Reviews
Rachel Halliburton
In an era marked by virtue-signalling, it's perhaps no surprise that Isabelle Huppert – a woman who has always gone against the grain – has opted for a little vice-signalling. Unlike other French screen icons, she is not part of the female cohort that railed against the #MeToo movement, yet she has defined herself through roles mired in moral ambiguity, not least as the video games executive who seeks revenge on her rapist in Elle (pictured below). To therefore pair Huppert with her infamously lubricious countryman, the Marquis de Sade, seems like a marriage happily forged in the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Stumble across Grange Park Opera’s new brick-clad “Theatre in the Woods”, nestled amid a labyrinth of gardens and orchards next to the rambling Tudor pile of West Horsley Place in Surrey, and on a mild June evening you may feel as if you have fallen into some Home Counties version of a magic-realist novel. The downside of all this bucolic charm is that the drama delivered inside the traditional, four-decker, horseshoe-shaped auditorium – funded and built from scratch by Grange Park’s founder Wasfi Kani after Bamber Gascoigne inherited the West Horsley estate – should always match the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
You need to be of a certain age to recall the sheer ubiquity of Studio 54. For a few years in the late 1970s, even the sterner British newspapers were routinely stuffed with stories of who was there and what went on within the hallowed citadel (if not who went down, and on whom). As for the New York prints, publicists were on a bonus scheme incentivising them to get the hottest discotheque onto front pages.As explained in a new documentary, for a couple of years after the US pulled out of Vietnam Studio 54 was a watering hole which attracted not wildebeest, zebras and antelopes but exotic Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Nordic shmordic. Why travel to Scandinavia to get your dark, disturbing mysteries when you can find them in Wales? You even get subtitles for an extra frisson of otherness.Hidden (or Craith in Welsh) stems from the same BBC Cymru Wales/S4C provenance as Hinterland, with whom it also shares the executive-producing fingerprints of Mark Andrew and Ed Talfan. Likewise, it echoes the eeriness and sense of isolation of its predecessor, exploiting spectacular but melancholy Snowdonia scenery to evoke a steady undertone of dread and horrors hidden in the undergrowth.There had to be a corpse to kick Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“There’s a rhythm in the air around Memphis, there always has been,” Carl Perkins once said. "I don't know what it is, but it's magic." The city on the Mississippi lives up to its musical heritage with performance venues aplenty, and a host of museums dealing with its illustrious musical past: there's Elvis Presley's Graceland mansion with all its garish gold lamé costumes, cars and even private jets; Sun Studios is now a museum; and there is a Stax Museum, a Blues Museum and the much-praised Memphis Rock 'n' Soul Museum.Memphis-born music journalist, filmmaker and author Robert Gordon has Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Past My Door” weaves together a series of leitmotifs. Beginning as a downbeat, mid-tempo shuffle, it then shifts into a staccato passage after which the tempo picks up before a more pacey section. Next, the character established at the song’s introduction returns. Over four-minutes 20 seconds, the different approaches are supported by oblique lyrics which include the memorable phrase “too late, cries the melting snowman". At its core, the melancholy “Past My Door” seems to be about missing chances and being left behind.This remarkable portmanteau composition is one of the many highlights of Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
The line that best summed up the European opening night of Taylor Swift’s latest tour had nothing to do with snakes, or tattered reputations, or tabloid melodrama. It came, in fact, from opening act Charli XCX, who chose the intro to cotton-candy sound-of-last-summer “Boys” to shout out the “three incredible, badass women” who’d take turns sharing the stage tonight.Anointing Taylor Swift as any kind of feminist figurehead rarely ends well, but I’ll say this: when one of the world’s biggest pop stars stops the show two songs in to introduce by name every female dancer and singer sharing the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It seems appropriate that an onstage blender features amidst Tom Scutt's sleek, streamlined set for Julie given how many times Strindberg's 1888 play has been put through the artistic magimix. Rarely, however, have the results been less illuminating than in this National Theatre rewrite by Polly Stenham that replaces Strindberg's charged three-hander with a lazy recap of themes and situations Stenham has explored to far more rending effect elsewhere. Running shy of 90 minutes, Carrie Cracknell's production nonetheless feels as if it is struggling to fill time, due in no small measure to Read more ...
David Nice
It's awfully long for a fairytale in which a mystery prince helps a damsel in distress, and she asks him the question she shouldn't. Myth tends to go deeper, as Wagner did in The Ring of the Nibelung after Lohengrin. Here he captures the magic of transformation and transcendence, but in between there's too much hard-to-stage pomp. Director David Alden treats it all too predictably, with images of post-war ruin – tilted, tottering shells of buildings – and fascist paraphernalia (the swan motif in Nazi colours). The real light of the piece is there in the music, led with bright breadth by the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I see critics elsewhere have been churlishly sticking the boot into this latest episode of the now quite venerable dinosaurs-reborn franchise (Steven Spielberg’s original arrived in 1993). While this one isn’t a revolutionary transformation of the genre, and doesn’t seek to replicate the critique of Hollywood’s corporate consumerist culture which some imagined to be the subtext of 2015’s Jurassic World, it’s a perfectly serviceable summer blockbuster with some roof-rattling action scenes and the occasional brain-teasing idea for good measure.With slightly unsettling contemporaneity, Read more ...
Katherine Waters
One space, one person, one story, one voice – the monologue is theatre distilled, the purest form of entertainment. On a stage of packing boxes and boards, over the course of just over an hour, Paterson Joseph relays and plays the life of Charles Ignatius Sancho, the first British man of African origin to vote.As befits any good piece of bombast set in the 18th century, The Author opens Act One. In actual fact, the author is Paterson Joseph himself, who, having written himself, performs himself – a fictionalised, larger-than-life, theatrical simulacrum. He explains, “Politics wasn’t Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
When Tamara Rojo won the top job at English National Ballet in 2012, it looked like a poisoned chalice. Directors had come and gone, some of them with visionary ideas, but all were defeated by the company’s peculiar position as underdog to the company at Covent Garden. With a much lower public subsidy and an obligation to tour, ENB has had to overwork box-office certainties such as the annual Nutcracker to stay afloat. An even tougher inheritance for Rojo was the perception that the level of dancing – with some shining individual exceptions – wasn’t quite up to scratch. Well, it is now.Of all Read more ...