Reviews
aleks.sierz
Prolific playwright James Graham aspires to be nothing if not timely. His latest, a play about the Labour Party, was originally due to open during the week of that party’s conference, when our ears were once again ringing to the chant of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!” Unfortunately, the play’s TV star Sarah Lancashire had to pull out, so its West End opening was delayed until tonight. Her replacement, Tamsin Greig, joins Martin Freeman in this epic comedy about a Labour MP in an era of change. It’s a starry cast, but does the play’s content live up to its billing?Opening with familiar chords of the Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
As predictable as night following day, you can almost sense the transitional change from summer to autumn by the onset of a new football season accompanied by the latest FIFA instalment. Football needs context for it to grab the armchair midfield general. A title challenge, relegation battle or lengthy cup run are the norm, but last year FIFA 17 introduced The Journey, a soap-opera style narrative that involved guiding the young talent of Alex Hunter from football academy obscurity to Premiership star striker.In FIFA 18, The Journey is back with a bigger scope than before. Hunter is tempted Read more ...
aleks.sierz
In the 1960s, we had the theatre of commitment; today we have an attitude of non-committal. Once, political playwrights could be guaranteed to tell you what to think, to describe what was wrong with society – and what to do about it. Now, as Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderón’s new play, B – which was developed by the Royal Court’s international programme – makes clear, the keynote is ambiguity and an ironic detachment. It sets the tone for this venue’s autumn season, in which “emerging writers from across the world make radical new work for Britain”.B starts innocently enough with Marcela Read more ...
David Nice
They say that Wigmore Hall audiences know their Lieder singers, but last night's far from packed house dispelled that illusion; the hall has been full for much lesser artists than German soprano Anne Schwanewilms. No matter; she gave her usual masterclass, ineffably poised between tone-colour, phrasing and word-pointing. Having hit the heights in Strauss, Schumann and Wolf in previous recitals, she found a deep centre this time in serious, almost operatic Schubert. Regular song-partner Charles Spencer's space and orchestral sonorities helped conjure vast landscapes and epic human emotions in Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Peter Moffat, author of Silk and The Village, has turned his sights on the last days of Empire for his latest series. Specifically, Moffat has mined his own memories of growing up in a British Army family in Aden in the 1960s, where his father was in the Military Police.The story begins as Captain Nick Page (Joseph Kennedy) is about to leave Aden (an unprepossessing but strategically significant port in what is now Yemen), to be replaced by the young and untried Captain Joe Martin (Jeremy Neumark Jones, pictured below with Jessie Buckley). Behind him, Page leaves a garrison Read more ...
stephen.walsh
About Khovanshchina I once had serious doubts. Leaving aside its unfinished condition, it always struck me as what Wagnerians would call a bleeding chunk of history, unstructured, confused, over-researched and dramaturgically obscure. Three recent performances in Shostakovich’s powerful performing edition of Mussorgsky's incomplete original have completely changed my mind: Graham Vick’s incomparable “promenade” production in the People’s Tent at Edgbaston three years ago, Semyon Bychkov’s Proms performance this summer, and now this revival of David Pountney’s at that time still problematic Read more ...
David Kettle
The Reagan administration produced as much video content as the previous five administrations combined. That’s the claim early on in The Reagan Show, an engaging but ultimately frustrating documentary compiled entirely from archive footage by co-directors Sierra Pettengill and Pacho Velez. So remorseless was the administration’s taping of carefully staged scenes or managed press conferences that it even got its own name – White House TV.And if JFK was the first US president to harness the power of television, then Reagan was the first to embark on a concerted attempt to manipulate the broader Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Richard Goode is one of the world’s great pianists, but you wouldn’t guess it from his humble and unpretentious stage manner. He wears thick glasses and squints into the music, and when he plays he sings along under his breath. When he is not playing, he often turns and gestures vaguely at the orchestra, not so much aping the conductor as moving with the flow of the music. He clearly lives every note, and everything he does is to the service of the score.Not virtuoso showmanship, then, and little bravado, though his playing is always lucid and engaging. That’s an ideal combination for Mozart’ Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Along with Balzac’s Paris and Dickens’s London, Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul now ranks as one of the most illustrious author-trademarked cities in literary history. Yet, as Turkey’s Nobel laureate told me during a Southbank Centre interview last month, he never set out to appropriate his home town as a sort of personal brand: it was simply the beloved backdrop of his childhood and youth. These days, he sometimes feels annoyed when critics harp on about the ineffable melancholy and nostalgia (hüzün is the Turkish word) that haunts his depictions of the picturesque old imperial capital that has Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Immediately before recording their first album in 1977, Motörhead were on their last legs. They went into the studio after playing what was initially conceived as their farewell show. Appropriately, no one then could have predicted that the band formed by Hawkwind’s former bass player in 1975 would become integral to rock’s rich tapestry. It wasn’t even their first attempt to make an album: one begun in 1975 had been shelved. The early Motörhead were bedevilled by false starts and upsets.The unpremeditated subsequent durability of the band has ensured Motörhead was never deleted. Read more ...
David Nice
Three tall orders must be met in any successful transfer of an Ingmar Bergman text from screen to stage. First, take a company of actors as good as the various ones that the master himself assembled over the years, both in his films and in the theatre; Ivo van Hove’s Toneelgroep is one of the few in the world today up to the mark, working just as intensively. Second, make sure the look of it isn’t a pale copy of the films – this isn’t. Third, while staying true to the essence, find something new. By making After the Rehearsal and Persona two very different sides of the same coin, an Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Sometimes you go to the theatre and in the first 10 minutes are convinced that the production is going to smash it, only to find by half time that it’s not. Initial delight gives way to mild irritation, and as a member of the ticket-buying public you draw a line under it and hope for better luck next time. A critic, however, must identify what didn’t work and why. Sally Cookson’s stage adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s best-loved novel seems to have everything going for it: dynamism, narrative clarity and a willingness to strip the story to the beating heart beneath the corset-stays. It takes Read more ...