Reviews
aleks.sierz
What does it mean to feel contemporary? Feel. Contemporary. According to theatre-maker Chris Thorpe, whose new play Victory Condition has just opened at the Royal Court in tandem with Guillermo Calderón’s B, being contemporary is a really disturbing mixture of feeling all-powerful and completely powerless. In a short two-hander, Thorpe emphasises that something is very wrong at the heart of daily life. We all know this; we all feel this. But what is it? Well, it’s the sense that everything is on the verge of breakdown.Set in a modern new-built flat, Victory Condition is basically two Read more ...
stephen.walsh
This week is Prison Week in the Christian Churches, and it would be nice, if fanciful, to think that WNO programmed their revival of Janáček’s From the House of the Dead with that in mind. More likely the thinking was that it fitted well enough into their Russian Revolution celebration, in view of its Russian source (Dostoyevsky) and setting (a Siberian prison camp), though one might have hoped that, among this bevy of autumn revivals (Khovanshchina and Eugene Onegin are both also old productions) some room - and funding - might have been found for an actual post-Revolution opera, as broadly Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This is not a movie to see in the front row – intrusive close-ups, hand-held camerawork, colour saturated night shots and a relentless synthesiser score all conspire to make Good Time, shown at London Film Festival, a wild ride. An unrecognisable Robert Pattinson plays Connie Nikas, a nervy con artist who enlists his intellectually disabled brother Nick in a bank robbery. The heist goes horribly wrong and the camera clings to the brothers’ and their nightmarish fate over the next 24 hours. Directed by real life brothers Josh and Benny Safdie (the latter also plays Nick), Good Time is a homage Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
An American TV show about drugs and drug dealers? How frightfully novel. At least The Deuce (showing now on Sky Atlantic) is about pornography instead.Anyhow Snowfall has been created by John Singleton, of Boyz n the Hood fame, and whisks us back to Los Angeles in 1983, where a crack cocaine epidemic is about to erupt and unleash all kinds of lawless, gang-warfare hell. For the time being though, South Central LA is presented as a prelapsarian demi-paradise, a friendly, sunlit neighbourhood where the only thing folks shoot is the breeze, under brilliant blue skies. The most memorable shot in Read more ...
Marianka Swain
A year after premiering acclaimed French playwright Florian Zeller’s The Truth, the Menier Chocolate Factory now hosts The Lie – which, as the name suggests, acts as a companion piece of sorts. Once again, we’re in a slippery Pinteresque realm, the seemingly conventional domestic set-up teasingly deconstructed as Zeller challenges our conception of honesty and morality.This latest Lindsay Posner-directed import is similarly light-hearted – compared with the weightier Zeller double of The Mother and The Father – and once again features two affluent couples, with the same names, plus Read more ...
David Nice
Television has paid its dues to the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act - rather feebly, with some rotten acting, in Man in an Orange Shirt; brilliantly, with mostly superb performances, in the monologue sequence Queers, surely due a second series. Now it's the turn of one of our greatest novelists - no need to add the qualifying "on gay subjects" - to make even richer work than Queers of stimulating our imaginations by leaving us to fill in the gaps."The Sparsholt Affair" is the big, offstage crisis at the heart of Alan Hollinghurst's dance to the music of time, his pictures at an Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Beware – here be spoilers, though if you can make them out through the blizzard of cliché that engulfed the last double-bill of this thunderingly underwhelming Nordic noir then you’re already ahead of me.Black Lake (BBC Four) saw a group of largely unlikable wealthy young people, led by the rude and overbearing Johan (Filip Berg, pictured below), stuck at a ski resort in the middle of nowhere with, wait for it: no phone signal, a pair of unlikely brothers (one of whom looks like a serial killer, while the other acts like one) and, best of all, a grumpy and deeply suspicious caretaker. After Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The dour, reclusive disgraced doctor Fredrik Welin has appeared once before in Henning Mankell’s work, in The Italian Shoes. The shoes appear early on in After the Fire as ghosts, referred to as bespoke luxuries made by an admired craftsman, and held in affection by their owner. They have been reduced to charred fragments, one burnt buckle surviving in the shocking aftermath of the destruction by fire of the protagonist’s ancestral island home, where he has lived alone for decades.No detective Wallender here, that hero of the substantial series of novels set in the Swedish provinces for which Read more ...
Jasper Rees
One New Year’s Eve in the 1970s, hot young session musicians Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards were assured by Grace Jones that they could penetrate the inner sanctum of Studio 54 by dropping her name at the door. A doorman thought otherwise and invited them to "fuck off". Making alternative arrangements, they bought a couple of bottles of Dom Perignon – “rock’n’roll mouthwash”, in Rodgers’ phrase – and went home to jam.The doorman’s valediction kept running through their heads and came out in a rhythmic disco riff. “Fuck off. Fuck Studio 54.” The tune was more radio-friendly than the verbatim Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Anyone who finds Eric Clapton and The Bee Gees’ Barry Gibb stepping up to offer their services as their producer is obviously special. It’s a view reinforced by knowing Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham and Small Faces were already their champions. Only one person fits this unique bill.PP Arnold has had no lack of starry support yet her passage through the music business has been disjointed. The release of The Turning Tide adds to what was known and also plugs gaps. The 13-cut album collects tracks she made with Clapton, Gibb and Elton John associate Caleb Quaye. All but two are Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
An irresistible tragedy: young man of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent, from Brooklyn, multilingual, brilliantly precocious, who left his middle class home to turn to street life in Manhattan, metamorphosing into a mesmerising graffiti artist. SAMO© was his response to "how are you?" Same old shit...Living in the blitzed Lower East Side in the late 1970s and early 1980s when New York was nearly bankrupt and deserted by the conventional middle class was a moment of creative explosion; living was cheap and artists poured into the city. The East Village and north of Houston (Noho) and south of Read more ...
David Nice
There's something here for everyone, as a "roll up!" slogan for one of the greatest shows in town might put it. Even opera buffs don't seem to have found much to fault with the cornucopia of sounds, moving pictures, objects, paintings, drawings and even a working stage set handsomely displayed in the spacious areas beneath the Victoria & Albert's gleaming new Exhibition Road entrance.Discrimination proves key. "Operas and cities" is the brief, which could have sprawled or resulted in some inapposite choices, but what we have is impeccable. In the first two "theatres", it looks as if there Read more ...