Reviews
Javi Fedrick
Pinkshinyultrablast might be a long way from their hometown of St Petersburg, but in recent years they’ve built themselves up in England as one of the more bizarre and original bands in today’s psych/shoegaze revival, and on the day their third album Miserable Miracles is released, they hit the north for a night of fuzz and electronic trickery.Support comes from Warm Digits, whose propulsive set has the room hooked from the off. Mostly playing tracks from their 2017 LP Wireless World, drummer Andrew Hodson and guitarist Steve Jefferies don’t let the groove drop, with their songs forming, Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Anecdotal story-telling wrapped up in hypnotic prose, Christie Watson’s narrative is a gentle, emotive five-part layered package of reflection and indignation. It is part memoir-autobiography, part history of nursing (Indian, Greek, Byzantine and African from millennia ago, not to mention Florence Nightingale and her revelatory common sense), and underlying all a polemic in persuasive praise of its crucial importance. There is also rage at what is happening to the NHS today, politically, socially and economically, and what it shows about the state of Britain.We are whisked through the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In early March 1980, the weekly music paper Sounds dedicated their front cover to “the new face of punk” with a photograph of Stinky Turner, the singer of The Cockney Rejects. What had, in 1977, been widely interpreted as a challenge to musical orthodoxy and as a new broom which was sweeping clean had, in turn, become a default style for new waves of bands. Punk, as The Exploited put it in 1981 for the title of their debut album, was not dead. And punk itself was now the inspiration, rather than the assorted influences which had fed into Buzzcocks, The Clash, The Damned and the Sex Pistols. Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Yorkshire theatre company IOU have a tool in their armoury that most of their peers do not. It’s an open-topped bus with tiered seating, as pictured above, built in Halifax and the only one of its type, replete with headphone sets for every seat. It is at the heart of Rear View, their show which takes to the streets of Brighton and puts the participant right at the blurred connecting point between art and reality. It’s a unique experience.Rear View starts at a barge venue in Brighton Marina. The Marina is a gaudy, ugly place of clunky, mismatched modern buildings and tacky, American-style Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Writer Robert Schenkkan’s Building the Wall imagines modern America in the not-too-distant future. The date is 22nd November 2019 and following an attack on Times Square in which 17 people were killed, martial law has been imposed. Demands for illegal immigrants to be thrown out of the country have resulted in mass round ups and swollen detention centres. Hysteria stalks the country.We find ourselves in an interview room in El Paso prison, Texas. Rick (played by Trevor White) is a Trump-voting felon incarcerated in a surveilled solitary confinement cell. Gloria (played by Angela Griffin) is Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
When an acquaintance heard my first review of the Brighton Festival was a circus event they snorted, “Oh dear.” It’s strange; for a couple of decades there’s been a default setting among broad swathes of otherwise artistically-inclined Boho sorts: that circus is embarrassing and naff. Think of all those sniping jokes about jugglers at festivals and circus skills workshops. It’s all rather bizarre, especially pondered in the post-performance glow of Wales-based collective NoFit State Circus’s fantastic new show Lexicon. It’s hard to see what could possibly be naff about the human body doing Read more ...
David Nice
When you have 21 women to present in song, but only a couple among the 14 poets and none to represent them out of the 15 composers idolising or giving them a voice, you need two strong defenders of their sex at the helm. Lucy Crowe and Anna Tilbrook are no shrinking violets – the soprano no longer a light lyric, the pianist supportive only in the best sense, full of flexible power and forceful middle-to-lower-range sonorities for the voice to coast above.Certainly there were colour and variety enough from both to create worlds in miniature throughout a well-proportioned programme with quite a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Goodmans are back - for a fifth (and rumoured possibly to be the last) series of Friday Night Dinner, Robert Popper’s deliciously daft comedy set in a secular Jewish household in north London and based on the Peep Show producer's own upbringing.Adult sons Adam (Simon Bird) and Jonny (Tom Rosenthal) instantly revert to their childhood selves when they return home to parents Martin and Jackie each week for a family supper. Martin (Paul Ritter) likes to stroll around shirtless while Jackie (Tamsin Greig) is obsessed with MasterChef and indulges her sons’ unremitting sparring and pranking. Read more ...
Christopher Glynn
The idea for a new translation of Schubert's Winterreise came from an old recording. Harry Plunket Greene was nearly 70 (and nearly voiceless) when he entered the studio in 1934 and sang "Der Leiermann," the final song of the cycle, in English (as "The Hurdy-Gurdy Man") into a closely-placed microphone. But the result is unforgettable - a haunting performance of the most mysterious soliloquy in all music, given by an old singer nearing the end of his own road. Like all great performances of Lieder, it relies less on vocal perfection and more on a leap of imagination, inhabiting the world of Read more ...
Matthew Wright
As the ice hardened in the Cold War of the mid-1950s, and the USSR mocked the USA for both its supposed barbarism and racial segregation, the representative from Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell Jr, had a bright idea. Instead of competing in the cultural heats of the Cold War on Soviet strengths of classical music and ballet, why not bring the world that quintessentially, originally American art form, jazz? With the added benefit that most jazz ensembles were racially mixed, to dispel the Soviet claims about segregation.Powell’s wife, Hazel Scott, was a jazz singer, and he was close friends with Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Across London last night politicians waited anxiously to hear their fates, and things were no different at the Vaudeville Theatre, where the ongoing Oscar Wilde season took a topical turn with An Ideal Husband.Colliding drawing-room comedy and Victorian melodrama, the play is at worst uneven, but at best it has a violence that sets the bone china rattling. The stakes of this political satire are real and high, only further raised by the knowledge that Wilde’s own society idyll was about to be shattered. Before the play’s original run had ended he was arrested, trading rubbers of bridge and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This was not a film that left you with much respect for the wisdom of politicians, but perhaps its truest line came from John Kerry, when he called the ongoing – seven years, and counting – Syrian conflict “an insult to the humanity of this planet”. Lyse Doucet has covered it as a reporter for the BBC since its beginning back in March 2011, and Michael Rudin's two-part (the second comes tonight) documentary Syria: The World’s War saw her revisiting some of its darkest moments, sometimes recapping how she had reported them at the time. That was combined with the perspective of today, Read more ...