Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
Beautiful though Katie Mitchell’s original production of Written on Skin is, George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s opera has always felt more at home in the concert hall. Last year’s Barbican performance put Benjamin’s meticulous orchestral writing absolutely in the spotlight, but perhaps this “concert-staging” – fully directed, but minimally staged – offers the best solution yet, allowing orchestra and action to share focus in this gripping piece of musical storytelling.Because that’s the power of this rarest of things, a contemporary opera that has already found a firm foothold in the Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Both Rhode Island’s Downtown Boys, and Washington D.C.’s Priests sit at the centre of today’s feminist punk scene. As stated in a recent Downtown Boys press release, they oppose “the prison-industrial complex, racism, queerphobia, capitalism, fascism, boredom, and all things people use to try to close our minds, eyes and hearts”. This, perhaps, explains why the promoters have listed the night as a “radical double bill”. Having also both released extremely well received albums this year - Cost of Living and Nothing is Natural respectively - they descend on Manchester’s Deaf Institute amid a Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
If there were an arts award for loyalty, the Barbican Theatre would surely win it for having kept faith with Michael Clark. It’s no secret that the bad-boy image that has clung to Clark since his punk extravaganzas in the 1980s had consequences in his personal and creative life, forcing frequent "early retirements". But the Barbican, along with the Dance Umbrella festival that helped produce his work, kept on believing, and this time last year that belief was rewarded in a knockout triptych of new work sparked in part by the passing of David Bowie. “Fabulous, but too short!” was the general Read more ...
Katherine Waters
During his time at the Slade David Bomberg — the subject of a major new retrospective at Pallant House Gallery — was described as a "disturbing influence". The fifth son of Polish-Jewish parents who fled the pogroms, he grew up at the turn of the 20th century in the East End of London where neighbours lived on top of one another and space was scarce. One of a cohort of local kids to be funded through art school by the Jewish Education Aid Society at a time when European modernism was making an impact among London artists, Bomberg became part of a group known as the Whitechapel Boys who were Read more ...
aleks.sierz
A new baby is like an alien invasion: it blows your mind and it colonises your world. For any couple, parenthood can be both exalting and devastating, with the stress hugging the relationship so tightly that eventually all its lies pop out. In his new play, which opened tonight at the Bush Theatre, Chris Thompson takes this idea and chucks it at a broody gay couple and their surrogate mother: Daniel, a 46-year-old lawyer, and his husband Oliver, a 32-year-old freelancer, are having a baby with their best friend, Priya.As the story begins in their classy Shadwell flat, Priya is due any day, Read more ...
Katie Colombus
I have a confession to make. The first time I heard "This Town" – the debut release for Niall Horan's new album – I thought it was Ed Sheeran.Which gives an indication of the general level of acceptability of Niall’s first solo foray outside of 1D – "This Town" is sure to stick around the airwaves for a while. Overall, Flicker is pretty mainstream in comparison to his fellow Directioners, who’ve opted for stylistic gimmickery (Zayne Malik), faux-rock-kitsch (Harry Styles), or impregnating super-famous celebs (that other one)… Niall has opted for a stalwart’s strategy, capitalising on his Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Like Steptoe and Son with ideological denouncements, Stalin’s Politburo have known each other too long. They’re not only trapped but terrified, a situation whose dark comedy is brought to a head by Uncle Joe’s sudden, soon fatal stroke in 1953. The prospects of replacing him and of his survival alike cause behaviour which would disgrace rats in a sack. Armando Iannucci’s portfolio of political satire has found its perfect subject.He’s helped by a cast of fascinating contrasts. Steve Buscemi’s Nikki Khrushchev is all sardonic Brooklyn cynicism, mixing acerbic putdowns with disbelieving dismay Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
There are different ways of celebrating a great artist’s legacy, and I suppose they have to coexist. One approach is raptly to admire his or her acknowledged masterpieces, the equivalent of making straight for Guernica or the Mona Lisa. The other approach is to delve in the archives and pull out the fragments and sketches, the early cartoons and the late pastels, and scrutinise them for evidence of the genius at work. The decision to try and recover a lost MacMillan ballet, Le Baiser de la Fée, for this Royal Opera House season marking the 25th anniversary of the choreographer’s death smacks Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
British singer-songwriter Nick Mulvey’s new album, Wake Up Now, is one of the year’s finest. However, there’s a moment on the single “Myela”, a heartfelt Afro-Latin stomper protesting the plight of refugees, which can grate. The song suddenly stops and female backing singers begin a nursery rhyme chant of “I am your neighbour, you are my neighbour”. On record it seems trite; however, in concert at this eye-pleasing, airy Bexhill-on-Sea venue, it’s transformative. Mulvey and his five-piece band use the sequence as a launch pad for a cosmic jam, before settling into a brief snippet of Gary Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Kerry Godliman is such an affable and down-to-earth onstage presence that when she talks about whether she should move now that her area has upped and come – you can tell by the local baker making sourdough loaves – you think how much her neighbours would miss her.Moving – whether geographically or along the social scale – is the central theme of Stick or Twist (which I saw at Soho Theatre), but Godliman neatly swerves into lots of other territory including bad parenting, female friendship and the invasion of hipsters in her previously gritty London abode. If she and her husband sold up, she Read more ...
The Lady from the Sea, Donmar Warehouse review - Nikki Amuka-Bird luminous in a sympathetic ensemble
David Nice
What a profoundly beautiful play is Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea. It stands in relation to the earlier, relatively confined A Doll’s House, Ghosts and Rosmersholm as Shakespeare's late romances do to the more claustrophobic tragedies. And with what apparent ease, art concealing art, do director Kwame Kwei-Armah, the Young Vic’s next Artistic Director, and the diamantine new performing version by Elinor Cook transport us in the Donmar Warehouse from a Norwegian fjord in the 1880s to the Caribbean of the 1950s.Nothing is lost of the play's essence, the race issue only brushed in with the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
On paper this was a fairly austere piece of programming. No variety in composer, genre or style, just four Bach Partitas in a row, works of similar approach, length and technique. And yet in performance, in the hands of Angela Hewitt, there was sufficient variety, not to mention poetry, humanity and wit, to make for a completely satisfying recital.It is extraordinary that of over a thousand pieces written by J S Bach only about a dozen were published in his lifetime. The pieces he chose as his opus 1 – although published in 1731 when he was in his 40s and already a hugely experienced composer Read more ...