Reviews
aleks.sierz
One of the glories of contemporary London theatre is its revivals of classic American drama. Year after year, audiences are able to revisit and enjoy the great landmarks of postwar American playwriting from greats such as Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard and David Mamet (recently joined by the likes of Lynn Nottage). Now the latest addition to the West End's glory days is Williams's 1961 masterpiece, The Night of the Iguana, in a great production whose starry cast includes Clive Owen, Lia Williams and Breaking Bad's Anna Gunn.The story is set in 1940, on the veranda of the Costa Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was on 16 July 1969 that Apollo 11 lifted off from Florida en route for the Moon, and exactly 50 years later, as we nervously anticipate the dawn of commercial flights into space, the event resonates louder than ever. Here, Professor Brian Cox called it “the greatest achievement in the history of civilisation.” According to veteran broadcaster Sir Trevor McDonald, it was “the most magnificent thing that ever happened.”The TV networks have been saturating us in moon-shot memorabilia, and in the cinema we’ve had Todd Douglas Miller’s imposing feature-length documentary Apollo 11, but this Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Not everybody is on Facebook, yet. So far, Mark Zuckerberg’s social media monolith has only managed to scrape together about 2.3 billion users, roughly one-third of the planet. But as this fascinating documentary revealed, Facebook’s plans are huge and its ambitions boundless.The title alluded to recent problems at Facebook, including the massive 2018 data breach in which the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica acquired information from 87 million Facebook users, and its struggles against online hate crime. These crises temporarily knocked 20 per cent off Facebook’s share price, and Read more ...
Owen Richards
Oh to be inside the head of Wayne Coyne. The frazzle-haired frontman has always been an enigma, persistently quirky, morally dubious, and undeniably fascinating. Perhaps King’s Mouth offers our best chance yet to get in there – the album is an accompaniment to his art installation in which visitors enter a giant metallic head. Rather on the nose for a metaphor, but still a hell of an invitation.King’s Mouth is as conceptual as an album gets: a fairytale about a giant baby that becomes king, sacrifices himself for the city, and becomes a monument. Full marks for imagination, the medieval Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
When he gave Martin Dysart, the troubled psychiatrist protagonist of Equus, a line in which he speaks about “moments of experience” being “magnetised”, Peter Shaffer might almost have been talking about theatre itself. It’s a phrase that comes close to catching what we feel when we're transfixed by the hard-to-predict coming-together of play, performance and production that marks the highpoints of drama. And “magnetic” is as good a word as any to describe the impact of Ned Bennett’s remarkable revival of Shaffer’s 1973 play for Theatre Royal Stratford East and English Touring Theatre, which Read more ...
Robert Beale
Who would have thought that a one-narrator show, mainly about projects that never got off the ground, would turn out to be such a satisfying evening’s entertainment?Phelim McDermott, writer, co-director and performer in Tao of Glass, is undoubtedly the star. He tells us about growing up in Blackley, Manchester, and his early experiences of showbiz – some in the very place where we are sitting, the Royal Exchange Theatre. (The Norman Tebbit test of being a true Manc, incidentally, is whether you know how to say "Blackley" correctly: Phel’s the genuine article and we love him for it.)He says Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Thirty-three years ago, at Manchester's Festival of the Tenth Summer, I fumed that New Order had been given top billing over The Smiths, much to the mirth of a couple of reviewers of this very parish. History has proved me wrong, obviously. So, to Italy, and a modest-sized and relatively modern piazza (Napoleonic) in beguiling, ancient Lucca. To see two of Manchester’s most revered bands. This time I don’t have to choose sides.It couldn’t be further from Salford, Macclesfield and Bury in every sense. A balmy evening breeze rustles through the leaves and brings welcome relief from the day Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This witty street-smart play about a white-skinned boy born to a mixed-race mother deploys its narrative with the dexterity of a dance. Two performers move backwards and forwards across the stage, switching through different characters, skin colours, genders and generations, as they tell a story of pride, poverty, passion and prejudice.We’re in Camden as the play starts, where it’s, “Really fucking hot. That inside-an-oven hot you only get in a big concrete city.” Playwright and performer Gabriel Bisset-Smith’s vivid humorous language ambushes you from the outset. A police officer from the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
"Genius" is a word to be used sparingly, but Django Bates surely is one. “A musical polymath and prodigiously gifted composer” went the citation for his Ivor Award a few weeks ago. “Joyful, insouciant and insanely clever,” wrote Evan Parker in a sleeve-note describing his re-workings of Charlie Parker in Confirmation (2011), the second album with his Belovèd Trio.Last night Django Bates with the regular members of that trio, bassist Petter Eldh and drummer Peter Bruun presented a concert billed as “A double celebration: Evan Parker’s 75th birthday and a look ahead to next year’s 100th Read more ...
stephen.walsh
One of the features of the converted barn that forms the theatre at Longborough is a trio of statues that tops the front pediment of the building: Wagner, flanked by Verdi on the right and Mozart on the left. No one could question Wagner: Longborough has done him proud. But Verdi, after last year’s dismal La Traviata, and now Mozart, in the dubious light of Martin Constantine’s new Don Giovanni, are looking distinctly uncomfortable as mere attendants at the great Gloucestershire Wagnerfest.I shall struggle to find anything positive to say about Constantine’s Don Giovanni. Set initially – and Read more ...
Russ Coffey
It was billed as a moment of musical history: two of the great icons of rock'n'roll sharing a double-headline. A dream ticket. Except, of course, everyone knows that only one of the two acts is still a conventional performer. And it's not Bob Dylan.Throughout the afternoon men in old tour t-shirts discussed concerts they'd seen and wondered what might be in store today. The sun was shining and a cool breeze blowing. If there was one thing everyone could agree on it was that Young was going to be ace.He arrived on stage a little after 6 (there were bands playing all afternoon) wearing his Read more ...
Veronica Lee
How to describe a show that by Robin Ince’s own admission doesn’t have a narrative strand, and for which he has written several pages of notes that he gets through only a small section of? Well here goes: he calls the show a mash-up of the two cultures of art and science in a celebration of the human mind, and Chaos of Delight is very well named.Ince races through an almost embarrassing richness of material, going down highways and byways as he talks about whatever comes into his head or is prompted by a selection of photographs that he clicks on to the onstage screen.As anyone Read more ...