Reviews
aleks.sierz
Edward Hall bids farewell to this venue, where he has been artistic director since 2010, with this production of a new play by Howard Brenton. The playwright has been a regular at the Hampstead Theatre, and he has enjoyed stagings of his history plays here, including 55 Days (2012), Drawing the Line (2013) and Lawrence after Arabia (2016). His latest is more contemporary and loosely inspired by Thomas Hardy's 1895 tragic novel, Jude the Obscure, which famously ends with infanticide and death by hanging, so it is with a faint heart that I sit down to watch this modern version, which changes Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Who would have known that the word “Kubrickian” only entered the Oxford English Dictionary last year? You’d have thought that one of the great film directors of the 20th century would have earned his own epithet long ago. It’s taken a long time, too, for Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition to reach his adopted homeland, and its current berth at London’s Design Museum – so long, in fact, that you might almost begin to wonder about prophets unhonoured and all that: the show opened originally in Frankfurt in 2004 and has been travelling the world, in one iteration or another, more or less ever since Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
Jacob has just managed to shoot up. No easy matter because his veins are, he says, non-usable, and are like those of an 80-year-old man. He’s in his twenties and has been on heroin for six years. Unusually, he works full time, has a car and a flat – blood-spattered ones. When the heroin kicks in he doesn’t feel stoned but as if he could “work on some graphic design or art work”. Not quite Edward St Aubyn or William Burroughs territory, though he also says that it “removes any sort of sickness in your mind”.Sadly, watching people talking about their drug habits tends to be boring, especially Read more ...
peter.quinn
Hosted by Jazz FM presenters Chris Philips and Jez Nelson, and taking place in the historic surroundings of Shoreditch Town Hall, this sixth edition of the Jazz FM Awards celebrated the dynamism, passion and vitality of the UK’s young jazz scene, with SEED Ensemble leader Cassie Kinoshi picking up Breakthrough Act of the Year, rising jazz singer Cherise Adams-Burnett receiving Vocalist of the Year, and the similarly youthful Poppy Ajudha proving a popular choice as Soul Artist of the Year.Adams-Burnett’s touching duet with Blues Artist of the Year winner, US singer-songwriter Eric Bibb, Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Finnish director Dome Karukoski’s Tolkien follows the same formula of many literary biopics, with a tick-box plot of loves, friendships and hardships that forged the writing career of one the 20th Century’s greatest fantasy writers.We open at the Western Front, as a feverish Tolkien doggedly makes his way through the trenches with trusty companion, Sam (Craig Roberts) – a proto-Samwise Gamgee, complete with West Country accent - looking for his schoolfriend, Geoffrey Smith (Anthony Boyle). Blasts of German flame-throwers transform into dragons, and caped cavalry officers shape-shift into Read more ...
Robert Beale
Opera North created something approaching a new art form when they performed Wagner’s Ring in "concert stagings", putting their large orchestra in full view, with singers symbolically dressed and given limited front-of-stage space, and a continuous projected screen backdrop. That approach was also used for their Turandot two years ago, and now method and team are reunited as Sir Richard Armstrong conducts Aida with Annabel Arden as director and design by Joanna Parker.The positives are considerable. Gone are conventional stage effects; instead, the performance is aurally stunning, with a Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Often the greatest works of dramatic absurdism spring from the worst extremes of human experience, whether it’s Ionesco’s Rhinoceros responding to fascism, or Havel’s The Garden Party satirising the irrational cruelties of Prague’s Soviet occupiers. In such dramas, absurdity becomes a powerful metaphor for the way totalitarian power seeks to undermine and warp reality, but in a work like The Glass Piano, in which absurdity is essentially a device for conveying the gently absurd, it’s less easy to see the point.The proposition is utterly fascinating: it’s based on the real life story of Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is a romcom of two radically different halves, vaulting so dizzyingly from insultingly unbearable to daringly hilarious that walking in half-way through becomes a viable option.It begins as a grim case study of the patriarchal odd couple, as schlubby gonzo journalist Fred Flarsky (Seth Rogen) becomes the unlikely speechwriter then unbelievable lover of immaculate presidential hopeful Charlotte Field (Charlize Theron). Hollywood’s touching interest in improving nature’s stacked odds against such coupling noticeably dims when the genders are reversed.The flat cinematography, jolly synth Read more ...
Marianka Swain
English National Opera continues its run of semi-staged musicals, in commercial collaboration with Grade Linnit, with a revival of this vintage oddity. Mind, commercial might be a stretch, as Dale Wasserman, Joe Darion and Mitch Leigh's 1965 work – it quickly transpires – is a tough sell, particularly in a quixotically cast revival that struggles to find a coherent tone. Loosely inspired by Don Quixote, the densely layered musical sees author Miguel de Cervantes (Kelsey Grammer) awaiting trial by the Spanish Inquisition. When put on trial by his fellow prisoners as well, with his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Are brothers Harry and Jack Williams mounting a takeover bid for British TV? They’ve written (among other dramas) The Missing, Liar and Baptiste, and they produced Fleabag. However, judging by their co-writing efforts on The Widow (ITV) they’re spreading themselves thin.The final two episodes saw the tension mount as the mysteries unravelled, but it wasn’t enough to compensate for the basic flaws which had made it creak and wobble from the start. It was as if the Williamses had patched it together from a random assortment of press clippings about African corruption, rapacious capitalism and Read more ...
aleks.sierz
If British theatre often seems to lack ambition, the same cannot be said of The Half God of Rainfall, a galaxy-hopping mythological mash-up. Written by Inua Ellams, whose Barber Shop Chronicles was a big foot-stomping hit for the National in 2017, this epic story trips across the globe and the sphere of myth, combining Yoruba gods with ancient Greek deities. A co-production with Fuel and Birmingham Rep, where it opened earlier this month, its arrival at the Kiln in Kilburn reaffirms the ambitions of this venue to stage stories that combine the everyday with the mind-blowing.The story starts Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
TV cooking shows are mostly a pain in the butt. Masterchef, featuring the thuggish Gregg Wallace and John Torode along with India Fisher’s excruciatingly arch voiceover, is enough to provoke a massed hunger strike. The BBC’s Great British Bake Off may have featured national treasure Mary Berry, but her Miss Marple-ish charm was undermined by the ostentatiously pointless Mel and Sue. Prue Leith should be running a Victorian workhouse rather than a cookery show.And so to Channel 4’s version of Bake Off, which is at least eccentric and, in finest pastry-making style, lighter than air. The trick Read more ...