Reviews
Adam Sweeting
There is something irresistibly haunting about tales of epic sea voyages and the perils they entail. Recently we’ve had two versions of the tragic saga of lone yachtsman Donald Crowhurst (not to mention the excellent documentary Deep Water from 2006), and you could lob into the mix the Robert Redford vehicle All Is Lost, Kon-Tiki, White Squall and… er… many more.But never mind the competition, because Adrift can stand proud as one of the finest specimens of this watery genre. Based on the true story of Tami Oldham and Richard Sharp, which Oldham later set down in her book Red Sky in Mourning Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester Collective is a new and enterprising group of musicians determined not just to create performances of high quality but to offer a new way in which the performances themselves are done. They started from scratch at the end of 2016, and I saw one of the first of their efforts, given at Islington Mill – a laid-back space in the basement of an old industrial building in Salford – in March last year. It was a place well used to commercial music performance, but not of Janáček… coupled with a brand-new dramatic piece for voice and string quartet commissioned from composer Huw Belling.It Read more ...
aleks.sierz
We are now pretty familiar with the idea that human reproduction (making babies) has been turned into big business, and there have already been several good recent plays about desperate couples and surrogacy – Vivienne Franzmann’s Bodies and Satinder Chohan’s Made in India – so is there any more to be said about giving nature a helping hand? This Hampstead Theatre certainly thinks so. In the 40th anniversary year since Louise Brown became the first test-tube baby it is marking the occasion by staging Jemma Kennedy’s large new comedy about giving biology a boost. And it gets its own Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The issue of immigrants being smuggled across the Mexican border into the USA is currently live and inflammatory, and this second instalment of the feds-versus-drugs cartels saga hurls us right into the centre of it. This explosive thriller is frequently shocking in its explicit violence, and its cynical view of power, crime and politics verges on the nihilistic, but it’s difficult to get its brutal imagery out of your mind.The original Sicario from 2015 had Emily Blunt on board as FBI agent Kate Macer, who provided a kind of startled audience’s-eye-view of the hardcore tactics of drug Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It seems only too fitting that David Lan’s luminous reign at the Young Vic should draw to a close with this bold, creatively thrilling international import. Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron’s Tony-winning musical, which premiered Off-Broadway in 2013, is an exquisite adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic-novel memoir – a heartfelt detective story that traipses through memory in order to decode our loved ones, and ourselves.We meet Alison at three different ages: as a child in small-town Pennsylvania, where her father runs the funeral – or “fun” – home; as a college student coming out as a Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
In the right hands, the music of the various Viennese Schools can still sound almost startlingly original. Imogen Cooper’s are very much the right hands, containing a rare, refined artistry that only continues to grow with the years. In her Wigmore Hall concert on Tuesday she matched Beethoven’s mighty Diabelli Variations with the same composer’s late 11 New Bagatelles Op.119, early Schoenberg and Haydn at his bounciest in a programme that left one marvelling as much at the daring of these voices as at the vivid musicianship of the pianist – which is exactly the way things should be.Cooper Read more ...
aleks.sierz
It’s the stuff of nightmares. There’s a massive explosion, the sound of smashing glass, falling debris and police sirens. Gunshots. Panic in the streets. It could be the November 2015 Paris terror attacks, in which the Bataclan venue was the scene of a massacre, except this time it’s happening in London. Yes, the stuff of nightmares. And it is also the powerful start of Cordelia Lynn’s new play, One for Sorrow, which has just opened at the Royal Court's upstairs studio space. And it all begins in anxiety-rich pitch-black darkness.As the noise recedes, we become conscious of the thoughts of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The dad who lives off-grid with his offspring is becoming a regular visitor to cinema screens. He was last seen in the guise of Viggo Mortensen in Captain Fantastic, the story of the father whose seven-strong brood must learn to come out of the forest and live in society. The latest telling is Leave No Trace, in which a military veteran Will (Ben Foster, pictured below) and his 13-year-old daughter Tom (Thomasin McKenzie) have been camping, apparently for years, in the woods of a national park near Portland, Oregon.Theirs is a quiescent existence among the ferns. They collect water from the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
A mere fortnight after the Download Festival, the Midlands was at it again over the weekend, celebrating noisy musical mavericks who have no truck with the mainstream. Indeed, if anything, Birmingham’s annual Supersonic Festival was considerably more way out than its metallic cousin in the East Midlands. Exploring culture from even more obscure places in the musical margins of the self-proclaimed New Weird Britain, there was folk music, glitchy techno, heavy psych, black metal, North African trance music and k-pop. That was just the musical side of things, as there was also plenty to sample Read more ...
David Nice
A magnificent riven oak with gnarly branches stands in the secluded graveyard of SS Peter and Paul's Church Peasmarsh, near Rye. Transport it in your mind to Flexham Park in a very different part of Sussex, imagine it struck by lightning and it could be one of that twisted group which Elgar encountered on a short walk from his Bedham cottage in the summer of 1918, subsequently permeating his massive and masterly Piano Quintet with the ghost story surrounding them. At any rate, having such an epic work conjured by top musicians in the Peasmarsh church made it seem as if we were close to Read more ...
Ralph Moore
The Robert Smith-curated Meltdown festival in London came to a close on Sunday night with a spectacular, concept-driven headline set by The Cure, or CUREATION 25, as the band was actually billed, presumably because of a previously contracted show at Hyde Park that's due to take place in two weeks’ time. Like Nine Inch Nails on Friday night at the same Smith-curated venue, seeing a band of this stature up close on such blistering form is a dream come true for fans, who have come far and wide to see Smith and his cohorts: bassist Simon Gallup plus Reeves Gabrels on guitar, Jason Cooper on drums Read more ...
David Nice
Opera and music theatre have set the birds shrilling in Regent's Park before in the shape of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess – a very forgettable production – and Sondheim's Into the Woods – much better, and a score which can give any 20th century opera a run for its money in terms of thematic interconnection. Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream would have been the obvious candidate; its earlier, tauter, smaller-scale companion-piece in terms of a very English haunting, The Turn of the Screw, was the more problematic choice for the Open Air Theatre's first collaboration with English National Opera Read more ...