Reviews
David Nice
Once a year is never too often to revisit one of the most perfect of all orchestral scores (not just for the ballet), a climactic Russian Imperial Pas de deux and the old-fashioned magic of illusionist painted flats flying in and out across a production/choreography that manages to crack the soft nut of a fantastical story only a quarter told. It all adds up in Peter Wright's Royal Ballet Nutcracker. His rekindling of as many elements as he can fit from the Hoffmann-via-Dumas original adapted by Petipa and somewhat reluctantly followed by Tchaikovsky is only as good as his two pairs of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Familiarity breeds contempt, which makes it difficult to look at Edwin Landseer’s The Monarch of the Glen (pictured below). The reproduction of this proud beastie on T-towels, aprons, jigsaws and biscuit tins blinds one to the subtle nuances of the original painting. Rachel Maclean’s caustic wit is a useful antidote to Landseer’s romanticised view of the Scottish Highlands, so it makes sense to visit her exhibition first.In her film The Lion and the Unicorn (2012) the Scottish artist plays the Queen. First we see the Union Jack painted on the nail of her index finger, as she points to Great Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Was The Little Drummer Girl commissioned by algorithm? Those who liked The Night Manager might reasonably have been supposed to enjoy another le Carré adaptation. The two dramas had DNA in common. Both steered away from the Cold War, and told of a rogue spy adopting a role to infiltrate a network and bring it down from within. There the overlap ended. Where The Night Manager exerted a vice-like grip, The Little Drummer Girl has caused much scratching of heads. Twitter's one-word review was “Huh?”So there was much audience depletion. By halfway through the series had haemorrhaged more than 40 Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You might think that, given the upheaval we are living through, political comics would be 10 a penny but, surprisingly, they’re thin on the ground. Regardless of how any rivals he has, though, Matt Forde is surely the outstanding political comic working today.Brexit Through the Gift Shop is his latest state-of-the-nation show and, despite his previous career as a Labour Party adviser and his avowed Blairite, pro-EU views, it’s one that anybody who is remotely politically engaged can enjoy, not least for Forde’s breadth of knowledge and the way he distils the complexities of modern politics Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
After Be-Bop Deluxe finished recording their third album at Abbey Road, their label said they needed something to promote as a single. EMI told band-leader Bill Nelson they wanted a song with commercial appeal. The result was the single “Ships in the Night”, which duly charted during the last week of February 1976. On the back of the hit single, the art-rock outfit’s third album Sunburst Finish became their first to go Top 20. EMI got what it wanted.In the book accompanying the new Deluxe Box Set Sunburst Finish, Nelson candidly says “I never really considered the band to be anything but an Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Mid Wales Opera makes small-scale touring look fun – even when you suspect that, behind the scenes, it really isn’t. Barely 24 hours before this performance of their current production of Ravel’s L’heure espagnole, and 11 dates into their current 16 date tour, their Torquemada, Peter van Hulle, was invalided out. Companies this size, and working on this budget, can’t carry understudies. So up stepped tenor Joseph Doody to sing the role from the wings and up, too, stepped the company’s artistic director (and this production’s director) Richard Studer, who mimed the role on stage with such ease Read more ...
Robert Beale
At first sight, performing Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring – premiered in 1913 and sometimes seen as presaging the whole world of modernism – in the centenary year of the 1918 Armistice might seem to be lagging behind in timing (if centenaries float your boat).But Sir Mark Elder’s choice of the piece for the Hallé’s last concert of the year in the "flagship" Thursday series had more to it than that. (Opera North, incidentally, are soon to perform it on stage, with Phoenix Dance Theatre, so there’s a couple of northern trendsetters with similar inspirations).At this distance, we can see it Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Lesbian love in a closeted Orthodox Jewish North London community suggests a place of barriers and secrets. In adapting Naomi Alderman’s novel Disobedience for producer-star Rachel Weisz, the Chilean-Argentine director Sebastián Lelio might as well have landed on the moon. But, as he showed in his Oscar-winning study of an indomitable transsexual, A Fantastic Woman, he has no fear of others' worlds. From our first minutes watching the final, gently humane words of a revered Rabbi, the Rav Krushna, to brief immersion in the bohemian Brooklyn of Ronet (Weisz, pictured below with Alessandro Read more ...
Owen Richards
There’s no one right way to grieve. It cuts through everyone differently, whether reverting to childhood traits or out-of-character impulses. The person you lose might mean one thing to you, and something completely different to someone else; it can hit you both differently, and equally hard. In Sky Atlantic’s new import Kidding, Jim Carrey blurs the line between reality and fiction as his character Mr. Pickles deals with bereavement the only way he knows how: through television.Mr. Jeff Pickles is a TV national treasure, a cross between Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street. For 30 years, he and his Read more ...
Jasper Rees
And now for something completely different from The Fall. The nerve-shredding drama from Northern Ireland was written by Allan Cubitt and featured, as its resident psychopathic hottie, Jamie Dornan (pictured below). It seems the two couldn’t get enough of each other because here they are again in Death and Nightingales (BBC Two), adapted from Eugene McCabe’s 2002 novel. The setting is rural County Fermanagh and to blend in Dornan has cultivated some exuberant shrubbery about that chiselled jaw.The year is 1883, when on the occasion of her 23rd birthday young Beth Winters (Ann Skelly) plans to Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The privileges of writing reviews are very few (it’s certainly no way to make a living these days) but one that remains is the possibility of seeing a film before reading about it. Sometimes it doesn’t matter knowing in advance how a story will play out. It’s probably a good idea to let audiences know that they won’t get child-rearing tips from Rosemary’s Baby. But with Three Identical Strangers, a lot of its pleasure is in its narrative twists. To write about it critically is to risk dissipating the intricately paced revelations that make Tim Wardle’s documentary work so well. My advice Read more ...
Heather Neill
Forget the cloak in the puddle. Never mind potatoes and tobacco. The children's book cliché of Sir Walter Raleigh (or Ralegh as he seems to have preferred in an age of changeable spelling) represents little of the real man and is at best misleading. The cloak incident was a later invention and potatoes and tobacco were already known before Ralegh's adventures in the New World. He did, however, popularise the smoking of tobacco at court.Good-looking and courageous, Ralegh was a favourite of Queen Elizabeth. He fought with the Huguenots in France, helped quell rebellion in Ireland, attempted to Read more ...