Reviews
Jenny Gilbert
God makes few appearances at the modern playhouse – so few that the Finborough Theatre saw fit to print a glossary in the programme for its latest production. What begins with Agnostic, Annunciation and Aramaic runs all the way to Spirit Guide, Utopia and Vespers, which gives some idea of the breadth of reference to be found in this tightly constructed three-hander by New York writer Keith Bunin.Hannah (Kazia Pelka) is an Episcopalian minister (the US equivalent of Anglican), wont to accessorise her clerical collar with combat pants and sneakers. She may be a fervent Bible scholar, but she is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
What a difference an ocean and a change of scale can make. When I saw the Mel Brooks musical Young Frankenstein on Broadway a decade ago, the show seemed to take its cue from the lumbering monster contained within it, who stutters and sputters before eventually being kickstarted into something resembling life. All involved have since been back to the laboratory, and the happy news is that its West End iteration is a thing of joy. For once, I really did laugh until I cried, not least in amazement that so unapologetically bawdy, lowdown a romp has somewhere along the way acquired a heart. Read more ...
Heather Neill
Bold and fearless are adjectives that might describe playwright Rory Mullarkey as accurately as any chivalrous knight. He made his name in 2013 when, at the age of 25, his play Cannibals, part of which was in Russian, took to the main stage at the Manchester Royal Exchange and went on to win the James Tait Black Prize. He has written opera libretti, a play about revolution for the Royal Court, The Wolf from the Door, and a version of The Oresteia for the Globe. And now here he is filling the Olivier’s wide spaces with an epic modern folk tale.Saint George and the Dragon comes, in proper Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The crime novels of Jo Nesbø are rampaging Nordic psycho-operas. The author's Oslo detective Harry Hole is a lofty alcoholic who takes an outrageous pummelling in his pursuit of deranged serial killers. His many adventures fill the crime shelves in bookshops with their fat spines in flashing yellow upper case, but until now he's been kept from the screen. Michael Fassbender feels like correct casting, a loping, freaky lunk who can embody obsession and self-loathing.In The Snowman, we first encounter Hole waking up on a public bench with a hangover from hell. He has an ex-girlfriend Rakel ( Read more ...
David Nice
It was a topsy-turvy evening. Sometimes the things you expect to turn out best disappoint, while in this case the relatively small beer yielded a true "Little Great" of a production and the best singing in Opera North's latest double bill (subject to reshuffling during the rest of the run). Janáček's Osud (Destiny) should have packed the emotional punch of the night – a score authentically vivid in every bar tied to an experimental plot and a libretto sometimes pretentious in its observations on art and life; Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti has more trouble finding its heart. But conviction, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is the 100th feature film by Takashi Miike, Japan’s fabled maestro of sex, horror and ultra-violent Yakuza flicks, and here he has found his subject in Hiroake Samura’s Blade of the Immortal manga comics. Manji (Takuya Kimura) is a veteran Samurai haunted by the cruel murder of his sister Machi, but saved from death himself by the “bloodworms” which were fed to him by a mysterious veiled crone and have rendered him immortal. If he loses a hand or is hacked by a sword, the worms speedily patch him up again.Fifty years after Machi’s death, Manji embarks on a new quest to avenge the murder Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Fish out of water come in various guises in Guillermo del Toro’s Cold War fable, shown at London Film Festival. The Shape of Water riffs on The Creature from the Black Lagoon with its amphibious man-god, captured in 1962 to be cattle-prodded and dissected by the film’s real monster, US agent Strickland (Michael Shannon). Elisa (Sally Hawkins), a mute cleaner at Strickland’s Area 51-style facility, her ageing, failing gay neighbour Giles (Richard Jenkins), black fellow cleaner Zelda (Octavia Spencer) and Soviet double-agent Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) are also feeling the American outsider Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s getting to that time of the century. A hundred years ago to the month, if not quite the day, the Winter Palace was stormed, and the Russian Revolution came to pass. To commemorate the communists’ accession, Russia 1917: Countdown to Revolution (BBC Two) pieced together the narrative for those who haven’t read all or indeed any of the books on the Bolsheviks.A battalion of historians answered the summons to give their version of events, the types whose titles are prominently displayed in airports and beyond. Indeed, if you lobbed a Molotov cocktail into the documentary's green room you’d Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
They’ve done it in a boat and a barn, a former poorhouse and even a tunnel shaft, and now Pop-Up Opera bring their latest production to a museum. Bethnal Green’s 19th-century Museum of Childhood provides an evocative frame for Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, its glass display cases and carefully glossed and labelled toys setting the tone for a production that takes a wry, curatorial approach to its material.This knowing, arch quality to the drama comes almost entirely from Harry Percival’s surtitles, or “captions” as they are more accurately termed in the programme. Freely Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Playwright Simon Stephens and director Marianne Elliott are hyped as a winning partnership. Their previous collaborations include The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a massive Olivier award-winning hit, and her sensitive revival of his early play, Port, at the National Theatre. Now they are in the West End again, this time with a two-hander starring Anne-Marie Duff and Kenneth Cranham. Despite the title, this is not a play about science, but about love, but it does concern chance. And uncertainty.Inspired by a vague notion of the Uncertainty Principle, which suggests that Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Richard Linklater’s sort-of sequel to one of the great American films of the Seventies, shown at London Film Festival, stars Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell and Laurence Fishburne as old Vietnam buddies reunited as America is embroiled in another futile war, in Iraq. On paper, it’s a timely and enticing prospect. Yet it’s not the impactful film it could have been.Directed by Hal Ashby, with Jack Nicholson in the spectacular early phase of his career, The Last Detail followed two Navy lifers as they escorted a younger seaman to military prison – determined to give him a good time on the way.It Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
What has 12 hands, 18 legs, 176 keys and two page-turners? Party night at the London Piano Festival, of course. The six-pianist, two-piano marathon on Saturday evening was a high point of this delectable four-day event – though far from the only one.Now in its second year, the London Piano Festival is the brainchild of the well-established piano duo Charles Owen and Katya Apekisheva. It’s a welcome addition to the London scene. We’re all used to piano recitals, but don’t always delve so deeply into the instrument’s galaxy of repertoire and the range of personalities among those who play it. Read more ...