Reviews
aleks.sierz
Location, location, location. Jim thinks he lives in the “shittiest” small town in Scotland. It’s Mallaig, on the west coast, and he’s a deeply troubled 32-year-old, working for a fish merchant and as a nature guide, but having no friends. His flat is tiny and messy, and it smells bad. Still, he enjoys his own company, and has a great collection of crustaceans in formaldehyde. It’s his hobby. As actor Sophie Wu shows in her 80-minute debut play he has good reason to feel depressed. It’s because of what happened to him 15 years ago.Yet Jim is not totally solitary. He has a girlfriend, 19-year- Read more ...
David Nice
Three “little greats,” as Opera North might put it, proved just the thing to cleanse the palate in a quiet place the afternoon after the LSO/Rattle Stravinsky trilogy. Composed following a breakdown in 1914, the year after the premiere of The Rite of Spring and only two years before his untimely death at the age of 43, Max Reger’s Cello Suites are not so much early neo-Baroque – Bach is the unescapable role model, unequivocally homaged in the first – as neo-everything, and even proto-Prokofiev in the second movement of No. 2. To hear them played with impassioned resonance in a religious space Read more ...
David Nice
“Next he’ll be walking on water,” allegedly quipped a distinguished figure at the official opening of Simon Rattle’s new era at the helm of the London Symphony Orchestra. Well, last night, with no celebratory overload around the main event, the homecomer was flying like a firebird, and taking a newly galvanised orchestra with him, at the start of another genuine spectacular. And that's no exaggeration, for how often, if ever, have you encountered all three of Stravinsky’s biggest, and earliest, ballets in a single concert?This journey from the compendium-salute to the Russian romantic Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Beautiful, shy, charming and talented, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a shining star who streaked across the New York skyline for a few brief years in the early 1980s before a heroin overdose claimed his life at the age of only 27. I’ve introduced him as a phenomenon rather than an artist, because that’s how the Barbican exhibition presents him. The upstairs space charts his meteoric rise to fame from the graffiti writer, SAMO © (same old shit) to the painter whose 1982 canvas of a skull fetched over $110 million at Sotheby’s last May. The highest price ever paid at auction for an Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Truth is pursued in different ways in Alice Childress’s groundbreaking 1955 Trouble in Mind, and its play-within-a-play story of rehearsals for a Broadway show fully mines the range of theatrical opportunities, for much comic as well as rather more serious purpose. On the one hand, it’s the decade when method acting was becoming all the rage, which has the (white) director Al (Jonathan Singer) bamboozling – and sometimes plain manipulating – his (largely black) cast into bringing extra power to their performances.But the other level at which Childress explores the concept of truth is more Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Of the many good reasons for seeing Akram Khan’s 2016 remake of Giselle – his work is often a headline event, for one – the most compelling is the company performing it. English National Ballet used to be the poor relation of its plusher sister national flagship in WC2. Not any more. Under the leadership of the fabulous Tamara Rojo (formerly a major attraction at that plush national flagship) it has been transformed from a troupe of also-rans into a company of demons."Demonic" is the only word for the ferocious energy and precision with which ENB’s dancers deliver Khan's extraordinary feat of Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A spate of tennis-themed films gets off to a vivid if incomplete start with Borg/McEnroe, which recreates the run-up to the Wimbledon Men's Final in 1980 with often-thrilling clarity and (as much as is possible for those who will of course recall the outcome) suspense. Where Danish director Janus Metz drops the ball is with a script that doesn't keep pace with the innate energy of the subject matter.Indeed, I wasn't at all surprised to learn that this film in Björn Borg's native Sweden is being marketed on the strength of his surname alone, leaving McEnroe to fend for himself, much as Read more ...
Jasper Rees
That the countryside is a dump where all good things come to a dead end is hardly a new punchline. There are plenty of novels and memoirs, and indeed newspaper columns, about trading the toxic metropolis for the green and unpleasant pastures of the rural life. The joke is it’s mainly horrible for a narrow spectrum of predictable reasons. It’s muddy, petrol costs a bomb, bored kids are forever after lifts, and as for the people…Now Jack Dee is in on the joke. Bad Move, which he has co-written with Pete Sinclair, finds Steve and his wife Nicky (Kerry Godliman), who seem to be Read more ...
Liz Thomson
As pretty much everything but a plague of locusts is visited upon this grim old world, an evening in the company of Neil Sedaka is the greatest of pick-me-ups. At the Royal Albert Hall on Monday, as his UK tour drew to a close, the capacity audience clearly felt uplifted, borne aloft on a raft of enduring songs and the evident enjoyment of the man who wrote them.Sixty years ago this year, Sedaka made his first appearance on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and signed a recording contract with RCA. Since then he’s written some 600 songs, the latest so recent he needed the lyrics propped up on Read more ...
David Nice
Has Hackney ever seen or heard such a spectacle – a full Hungarian orchestra taking up most of the Empire stalls to complete the semi-circle of a relatively empty stage? And did enough of London get to hear about it? I certainly wouldn’t have done had it not been for a chance conversation with Péter Eötvös, a leading figure in Hungary’s beleaguered but still thriving cultural life, in an interval of the Budapest Ring. You don’t often get to witness a major composer conduct his own response to a masterpiece – Senza Sangue, a psychological two-hander fit with Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle – so Read more ...
Dylan Moore
Port Talbot (population 38,000) is a town on the south Wales coast famous for two things: steel and actors. The birthplace of Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins and Michael Sheen made a rare foray into the national consciousness at the beginning of last year when Tata Steel threatened to close the plant that employs 10% of the town. It had been making a loss of £1m a day, largely due to flooding of the global market by China. National Theatre Wales have returned to the scene of the greatest triumph in the company’s short history, the perhaps unsurpassable Passion (starring Sheen), for Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Take one off-the-wall spoof spy thriller that becomes an unexpected hit. Add a bunch of gratuitous guest stars (mostly American). Stretch formula to 140 minutes. Stand clear and wait for the box office stampede.This seems to have been the recipe for this follow-up to 2015’s Kingsman: The Secret Service, likewise helmed by Matthew Vaughn, who once again wrote the screenplay with Jane Goldman. Sadly, much of what made the first film work has vanished this time around. Despite having apparently died in the first one, Colin Firth is back as Harry Hart, but his aura of fastidiously hand-tailored Read more ...