Reviews
aleks.sierz
It's all in the title, isn't it? Martin McDonagh's surreal new play comes with a warning that not only screams its intentions, but echoes them through repetition. Okay, okay, I get it. This is going to be a dark story, a very very very dark story. And, talking of repetition, the show's cast — in its premiere at the Bridge Theatre — is led by Jim Broadbent, who has form with this playwright. He was also in McDonagh's The Pillowman at the National in 2003 — and that was also a dark tale that was bleaker than bleak. Hot on the heels of the hilarious massacres of the recent revival of his The Read more ...
David Kettle
Matthew Holness clearly knows a thing or two about low-budget British horror from the early 1970s. In TV comedy Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace he was as merciless as he was affectionate in ripping the genre apart. His debut feature as writer-director is an odd, woozy creation that pays just as overt homage, but Possum is in another tonal world altogether – one that’s brooding, clammy and unremittingly grim.Former children’s entertainer Philip – disgraced, though we’re left to guess precisely how – makes a physical and psychological return to the charred, crooked remains of his boyhood home, Read more ...
Heather Neill
It has been said before: Macbeth's reputation for bad luck has more to do with the difficulty of bringing off a successful production than the supernatural elements in the play. Even those of us who have seen dozens of interpretations can count the number which "worked" on the fingers of one hand, and veterans still recall Trevor Nunn's 1976 production for the RSC, starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench, as a rare truly successful one.The challenges are clear enough. The Weird Sisters suggest a witchy power it is difficult for modern audiences to accept. The ghost of Banquo (do we see him or Read more ...
David Nice
Here it comes - get a grip. The tears have started flowing in the trio "Quid sum miser" and 12 minutes later, as the tenor embarks on his "Ingemisco" solo, you have to stop the shakes turning into noisy sobbing. The composer then lets you off the hook for a bit, but only transcendent beauty in singing and playing can achieve quite this effect in Verdi's Requiem. No one conducts it with more sense of nuance, more space and silence at the right points, than Antonio Pappano, last night giving the perfect base for an outstanding solo quartet, his own Royal Opera Orchestra on top form and the Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
It’s been a whirlwind year for Tracey Emin, CBE, RA. Her pink neon sign, “I want my time with you”, greets passengers at St Pancras station, she’s installed bronze birds all over Sydney city centre, she’s making a derelict print works in Margate into a living-space/studio that’s going to be like Rodin’s in Paris but “slightly bigger”, and she’s got married. To a large stone in her garden in the south of France. This was an empowering, really good, healthy thing, apparently. And she’s had Alan Yentob tailing her for 12 months for Imagine (BBC One).You might think that we already know Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Starr Carter is 16 years old and her life straddles two very different worlds, the posh prep school she goes to with its privileged white students and the troubled black neighbourhood she lives in with her family. And like its heroine, The Hate U Give straddles two very different genres, playing as both a teen drama about friendship, bullying and boyfriends and an African-American call-to-arms about police brutality. It’s not always the most seamless of hybrids and occasionally the joins show in the casting choices and the didactic expository dialogue, but the film is held together by a Read more ...
Owen Richards
It’s been a tough few years for Sŵn Festival. Once a genuine rival to fellow urban festivals Great Escape and Sound City, recent events have fluctuated between one-dayers and a string of ticketed gigs. 2018 marked the biggest change yet, but also a return to the multi-day, multi-venue format. Founders Huw Stephens and John Rostron announced they were handing over the reigns to Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff’s leading music venue. This fresh injection of enthusiasm and experience was just what the festival needed. This year, Sŵn was spread over four days: large single gigs on Wednesday and Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Fifty years after he first entered what was then known as “the hit parade”, Duane Eddy stepped on stage at the London Palladium, cheered to the echo by an audience old enough to remember 78 rpm. By and large, they’d worn less well than the man they’d come to hear, who looked trim in charcoal jeans and cowboy boots, and a jacket of the sort tailors on Nashville’s Music Row specialise. His specs and white goatee were shadowed by a black Stetson, which remained firmly in place, even has he switched between various signature Gretsch guitars. He turned 80 this year, and although Imelda May, one of Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Think Glastonbury, not Salzburg. It struck me at Milton Court last night that the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s ebullient, rock’n’roll Mozart would go down a storm at the sort of music festival renowned for canvas more than canapes. As listeners now expect from the ensemble that director-leader Richard Tognetti has steered since 1990, the ACO shook the Barbican’s junior venue with an electrifying account of the three great symphonies – numbers 39, 40 and 41 – with which Mozart said his revolutionary farewell to the form in 1788. But if the ACO – all of them (sparing cellos) on their Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s an undeniably quirky set-up: an elderly Spanish farmer who takes it upon himself to travel to America and walk – alone – the epic, 2,200-mile Trail of Tears, following the westward route taken by the Cherokee fleeing white settlers. Alone, that is, apart from his trusty sheepdog Zafrana and Andalusian donkey Gorrión.It’s such a bizarre idea, in fact, that a travel agent whose help the old man attempts to enlist worries he’s being pranked. But what’s most successful, and memorable, about Chico Pereira’s poignant documentary – co-produced by the Scottish Documentary Institute, and winner Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Joseph Phibbs is not the first composer to make an opera out of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, and it is not difficult to see the operatic appeal of this taut, passionate three-handed drama. But there are also hazards: my recollections of the play, reinforced by this operatic interpretation, were that for all the emotional huffing and puffing, not much actually happens, and the final, shocking denouement comes somewhat out of the blue.Juliana, premiered this summer at the Cheltenham Festival, updates the action from 19th century feudal Sweden to the present day. The off-stage presence of the Count Read more ...
David Nice
Supernatural wonders, consciously avoided in Rossini's enlightened tale of goodness rewarded La Cenerentola and unrealised by second-rank composer Isouard in his 1810 Cendrillon, recently uneathed by Bampton Classical Opera, flood Massenet's gem-studded version of the Cinderella story. For a contemporary production to avoid visual representation to match would be foolhardly; but to yoke magic to an alternative narrative can also be confusing. Fiona Shaw's fitfully perceptive but overstuffed cabinet of curiosities is too heavy for the gossamer textures of this total charmer. Young leads and a Read more ...