Reviews
Jasper Rees
When you’re hot, you’re hot. In the past two years Mike Bartlett has had the following works staged or broadcast: Wild, a play about Edward Snowden at Hampstead Theatre; Albion, a three-hour neo-Chekhovian state-of-the-nation play at the Almeida; an episode of Doctor Who, a TV version of his play King Charles III, 10 hours of Doctor Foster, and now the hospital drama Trauma on ITV. Of the last three he was also executive producer, as he is of Press, a six-hour BBC One drama he’s been writing about the newspaper industry.It’s an astonishing rate of productivity, to compare with the Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Colours had meanings for Emil Nolde. “Yellow can depict happiness and also pain. Red can mean fire, blood or roses; blue can mean silver, the sky or a storm.” As the son of a German-Frisian father and a Schleswig-Dane mother, Nolde was raised in a pious household on the windswept flat land on the border on Germany and Denmark that his family farmed. The Bible was practically the only book in the household and had been in the family for nine generations, and his understanding of colour was drawn as if from a chromatic psalter. “Every colour harbours its own soul,” he wrote, "delighting or Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It says something about the state of television that sooner or later every actor has to play a cop or a spy. Latest in line is Carey Mulligan, starring as DI Kip Glaspie in David Hare’s new four-parter Collateral.This is, on the face of it, a thriller. The wheels of detection spun into action after the puzzling death of Abdullah Asif, a pizza delivery man who’d just delivered a quattro formaggi to harassed mother of two, Karen Mars (Billie Piper). Karen indignantly pointed out that the pizza in question lacked its requested additional topping, though this did not prove to be the motive for Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Peter Gill has been a quiet if invaluable mainstay of the Donmar over time. But the Welsh playwright-director has rarely been better served than by this emotional stealth bomb of a revival of his 2002 Royal Court play, The York Realist, presented here as a co-production with the Sheffield Crucible, where it will transfer following the London run.The director, Robert Hastie, previously reinvigorated at this same address another gay-themed play of an earlier vintage, My Night With Reg, cut from very different temperamental cloth. The York Realist is a sparer, more buttoned-up piece, if equally Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Guillermo del Toro has laid down markers as a wizard of the fantastical with such previous works as Pan’s Labyrinth and Crimson Peak (though we’ll skate nimbly around Pacific Rim), and now he has brought it all back home with The Shape of Water, as its 13 Academy Award nominations might suggest. It’s a film that doesn’t want to be categorised, but it’s no trouble at all to lose yourself in its swirling currents.In outline, it’s a Cold War monster movie mashed together with an unearthly love story, alchemised by an infatuation with old Hollywood. Del Toro’s main human protagonist is Elisa Read more ...
David Nice
Very well, so ENO's latest Gilbert and Sullivan spectacular was originally to have been The Gondoliers directed by Richard Jones and conducted by Mark Wigglesworth. But that Venetian fantasia has already been seen at the Coliseum in recent years, and Iolanthe - which I can't remember experiencing live with a full orchestra since the declining years of the D'Oyly Carte - ranges wider. Sullivan’s spoof of supernatural Mendelssohn/Weber, as dewily beautiful as its sources, meets Gilbert at his multiple-rhyming sharpest in the mésalliance (that word is French) between fairy ladies and Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Czech Philharmonic on tour are a familiar sight, and they have built a following appreciative of their particular qualities, since they are an orchestra with a sound of their own – the way European orchestras used to be, in some respects. A distinguished colleague used to call them the bouncing Czechs: I like to think they are like the best of their homeland’s beer: rich, mellow, and full of character and body.The present tour has partly varied programmes, but Dvořák’s "New World" Symphony and a cello concerto with soloist Alisa Weilerstein are in most of the remaining ones, with tomorrow Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Cage fighting summons up images of the most brutal hand-to-hand combat. Two fighters, an octagon cage, punches, kicks, submission holds, and the trademark "ground and pound" when an opponent drops to the floor and his rival goes in to finish him off. Not very tasteful, is it?But the blood-on-the-canvas world of Ultimate Fighting Championship is a sporting dichotomy straddling savage barbarity and unrivalled skill. The action is undeniably brutal but the athleticism and precise technique on display places the protagonists at the top tier of the sporting elite.It’s a violently compelling Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
McMafia has taught us to recognise one thing – you might call it the “Norton stride”. As the charismatic Alex Godman, James Norton has been advancing, confidently at screen centre, towards one challenge after another, and they have been coming (mildly put) from all sorts of unexpected quarters. He’s dealt with everything by pressing onwards, ignoring advice from all and sundry.Quite who he was propelling ahead to meet at the end of this final episode of Hossein Amini and James Watkins’s series was left a mystery. But if Vladimir Putin himself had slipped into shot, smiling lopsidedly, arm out Read more ...
graham.rickson
You’d expect a degree of mischief and bafflement in an opera about mistaken identity, closing with a scene set at a masked ball. But Tim Albery’s new Opera North Un ballo in maschera is confusing for the wrong reasons, its shortcomings all the more irritating compared how good the performance actually sounds. Verdi was forced by censors to relocate his 18th century Swedish shenanigans to Boston, his real life protagonists recast as nonsensical fakes (King Gustav becoming "Riccardo, Earl of Warwick"). Albery sensibly returns us to Northern Europe, the sets and costumes suggesting that we’re in Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Hannah Gadsby was awarded best show (jointly with John Robins) at the 2017 Edinburgh Comedy Awards for Nanette, which had already been given the equally prestigious Barry award at last year's Melbourne Comedy Festival. Gadsby draws us in gently, telling us that Nanette was so titled before she really knew what the show was going to be about, and she named it after meeting an unfriendly and unhelpful barista in smalltown Australia, in one of those places that she – a lesbian who is sometimes taken for a man – feels really unwelcome in.That's probably the lightest moment in Nanette's 80 minutes Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Kendrick Lamar has never been afraid to experiment. Since his first studio album, Section 80, was released in 2011, he’s explored funk, jazz, rock, soundtracks, ballads, and (of course) hip-hop, building himself a reputation based as much on his musical risks as his outspoken political views (as seen in the Black Lives Matter-orientated To Pimp A Butterfly, released to critical acclaim in 2015). Although latest album DAMN. is perhaps his most conventional to date, the wit, religious allusion, and vague sense of unease lurking beneath the surface are fully brought out live, making Lamar’s set Read more ...