Reviews
Veronica Lee
Phil Wang Pleasance Courtyard ★★★Phil Wang used to perform as part of sketch group Daphne, and his new solo show's title, Philly Philly Wang Wang, hints at their sometime schoolboy humour. He starts the standup on the Edinburgh Fringe by dropping various puns on his name, and each manages to top the previous one. It's a strong start.But Wang is 29 and wants to talk about more serious things (although there's an extended fart gag in the set), such as how modern men think and act. He has some good material about why, still, women are the ones in straight relationships who have to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Joanne McNally Assembly George Square ★★★★The area Joanne McNally treads (actually stomps might be a better word, given her fantastically high-energy performance) in The Prosecco Express is not new – she’s 36 and wondering if she should settle down and have children, or would that mean settling for less – but the Irish comic makes it her own.McNally tells us often filthy stories about her friends, married and single, with whom she drinks far too much Prosecco but whose lives give her food for thought. She a natural storyteller and there are some tall stories, but she knows how to Read more ...
Sarah Collins
Many of the women in this pioneering collection of essays have faced unimaginable hardship in their pursuit of truth – persecution by extremist groups as well as the loss of family members and friends. The tone of this collection is, however, best captured by Amira Al Sharif’s photograph of laundry hanging out to dry across a grocer's family home which has been damaged in a coalition bombing in Yemen. “You can destroy our homes, but the Yemenis will still do laundry,” she writes – ordinary life will continue in the face of terrible circumstances.The essays are grouped around loose themes: Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The timing seemed odd. Sigrid is internationally successful. She’s Norway’s highest-profile musical ambassador since a-ha. Yet instead of headlining at 2019’s Øya Festival, she hits the stage at 6.45. Has she been demoted in favour of Tame Impala, who are given the final slot at 9.30?Then, as the crowd begins gathering in the natural amphitheatre before the Amfiet stage in the Tøyen park in Norway’s capital, it becomes clear. The timing recognises that some of her younger fans might not usually be up at 10 or later. Sigrid’s fan base is multi-generational, with her youngest admirers around Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Jeanne – employment, age and appearance unknown, motives unknowable – is building a collection of penises. In street after street, she feigns dizziness; on the inevitable approach of a man eager to lend his help, she leads him to a hotel room. After the encounter, she does not retain any recollection of this man’s face, body or name; in the intricate interior of her memory palace, only the textured details of the penis, the "shape, the form, the particular warmth, the density, the smell", are carefully preserved. She is the protagonist of Nina Leger’s provocative novel which imagines the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The core paradox with powerpop is that most of those who sought to create the perfect guitar driven, hook-laden pop song failed to score hits. Come On Let's Go! – Power Pop Gems From the 70s & 80s is stuffed with the classy and memorable, but under a third of its 24 participants had any sort of chart profile. And, for 20/20 and Wire Train, it was fleeting and ultimately inconspicuous.Focussing on America, Come On Let's Go! covers the period 1972 to 1987 with one outlier from 1995 (The Rooks’ archly titled “Glitter Best”). The earliest track is The Raspberries’ hit “I Wanna be With You”. Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Your first thought on hearing there's a new Matthew Bourne Romeo and Juliet might well be 'doesn't it exist already?' So obvious does this marriage of high drama, lush iconic score, and Britain's premier dance maker seem that you might well be forgiven for assuming it had happened years ago. In fact, the show Bourne presented at Sadler's Wells this week is brand new this year. So is it a worthy addition to the choreographer's stable of reimagined ballets? Up to a point. It won't knock the immortal male swans off the top spot, but it's still a hell of a night at the theatre.The familiar Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
With Peter Gynt, the National Theatre’s “reboot” of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, topping the drama bill at the Edinburgh Festival hotfoot from London, it was almost obligatory to find a space somewhere in the music programme for Grieg’s famous incidental music from 1876. But what would you put in the rest of the programme? A safe choice might have been more Nordic sweetmeats such as the Grieg concerto or a Sibelius symphony, but few could have expected Peer Gynt to be paired with Sofia Gubaidulina’s mesmerising Glorious Percussion – a concerto composed in 2008 for an ensemble of five percussionists and Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Wisecracks can be profound. The late André Previn – who spent most of the period from his late teens to his mid-thirties working in film studios – once responded to a critic’s snub that the music of Korngold all sounded like Hollywood with the line: “No, Hollywood music all sounds like Korngold.”Last night’s Prom was under the title “The Warner Brothers Story” and its highlights came in works by the two European émigrés Korngold and Max Steiner. The programme showed quite how far-reaching the consequences were of Warner Brothers’ decision in the early 1930s, and at the beginning of the era of Read more ...
David Kettle
Sea Sick CanadaHub ★★★★ She’s not a performer, Alanna Mitchell tells us. She’s a writer and journalist. But what she’s discovered about climate change, and specifically about its effects on the world’s oceans, has compelled her to tell us about it in this show.And it’s Toronto-based Mitchell’s unforced, unperformative directness – just a woman telling us a story, with a blackboard and chalk – that really carries her quietly gripping Sea Sick. That, and the increasingly worrying information she slowly divulges about the state of our seas, and about how that’s going Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
July in Tuscany and the heat is intense. Oak-forested hills offer tempting shade; pale dust flies from the roads; in the houses curtains are drawn against the ferocious sun and around irrigated gardens the mosquitos are growing plump. If you love Italian sunshine, food, wine and chamber music, this is your ideal festival, as long as you pack some citronella. Its name: Incontri in Terra di Siena. The background to the event is both unusual and inspiring. In the 1920s the writer Iris Origo and her husband Antonio set up home in a sprawling villa, La Foce, overlooking the Val d’Orcia ( Read more ...
Veronica Lee
On the Other Hand, We’re Happy Summerhall ****This affecting co-production between Paines Plough and Theatr Clywd of Daf James’s play takes a sideways look at adoption.Twentysomethings Abbi (Charlotte Bate) and Josh (Toyin Omari-Kinch) have been together for almost their entire lifetime. They’re solid, so it’s a shock when they can’t have a biological child, and they decide to adopt.The long drawn-out nature of the adoptive process is neatly essayed here, with endless discussion about what kind of child they wish/will be allowed to adopt, and the pitfalls to be avoided. One wrong step and Read more ...