Reviews
David Nice
There's now something of a gala atmosphere when the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House takes to the Covent Garden stage with its music director Antonio Pappano. Admittedly some of the players are not the same as when he took up his tenure, but the core relationship of 17 years - with the contract now extended to at least the end of the 2022/23 season - results in collegial music-making at an intense level which most orchestras can only dream about. As in 2016, he chose an all-Russian programme - none of it core repertoire, all of it spellbinding in one way or another.Blink and you miss the Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Is everything awesome? Indeed it is if you like your movies brightly coloured, packed with jokes and really quite loud. Almost five years after the first Lego movie impressed critics and entranced its target audience of families with young kids, its sequel blasts on to the screen and will probably not disappoint fans of the original. Finn (Jadon Sand) hasn’t aged much and is still constructing elaborate Lego worlds, but rather than his dad and the evil Craggle glue threatening his creativity, it’s his little sister Bianca (Brooklynn Prince) and her candy coloured Duplo that form the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The flayed corpse of a dead seal hangs red and grotesque at the back of the stage. It’s a placeholder; we know that by the end of Anthropocene – Scottish composer Stuart McRae’s latest collaboration with librettist Louise Welsh – something more familiar, and far more horrifying, will take its place.It’s the same trick we hear in McRae’s skilfully crafted score, which opens in teeming musical activity. The orchestra scuttles and ticks with nervous animation. But while the sense is of motion, the harmony remains resolutely rooted, unmoving – a musical block of ice trapping life, confrontation Read more ...
Sarah Kent
What a wonderful little gem! This documentary by American duo Erick Stoll and Chase Whiteside lasts 76 minutes, but I could happily have watched it for hours. The film addresses a desperately sad and difficult issue – what to do with an elderly relative who suffers from dementia and needs constant care – but does so with such a light and compassionate touch that it is pure joy.When 93 year old América fell out of bed, her neighbours heard her cries and called the police. Luis, her son and sole carer, was out at the time, so they charged him with neglect and put him in jail. América Read more ...
Owen Richards
What's worse than grieving? That all-consuming loss. For those that have experienced it, nothing really comes close. It starts to bug Thomas (Jordan Bernarde, main picture second right) during his visit to the Williams household. Recently bereaved himself, he senses the fragility in the air but no-one seems to give a straight answer. Everyone would rather focus on him, talking at speed but never really engaging beyond the surface. In Blue, at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff, this lack of communication is played for both big laughs and hard hits.Thomas has been brought to the house by Elin ( Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It was back to the very beginning for this final instalment of “Pinter at the Pinter”, with its pairing of A Slight Ache and The Dumb Waiter. Both were written at the end of the 1950s, which explained a certain rock’n’roll vibe in the auditorium, but brought home how much Pinter’s work stretches beyond period, resounding with new intonations to match new times.This highly revealing commemorative season of the playwright’s one-act plays has shown what (relative) rediscoveries there are to be made. A Slight Ache, originally written in 1959 as a radio play, remains much less known than The Dumb Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
When a pianist directs from the keyboard, the result can be a sedate affair: a matter of minimalist time-keeping while the soloist shows his or her fancy moves. Not so with Dame Mitsuko Uchida and her long-term partners, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Clad in a sort of blue magician’s gown over severe black, Uchida – who has just turned 70 – stood to conduct, vigorously, the opening passages of last night’s two Mozart concertos at the Royal Festival Hall. Even when safely back on her stool, she frequently indicated every sign of wanting to leave it as her arms – when not otherwise occupied – Read more ...
Tim Cornwell
The Fifties? They were terrible: bone-cold houses where people huddled round the fireplace for heat, empty Sundays that lasted a month, drawn-out rationing, bread you could build houses with. It was all making do and mending and "grey meat, grey people, everything grey," or so declares Susan Brown's Sylvia in a mother's get-real rant in Home, I'm Darling, the Laura Wade play now on the West End after a sellout run at the National Theatre/Dorfman last year and Theatre Clwyd before that. Women were frightened of a new invention called yoghurt, not to mention of husbands, who had all the rights Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The first line of this show is “I'm the guy who you meet right after you come out of a long-term relationship.” On the night I see The Guy Who..., Adam Riches has three tries with it before he meets his target, a woman who has been dumped by a long-standing boyfriend.His character, whose name we never learn, is reading the Sunday papers – “the physical edition!” – with reading glasses placed artistically in his mouth as he ponders what he has just read, while we take our seats in this funky bar in King's Cross. He's super woke, super cool and super suave. But he's also super dangerous.He Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Wolfgang Petersen’s film Das Boot is now nearly 40 years old, but in this new TV sequel time has moved forward a mere nine months from the original story, into the autumn of 1942. Whether it’s still springtime for Hitler is moot, but the U-boat crews based at La Rochelle are locked in a grim struggle with both the Atlantic and with Allied ships and aircraft.From the furniture-rattling opening sequence of a submarine being sunk by depth-charges, these first two episodes (out of eight) were tightly-wound and exuded a powerful atmosphere of menace. The series extends the war onto a new front, Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“You stop playing for three years and you double your crowd,” jokes Amy Boone at a sold-out gig at the Jazz Café in Camden. The reason for the Delines’ hiatus isn’t much of a joke: Boone was hit by an out-of-control car when walking in a parking lot in Austin, Texas. Both her legs were broken badly, she needed nine major surgeries and a skin graft and spent those years in rehab, delaying the release of the Portland, Oregon band’s acclaimed second album, Imperial. She now walks with an elegant silver cane. And her voice is as haunting, her pacing as impeccable and seemingly effortless, as ever Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
There is no doubt that this Cherry Orchard, whirled into town by Roman Abramovich from Moscow, is going to be divisive. If you, like the two elegant old gentlemen sat next to me on press night, have come to see the Pushkin Drama Theatre’s production in order to steep yourself in Chekhov’s philosophical ambiguities and perhaps brush up on your Russian, you will be disappointed. If, on the other hand, you want to be blown away by a stunningly beautiful absurdist interpretation that captures, like no other Chekhov production you’ve seen, the way the world can teeter between exhausted Read more ...