Reviews
Kieron Tyler
An album is one thing, a live show is another. A truism of course, but one which is inescapable during this London date by the Rotterdam-based Rats on Rafts at a shabby chic pub in Dalston, East London.Rats on Rafts’ measured new album, Deep Below – released a couple of weeks ago – inhabits the shadows cast by the early Eighties Cure, with a nod to the Cocteau Twins of slightly later. The hyperactive sonic assault colouring their predecessor albums is set aside in favour of a hazy shade of grey.It’s not-quite goth and not-quite a fun factory, but this is irresistibly kinetic stuffThis Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Steven Knight is beginning to resemble the British version of Taylor Sheridan. While Sheridan has been saturating our screens with Yellowstone, 1923, Landman etc, Knight has been reeling off Peaky Blinders, SAS Rogue Heroes and even the story of opera star Maria Callas.With A Thousand Blows, Knight has travelled back to Victorian London in the 1880s, the era of Jack the Ripper, for a lurid exploration of the city’s foul-smelling underworld of crime, corruption and illegal boxing rackets. His chief protagonists are boxer Henry “Sugar” Goodson (Stephen Graham, pictured below, making a deft Read more ...
David Nice
Let’s finally face the elephant in the room: the most popular Viennese operetta, packed with hit numbers, no longer works on the stage as a whole. The central party, yes, never more high-energy delight than here, with a cast of 13 and 10 instrumentalists on stage. As for the rest, not even the likes of Richard Jones, Harry Kupfer and Christopher Alden have won a total victory. Davey Kelleher comes closer, but the high jinks can still be wearing in the outer acts.For its touring farce, Irish National Opera has dropped the "Die" from the title of Johann Strauss II's smash hit, allowing the Read more ...
Robert Beale
The second of the Philharmonic’s Boulez-Ravel celebrations (birth centenary of the former, 150th of the latter) brought Bertrand Chamayou back: after his performance of the G major piano concerto in January, this time it was as soloist in the Concerto for the Left Hand, with Ludovic Morlot on the podium.It’s a different piece of stuff from the two-hands concerto (though contemporary). Whereas the G major varies the role of the soloist, sometimes offering a balance of power between orchestral and keyboard resources, in the left-hand one Ravel was at pains to see that the solo should never seem Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
A year ago, after a deeply disappointing Manon Lescaut at Hackney Empire, I wrote here that English Touring Opera had often excelled in the past, and would do so again. The company hasn’t taken long to prove the point.Severe critics might argue that Eloise Lally’s New York mafia production of Bellini’s The Capulets and the Montagues too much resembles Jonathan Miller’s iconic wise-guy Rigoletto; that the now-obligatory feminist twist on the star-crossed lovers’ fate can at times feel heavy-handed; or simply that some of Bellini’s stratospheric top notes and sinuous melodic lines don’t quite Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Harry Hill reminds us at one point during his latest touring show that he’s 60, but there’s no let-up in the energy he brings to New Bits and Greatest Hits, a pleasing mixture of old and new material showing he still packs a punch on stage.There are sufficient new gags to justify the first part of the title, but equally enough old ones to keep his long-term fans happy – although the audience at Wilton’s Music Hall suggested that his fanbase now covers a few generations who appreciate Hill's madcap comedy.The gags – visual, physical, outrageous puns and sly asides – come thick and fast, Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Sol Abrahams, singer and guitarist for Essex rock’n’rollers Bilk, was suffering from a bit of guitar trouble in Birmingham on Friday evening. By the time the band was ready to power through “On It”, from new album Essex, Drugs and Rock and Roll, he was already on his third or fourth instrument, the last one having literally fallen apart in his hands.Not that this put any kind of dampener on his Pete Townsend-like flailing right arm as he blasted through the power chords of “RNR”, “F Up” and “Be Someone”. His band were also serious about being here to promote their new disc of post-Oasis and Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Hinds don't believe in God. They declared this as they surveyed the converted church that is St Luke's, and given the past few years you can't blame them for lacking faith.The Spanish duo later admitted they weren't sure they'd ever be playing material from last year's Viva Hinds live, and it was not an exaggeration, given the past few years saw half the group leave, a departure from both their management and label, and a drastic drop in money after the outbreak of Covid-19 cancelled touring plans.Yet here they were, bounding about in Glasgow with zeal and charm, beginning with the riff- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1964, the Norwegian division of Philips Records began issuing singles labelled “Bergen Beat.” The picture sleeves of 45s by Davy Dean and the Swinging Ballades, Sverre Faaberg and the Young Ones, The Jokers, Rune Larsen and Teen Beats, The Quartermasters, Helge Nilsen and the Stringers and Tornado bore a bold stamp recognising each band’s origin in the country’s second city.As a marketing tool, “Bergen Beat” made sense. A Norwegian counterpart to Merseybeat might catch on (irrespective of some of the bands dubbed thus being in the mould of Cliff Richard & The Shadows or Swedish instro Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Longlegs’ trapdoor ending snapped tight on its clammy Lynchian mood, reconfiguring its Silence of the Lambs serial-killer yarn into a more slyly awful tale. Osgood Perkins’ hit fourth horror film seemed sure to elevate his career, but follow-up The Monkey is a resolutely minor, down and dirty B-movie, relishing cartoon gore and comic excess.Stephen King’s 1980 short story “The Monkey” combined his observation of scary streetcorner wind-up toy monkeys with the bad luck charm of WW Jacobs’ classic “The Monkey’s Paw” (1902), in a story really about protagonist Hal’s fraught family Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Screen stardom is generally anointed at the box office so it's a very real delight to find the fast-rising Jonathan Bailey taking time out from his ascendant celluloid career to return to his stage roots in Richard II.His director, Nicholas Hytner, provided an early Shakespearean platform for this performer more than two decades ago as Cassio in the National's Othello, and the screen's current Fiyero in Wicked, soon to be seen in the latest Jurassic reboot, here graduates to one of the most luxuriant roles in the canon: a part so fulsomely written that the language itself can move a listener Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The theatre director Anna Mackmin has written and directed an extraordinary play about a mother and daughter relationship: extraordinary because it puts the audience inside the maelstrom of these characters’ lives, forcing us to focus on how we interpret them and how our lives might resemble theirs.Things start relatively straightforwardly. A hospital bed dominates the raised half of the stage, with all the familiar accessories: the nurses’ sink in the corner, the IV drip stand, the urine bag. At the top of the back wall is a panoramic screen; at the front of the stage, a country kitchen Read more ...