos gave us a morning of pure pleasure in the light-filled, packed-to-the-rafters surroundings of the wonderful Queen's Hall (★★★★), a sober though appreciative audience sitting and standing around the artists in the converted church like a Lutheran congregation, yet were all but eclipsed by the seductive force of Puccini's first great love Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You can’t fail to feel the ghosts in Appropriate at the Donmar Warehouse: they are there in the very timbers of the ancient Southern plantation house that is the setting for Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s fraught – and often very funny – family drama. In the best traditions of that genre, when the three children of the Lafayette clan come together following their father’s death for the auction of their old Arkansas home, the experience proves difficult on all fronts – before it’s catapulted to new extremes when they discover an album of old photographs that depict horrifyingly Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Let us never tire of singing the praises of the Proms, nor ever take them for granted. For two months concerts, many of which would be the highlight of any ‘normal’ week, keep coming night after night. And for all that it is a critic’s job to comment in detail and find fault where necessary, it is also helpful sometimes to step back and say: the Proms is an astonishing festival which we should be grateful to have. The thought is prompted by last night’s concert, which saw the Proms at its best: a neglected favourite of previous generations, a popular concerto played by a rising young star, a Read more ...
David Nice
Love him or hate him, Lars von Trier has time and again made the unpalatable and the improbable real and shatteringly moving in a succession of great films. Breaking the Waves set an audacious precedent. Baldly told, it's a story of a mentally ill, deeply loving woman at odds with her Hebridean community who thinks she can save her paralysed husband by having sex with strangers and describing the acts to him. The numinous outcome requires suspension of disbelief, and in one way opera is equipped to do that. But the art-form is littered with problem plots about sacrificial women, albeit so Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The Bauhaus school and its subsequent influence make an extraordinary story, and this film by Mat Whitecross, which has assembled a whole range of different voices and perspectives and woven them together, told it well.As a school, the Bauhaus lasted just 14 years from beginning to end. It opened in 1919 when Walter Gropius was finally able to accept an invitation to merge the art schools of Weimar and to be the principal of the “Staatliches Bauhaus”. The roll call of star teachers which Gropius attracted to Weimar was impressive right from the early years: Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Read more ...