Reviews
Helen Hawkins
When Yasmina Reza’s cerebral play Art arrived in London in 1996, we applauded it as a comedy. Now another French hit, Jean-Philippe Daguerre’s Adieu Monsieur Haffmann, has landed, and the genre confusions could start all over again.This is a story set in Occupied Paris, from May 1942 to VE Day in 1945. In the exodus of French Jews, Joseph Haffmann’s wife and children have reached Geneva. But he has stayed put to wind up his jewellery business and hatch his own escape plan: which is to sign over his shop to his trusted assistant, Pierre (Michael Fox), while he hides in the cellar. Pierre Read more ...
Leila Greening
One Boat, Jonathan Buckley’s 13th novel, captures a series of encounters at the water’s edge: characters converge like trailing filaments on the shoreline, lightly touching, their eventual separation assumed. Through this, Buckley pays profound attention to what otherwise might be inconsequential moments of connection, their soft, contemplative intimacies and banal departures.In the wake of her father’s death, a woman returns to the small Greek town where she mourned her mother nine years earlier. The narratives of her two trips are interwoven, as the events of the second provoke reflections Read more ...
David Nice
You could plan an entire concert season around the theme of “late style”, its paradoxes and variations. For this one-off, many of us expected a concentrated mesh of Edward Said’s only-connect observations with a well-balanced musical programme, something along the lines of the recent 90-minute cloud tapestry the City of London Sinfonia wove with atmospheric scientist Simon Clark (Rachel Halliburton, whom I accompanied, loved it, as did I).That was to underestimate the latest collaboration with the London Review of Books, involving four very fine actors voicing not just Said’s chosen literary Read more ...
Gary Naylor
“Don’t put your co-artistic director on the stage, Mrs Harvey,” as Noel Coward once (almost) sang. Tamara Harvey took no heed and Edward II sees her RSC compadre, Daniel Evans (pictured below, kneeling centre), back on stage after 14 years and in the title role to boot. In Daniel Raggett’s stripped back, helter-skelter, 100 minutes version of Christopher Marlowe’s sex, power and violence fest, Evans has certainly jumped in at the deep end (literally so at one point, which you won’t miss!). The noblemen of England disapprove of the king’s flamboyant "friend", Gaveston (Eloka Ivo, blessed Read more ...
Robert Beale
Anja Bihlmaier returned to the BBC Philharmonic – for the first time in the Bridgewater Hall as principal guest conductor – with a programme to mark International Women’s Day, and consisting entirely of music by women composers, past and present.Surviving symphonies written by 19th century women are not exactly thick on the ground, but Emilie Mayer’s No. 5 (one of eight) is evidence of what determination and originality could achieve even in a social context where expectations were of conformity and subservience. More of it below. The whole programme was of unfamiliar music: not a single Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
What happens after the spotlight is directed towards another target? In the case of Liverpool and the Merseybeat boom – which, in terms of chart success, peaked in 1963 – the question is addressed by Liverpool Sunset: The City After Merseybeat 1964–1969. The city’s musicians carried on, despite record labels looking elsewhere for the next big thing, and despite the Liverpool tag no longer ensuring an automatic interest.The final (identifiably) Merseybeat bands to debut on the charts were The Escorts, with “The One to Cry” in July 1964, The Undertakers, with “Just a Little Bit" in April 1964, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Exactly half a century ago, Semyon Bychkov fled the USSR for the United States as he sought to swap tyranny for liberty. Last night, in a world that feels utterly different yet even more terrifying, the great conductor turned the stellar talents of his Czech Philharmonic Orchestra to the music of Dmitri Shostakovich: both a victim, and a troubled celebrant, of the searing Soviet history he endured. At the Barbican (a date on the Czechs’ current European tour), we inevitably felt the weight of the past that conductor and orchestra carry, in a programme that paired Shostakovich’s First Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last year’s sixth season of Drive to Survive radiated an air of diminishing returns. It was as though the novelty of its spy-in-the-paddock ethos was wearing off as the Formula One teams sought to mould the show to suit their own interests, and what once felt spontaneous had begun to seem rehearsed.They can’t turn back time to the long-ago year of 2019 of course, but 2025’s new series benefits from covering a 2024 racing season which bristled with various kinds of personal and corporate dramas. The allegations of “inappropriate behaviour” by Red Bull boss Christian Horner, triggering a Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The German theologian, pastor and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was a saintly, courageous figure, of major historical significance. Those are good reasons to ensure that his story gets told and becomes better known. At a time when fanatical violent nationalism is on the rise and religion has been commandeered to support it, Bonhoeffer's work and his contribution to ideas have a renewed relevance.It is one thing to tell the story of Bonhoeffer's life, and quite another to tell it well and accurately. The film's director, Todd Komarnicki, who has been accused of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Matt Forde gives a warning: “Don’t heckle the disabled – that’s a hate crime.” What an opener for his latest touring show, The End of an Era, which I saw at the Oxford Glee Club. To explain: in 2023 the back pain that Forde thought was sciatica turned out to be spinal cancer. Major surgery that included severing nerves in his nether regions followed, and post-surgery he now uses a stoma bag and self-catheterises. Thankfully Forde has recovered.He mines a slew of jokes here – mostly at the expense of his dignity – and the natural born comic looks on the bright side, as the very good poo Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
When Twiggy burst on to the scene in 1966, she was a beacon of hope for all flat-chested, short-haired, skinny girls. Of course we couldn’t look as fabulous as she did, with her enormous eyes and high forehead and long legs, but we could try.Before Twiggy, models were posh. They went to the Lucie Clayton Charm Academy in Bond Street and learned how to curtsey, pivot round an umbrella and get out of a car gracefully. In director Sadie Frost’s lively, likeable film, featuring many celeb talking heads including Paul McCartney and Dustin Hoffman, an alumnus, namely Joanna Lumley, looks back. “A Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Alienation, isolation, and instability are the fruits of working as a “picker” in the chilling labour drama On Falling. The first feature written and directed by the Porto-born, Edinburgh-based filmmaker Laura Carreira presents post-industrial gig economy work as a dystopia.It is the kind of hell that Blake or Dickens would have excoriated, but instead of fiery red, Carreira and her cameraman, Karl Kürten, saturate their imagery in metallic blue, including most of the pickers’ clothes. Blue denotes the coldness of machinery, of which these algorithmically-tracked drudges are flesh and blood Read more ...