Reviews
Matthew Wright
Michael Hughes’ second novel, superimposing the post-96 Troubles on the story of The Iliad, rides a wave of Homeric re-tellings, with Pat Barker and Colm Tóibín having recently published contemporary versions. Just as important, though less remarked upon, is the topicality of the Irish Border region, where Hughes grew up, an area that once more finds its identity and security arrangements contested by politicians, this time through the prism of Brexit.Homeric hints are evident from literally the first words: “Menin” (“wrath”) opens The Iliad, and “Fury. Pure fury.” opens Country. But so Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1969, a stream of creative new albums pointed to how what had grown from pop music could be reframed. Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline embraced country music. The Band’s eponymous second album drew on and was integral to defining Americana. The first album by Crosby, Stills & Nash shied away from the increasingly harsh template embraced by rock.In contrast, and bridging the Atlantic, little was more harsh than the debut albums by The Stooges and Led Zeppelin. The year's boundary pushers were seemingly endless: Tim Buckley’s Happy Sad, Can’s Monster Movie, Deep Purple’s Concerto for Group Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This Prom had three pieces from times of social crisis, although only one faces its crisis head on. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring hides its pre-war angst behind a story of pagan Russia while Ravel’s post-war desolation is danced in decadent Viennese waltz time in La Valse. Berio’s Sinfonia, however, is very much engaged with the upheaval of the late 1960s, when, as today, fundamental questions were being asked about the very fabric of western society.This is in danger of making the whole thing sound less fun than it was. Although these are works of overriding seriousness, they all have a wit in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s been a long haul for Keeping Faith. The drama was shot in Welsh and English simultaneously, and premiered in the former with subtitles on S4C at the back end of 2017. It switched to the latter language on BBC One Wales earlier this year. Word spread like a benign bubonic plague of its tendency to grab you by the throat and not let go. In the summer lull, it has been a valiant schedule filler on BBC One. There will still be fans who haven’t lapped up the eighth and last episode, who should look away now to avoid spoilers, because we need to talk about Evan.I should report that some Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The first significant British film to explore the influence of Jamaican sound systems in London was Babylon. Shot in 1980, its street patois was deemed impenetrable enough to merit subtitles. Times change. Yardie revisits the same world and era – it is bookended by heaving get-togethers in which sound systems pulse and throb. But there are no subtitles and one of the film’s pleasures, alongside the music of the soundtrack, is the music of the dialogue.For his debut behind the camera, Idris Elba has adapted the 1992 novel by Victor Headley about a young man tasked with the age-old choice Read more ...
David Nice
It was the C major Prelude and Fugue from this second book of Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, not its more familiar counterpart in Book One, which found itself tracked on a gold-plated disc inside Voyager I to reach whatever intelligent life there may be outside our solar system. Surely more interesting, though, is the universe within the minds of certain exceptional individuals – in this case not just that of the composer, which remains unfathomable. How can an artist like András Schiff not only have all 48 Preludes and Fugues in his head, but communicate them to a huge public with such Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
If ever there was a play of “well bandied” words, it’s surely Love’s Labour’s Lost. The early Shakespearean comedy may once have hit a highpoint for verbal wit, but much of that context – the word play, the allusions, the sheer stylistic preening that must have had a certain in-joke quality for its initial courtly audience – has rather evaporated over the centuries.So it’s to the credit of Nick Bagnall’s new production that the Playhouse audience clearly comes away on an upbeat note. And that’s despite that perplexing final scene, one that disrupts the traditional marriage ending (“our wooing Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Can we ever really know the passion that brought our parents together? By the time we are old enough to hear the story of how they first met, that lovers’ narrative has frayed in the telling and faded in the daily light of domestic familiarity. But what if we could be transported back in time to when that romance was at its peak? Cold War is Pawel Pawlikowski’s first film since winning the Oscar for Ida in 2015. It’s a long-nurtured drama inspired by his parents’ own volatile relationship which saw them leaving Poland, leaving each other, marrying other people only to Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It was always a question of when. As in when would the hoity-toity Home Secretary and her poker-faced bodyguard move into the horizontal? “I’m not the queen, you know,” she said, by way of a hot come-on. “You can touch me.” As a mode of discourse, this marked quite a step-up from the first episode of Jed Mercurio's new drama. Then the Rt Hon Julia Montague didn’t even want his vote. Now she was after her bodyguard’s body. “I Will Always Love You”, anyone?The great thrill of Bodyguard (BBC One) is one’s absolute uncertainty about which way it’s going to twist next. By the end of episode two, Read more ...
David Benedict
“What drivel! What nonsense! What escapist Techicolor twaddle!” No, not a description of Wallis Giunta’s scintillating BBC Proms at Cadogan Hall recital, it’s a lyric from “What A Movie”, Leonard Bernstein’s outstanding stand-alone number from his one-act opera Trouble In Tahiti. Narrating the story of a ridiculously torrid movie the heroine has sat through, Giunta joyously inhabited its every moment and delivered it with complete theatrical assurance. That’s only to be expected; theartsdesk reviewed her stunning performance in the role for Opera North last year. What really impressed here Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When the League of Gentlemen – Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, plus non-performing writer Jeremy Dyson – reformed for an excellent series to update us on events in Royston Vasey (“portal to another world, or just a shit hole?”) for the BBC last year, they enjoyed it so much that they announced a tour for 2018, their first live show since late 2005.There is more than a whiff of nostalgia in the first half as the trio – dressed incongruously in dinner suits for their black comedy as they were when they started out in the mid-1990s – perform some old favourites. The audience Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
A break-dancing mini Michael Jackson, a transvestite Neptune, and a hero who wears his hubris as proudly as his gold-tipped trainers, are unconventional even by Shakespeare’s standards, but they all play a key part in this joyful act of subversion. Emily Lim’s bold production – which marks the first time a community cast (of more than 200 everyday Londoners) appears on stage at the National – celebrates multicultural diversity with a zing that makes you want to dance in the aisles.Lim and the play’s adaptor Chris Bush have added to their immense challenge by taking on Pericles, a flawed work Read more ...