Reviews
Tom Birchenough
There was a lovely moment at the beginning of this Panorama where David Dimbleby was chatting to a schoolgirl – not just any schoolgirl actually, because she came from a family of 10 children, which surely makes her a bit out of the ordinary, even in Russia, Putin’s or anyone else’s. Had he ever met the Queen, she asked. Twice, he replied, before enquiring what she thought of our monarch. Obvious approval beamed back. Why, he pressed. “She’s old, but she still runs the country.”Please, you thought, don’t give your man any ideas… Vladimir Putin will be 71 when his current term (his fourth, in Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Lia Williams can be said to have been in her prime ever since the double-whammy several decades ago when she appeared onstage in fairly quick succession in Oleanna and then the original, and unsurpassable, production of Skylight. But she's rarely had the spotlight afforded her by Polly Findlay's altogether terrific reclamation for the Donmar Warehouse of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which tethers a familiar Muriel Spark title to a newly scalding adaptation by David Harrower (supplanting the Jay Presson Allen one of old). And whether sensual or severe, in full emotive flight or Read more ...
Owen Richards
The Ciambra is a wonderful and subtle piece of filmmaking. Director/writer Jonas Carpignano captures the genuine heart and fire of family relationships with an amateur cast of relatives, led by the magnetic young Pio Amato. By trusting the audience to find the subtext themselves, they create touching and persuasive cinema over two hours.Pio is 14-years-old, living with his large family in the Romani community known as the Ciambra, in south Italy. Life here is tough – the electricity is stolen, and money is made by hijacking cars for ransom. Age works differently here, with establishing shots Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Emma Daly (Carolyn Dodd) tells her estranged husband Miles (Chris O’Dowd): “There is always an angle, a shakedown.” Of course there is: Davey Holmes’s Get Shorty is “partly based on” the Elmore Leonard novel of the same name (“inspired by” would be more accurate). Miles, a henchman for a gloriously nasty casino owner called Amara de Escalones (Lidia Porto, pictured below) in Pahrump, Nevada, knows this full well – he spends his days collecting kickbacks and crushing corpses in a car-compactor – but chooses to ignore it as he dreams of escaping his scuzzy existence and making it in Read more ...
theartsdesk
Since Glastonbury lies fallow this year, Download is the biggest British green field festival of the summer. 100,000 souls gathered to celebrate the canon of metal on the land around Donington Park racing circuit. The site has four stages, two outdoor, the Main Stage, featuring headliners Avenged Sevenfold, Guns’n’Roses and Ozzy Osbourne, and the Zippo Encore Stage, and two under canvas, the Dogtooth and Avalanche stages, as well as a large arena for the hammy activities of WWE NXT Wrestling and also an enclosure where men and women dressed in armour batter each other all weekend.Theartsdesk Read more ...
stephen.walsh
If you ever find yourself in Leipzig at a weekend during school term, the Bach motet (and occasionally cantata) performances in the great cantor’s old church, the Thomaskirche, are an absolute must. But if you happened to be in that city this weekend just past, you will have been able to immerse yourself in practically a whole year’s worth of cantatas in the space of a little more than forty-eight hours. The Leipzig Bach Festival is an annual event. But it has surely never been quite like this before. The festival’s artistic director, Michael Maul, and the president and director, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The American playwright/journalist Sophie Treadwell's 1928 expressionist drama crops up every so often in order to allow a director to leave his or her signature upon it, so the first thing to be said about Natalie Abrahami's Almeida Theatre revival of Machinal is that it puts the play and not the production first.Whether that is entirely beneficial is open for debate, given the jagged, staccato nature of writing that amounts to a sequence of extended snapshots from an Everywoman's descent into a gathering darkness that by play's end has all but swallowed her whole. Viewed up close, as it Read more ...
David Kettle
Raqqa was once a prosperous if little-known town in northern Syria. Since 2014, however, it has served as the de facto capital of ISIS’s self-styled caliphate, and as such has been physically decimated, its population subjected to increasingly horrific subjugation.Despite its title, however, it’s not the city itself that’s the subject of Matthew Heineman’s quietly masterful film. This revealing and at times harrowing documentary focuses instead on "Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently" (RBSS), a collective of citizen journalists that has existed since 2014 to chart the facts of Raqqa’s barely Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If you go to ENO’s Acis and Galatea expecting a grassy knoll draped decoratively with a Watteau shepherdess or two then you may be disappointed. Launched in 2017, the company’s reliably punchy Studio Live strand (stripped-back, small-scale, off-site performances) continues here with Handel’s “little opera”, reinvented for the Instagram age. #Nymphsandshepherds #FlockthisBeanbags (candy-bright) are strewn across the turf (astro), bathed in the glow of the vending machines ranked across the back of the stage. “Work Hard, Play Harder” enjoins a balloon sign, while arrows point the way to “Groves Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Forget about dark alleys, deserted parks and slippery slopes: the most dangerous place in the world is likely to be your family. That’s where the traps are, the minefields and the surprise betrayals. As its title suggests, Torben Betts’s new comedy is all about failing marriages and imploding families. The focus is on a celebrity chef, but does Betts have anything new to say about the state of our emotional nation, or is this just another rehash of the same old ingredients? After a national tour, Monogamy comes to the Park Theatre – and boasts Janie Dee and Charlie Brooks in its cast.The Read more ...
Robert Beale
Juanjo Mena, chief conductor of Manchester's BBC Philharmonic for the past seven years, took his official leave of them with a programme reflecting his great love, the music of his Spanish homeland. Albéniz and Falla, to be precise, and the greater part was a complete concert performance of the latter’s opera La Vida Breve. A quality list of Spanish singers had been engaged – notable among them Nancy Fabiola Herrera, as Salud – along with the Spanish Radio and TV Chorus, Coro RTVE.So there was a festive feeling in the air from the outset: the concert was to be a celebration of a warm Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
What a great show, on every level. David McVicar’s Glyndebourne production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare, originally staged in 2005, and in its third revival this year, has a cast without a weak link, and never fails to draw in the audience to the work’s cycles of power, suffering, death and intermittent triumph. It brings us deep into the mind and essence of every character. And holds us right there. Every time.The big change from the previous seasons is that the production has a new Cleopatra. The role was originally offered for 2005 to Rosemary Joshua but memorably taken in all three previous Read more ...