Reviews
Marina Vaizey
The controversial historian Niall Ferguson is the author of some dozen books, including substantial narratives of the Rothschild dynasty, a history of money, and a study of Henry Kissinger up to and including the Vietnam war. His new one has the subtitle Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power, and in it he turns his attention to analysing that most overworked 21st century word, “network”, as well as one that makes many uncomfortable in its encapsulation of inequality, “hierarchy”.We are given to conspiracy theories, but Ferguson goes well beyond exploding such myths – we are Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The first thing to say about Lucy Worsley’s Nights at the Opera (BBC Two) is that it is laser-aimed at those who have not enjoyed many nights at the opera. Enjoyed in the sense of attended; also, probably, in the sense of enjoyed. Anyone who is a regular at the Garden, or keeps a plaid rug permanently pegged out by the Glyndebourne ha-ha, or is a life member of the Netrebko claque, approach if you dare, but with smelling salts to hand.Television occasionally feels it must demystify opera for the masses who subsidise it, strip away that elitist veneer and lay bare an elemental core. Harry Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
80 Aching Orphans ought to be hard work. A four-CD, 80-track, 274-minute overview chronicling 45 years of one of pop’s most wilful bands should be a challenging listen. The Residents have never made records which are straightforward or were meant to be, and have never made records conforming to prevailing trends. Sometimes, they’ve chimed with the ethos of passing zeitgeists like punk but, when that’s happened, it’s been about the times themselves rather than anything intrinsic to The Residents.However, with its flow and internal harmoniousness the casebound box set 80 Aching Orphans Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
Loneliness: in the age of the digital hook-up and the flaunting narcissism of social media, it’s become a strange sort of taboo – a secret shame, the unsexy side of singledom. So it’s good to see playwright David Eldridge putting it centre-stage in this tender, pleasingly unsentimental two-hander. Written with wry humour, warmth and compassion, and delicately threaded through with painful laughter and uncertainty, Beginning is like an emotional striptease, peeling away the defences of its pair of needy characters. In Polly Findlay’s assured, delicate production at the National Theatre, it’s Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Northern Ballet do a challenging job really well: on a mid-scale touring company budget and doing all the things mid-scale touring companies have to do (tour, obviously, but also outreach and audience-building and Christmas ballets for children), they manage to create a constant stream of new work, and have built up a real competence in storytelling on stage. But what they don't get to do is perform the greats of the classical ballet repertoire, either 19th or 20th century. Those have demands all their own, and Northern's dancers don't have the chance to work familiarity with those demands Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Screen biographies are tricky things to pull off when the person portrayed has left behind an indelible screen presence. It was hard to love Michelle Williams dragging up for My Week with Marilyn; Grace of Monaco was far from Nicole Kidman’s finest hour. But Annette Bening is wholly mesmerising as Gloria Grahame, Oscar-winning femme fatale turned jobbing actress in late '70s England.Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool is based on actor Peter Turner’s slim, self-deprecating memoir of his love affair with Grahame, first published in 1986 some five years after her death. Turner met the Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Dances of earth and songs of sea – the BBC Symphony Orchestra's latest programme offered an inspired coupling, where similar inspirations balanced contrasting styles. In a gritty first half, Birtwistle’s Earth Dances played out over a continuous 40-minute span of uncompromising modernism. In the second, we heard Vaughan Williams’ equally expansive A Sea Symphony, music of a more lyrical cast. But that sense of expanse, of music inspired by the vastness of nature, was the linking factor, and the two works complemented each other well, especially in these excellent performances.Birtwistle ( Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The awful mother, the celebrity-obsessed teenager, the mediocre old writer who wants some young sex in his life – there are motifs in Chekhov’s The Seagull that fly merrily from one century to another, and Simon Stephens and Sean Holmes’ new modern-dress update for the Lyric, starring Lesley Sharp, is fresh and accomplished, even if the classic bird's flight is rather lopsided. The comic wing turns out to flap more strongly than its tragic one, but it's good the Lyric’s notably young audience can think of a 120-year-old play as a play for today.The vision borrows something from reality Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
They’re all going into TV nowadays, and here amid the cinematic runners and riders at the LFF is David Fincher directing Mindhunter. It's Netflix’s new series about the FBI in the Seventies, when the Bureau was slowly starting to realise that catching criminals needed more than the old “just the facts, ma’am” approach. Society is changing and so is crime, with serial killers like Ted Bundy and David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz baffling the sleuthing community with their seemingly motiveless killings. Into this strange new world walks Agent Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), who, despite his Joe College Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Loving Vincent was clearly a labour of love for all concerned, so I hope it doesn't seem churlish to wish that a Van Gogh biopic some seven or more years in the planning had spent more time at the drawing board. By that I don't mean yet further devotion to an already-painstaking emphasis on visuals that attempt to recreate the artist's own palette in filmmaking terms. The fact is, no amount of eye-catching amplitude can overcome consistently tin-eared writing, and by the point someone posed the onscreen question, "Did you know he was a genius?", I was primed to drain my own face of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Before they even step on stage The Pretenders win me to their side. An announcement prior to their appearance tells the audience, “The Pretenders request you keep your phone in your pocket.” Brilliantly, these aren’t idle words. As the gig progresses security quietly but firmly approach anyone with their phone out and asks them to desist. A few songs into the set, Chrissie Hynde has just begun a stripped-down take on her 1986 hit “Hymn to Her”, accompanied only by Welsh keyboard-player Carwyn Ellis, when she stops short. “Would everyone rather watch you take pictures than me sing?” she asks Read more ...
David Nice
"Mitsuko Uchida plays Mozart" might have been the marketing tag to sell out this first concert in the Scottish Chamber Orchestra's 2017-18 season (despite student and free under-18s take-up, the Usher Hall still wasn't full). "Dvořák Symphony No. 8" was in fact the headline, marking the launch of Robin Ticciati's last series as the SCO's hugely successful Principal Conductor. As it turned out, Berlioz's early Overture Les Francs-Juges offered the real shake-up of the evening, the shock of the new as good as a contemporary work – better than most instances – with an unusual complement for Read more ...