Reviews
aleks.sierz
Documentary theatre has a poor reputation. It’s boring in form, boring to look at (all those middle-aged men in suits), and usually only tells you what you already know. It’s journalism without the immediacy of the news. But there are other ways of writing contemporary history. In telling the story of the 1993 Oslo Accords – the first ever agreement between the State of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation – American playwright JT Rogers gets around the disadvantages of documentary theatre by writing what he calls “a scrupulously researched, meticulously written fiction”. And he Read more ...
Veronica Lee
She’s only 30, but Mae Martin has been at this comedy lark for a long time. By her own admission she was a rather strange child; she became obsessed with stand-up after her parents took her to a comedy club when she was 11, and she started performing in clubs in her native Toronto two years later – when the high from making people laugh took over her life.The comedy obsession was part of a pattern in her younger years, and in Dope she explores the compulsive behaviour that resulted in a serious drug addiction by the time she was in her mid-teens. She’s honest about the reasons why – hanging Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Caressing the microphone, and gazing into the audience with winsome, soulful sincerity, tousled auburn locks glistening in the stage light, Mads Mathias looks like nothing so much as Ed Sheeran’s more handsome older brother. His voice has the softest of rasps, like being rubbed gently with velvet, and he has his saxophone on hand, as if threatening to shimmer phrases of Sanborn smooth into the night.To judge purely by appearances Mathias seemed an incongruous choice for one of London’s most esteemed jazz venues. And yet, while seemingly at home in every stereotype of the romantic singer, Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
For his monster concerts in 1840s Paris, Berlioz took pride in assembling and marshalling a "great beast of an orchestra". At the Barbican on Sunday night, the LSO filled the stage and fitted the bill. Their thoroughbred tradition of Berlioz performance, long nurtured by the late Sir Colin Davis, looks set fair to be renewed by Sir Simon Rattle. Just as they had done last week in a remarkable survey of modern English music to open his tenure as music director, they gave him everything in La Damnation de Faust.Cramped acoustic be damned: there was playing here of unabashed violence, backed up Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Magnum was founded just after the war in 1947 as a co-operative that ensured both the quality of its members, and their clout in dealing with the media world. Its longevity is testimony to its success. The original founders were war-hardened photo journalists and included Robert Capa and David “Chim” Seymour; the first woman member was Eve Arnold, who joined in 1951.The linking of its members to cinema was the hook for this fascinating French documentary on BBC Four, written and directed by Sophie Bassaler, with a delicate voiceover by Sharon Mann and evocative music by Harry Allouche. There Read more ...
Drawn in Colour: Degas from the Burrell Collection review - guilty pleasures at the National Gallery
Florence Hallett
If only a modest fuss is being made about the rare and prestigious loan currently residing in Trafalgar Square, it could be that the National Gallery is keen to forget the role of its former director, Dr Nicholas Penny, in a row about art transportation that centred on the very collection to which these objects belong. Of the 13 Degas pastels that form the core of this small but wondrous exhibition, most have never been seen outside Glasgow, where they are among the highlights of the magnificent art collection bequeathed to the city in 1944 by the shipping magnate Sir William Burrell.In an Read more ...
Robert Beale
The first two one-acters in Opera North’s season called The Little Greats were unveiled on Saturday. There are six in all, scheduled on a mix-and-match basis so Leeds opera-goers can choose their own tapas menu: grab one show, choose from various pairs, or even try three on a Saturday (including a matinee) if you want to.Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci and Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges were both originally slated to be conducted by Aleksandar Markovic when he was the company’s music director. But the entire enterprise is the most thoroughgoing example yet of its ensemble philosophy, with Read more ...
Will Rathbone
Thebes Land returns to the Arcola Theatre as part of the wider CASA Latin American Theatre Festival, following a short 2016 run that resulted in an Off West End Award, or Offie, for Best Production. Director Daniel Goldman's pinpoint translation of Franco-Uruguayan playwright Sergio Blanco's original text proves a tight, exhilarating two-hander on themes of violence and the ethical boundaries of theatre itself.Writer T (Trevor White) is devising a play based on a series of interviews he is conducting with Martin (Alex Austin), a prisoner serving a life sentence for murdering his father, and Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“Keep here your watch, and never part.” There was a strong symbolism of standing and singing together in the last moments of the Grenfell Tower Benefit Concert. After singing the Lament of Purcell's Dido, Christine Rice made her way back slowly through the orchestra to join the choir. All 150 participants in the concert, operatic stars, young singers, conductor, a special orchestra assembled from various London orchestras joined in for the final chorus of Dido and Aeneas. All had given their services for free to support charities helping Grenfell Tower survivors. The organisers ensured Read more ...
David Nice
Hands both sensitive and surgical are needed to guide a reader into the heart of the 20th century’s second biggest genocide and out again. Anne Applebaum is the right person for a queasy and difficult task, never turning away from the horrifying details of the man-made famine that caused nearly four million deaths throughout Ukraine in 1932-3 but also giving it a context of before and after that ends on a positive note for the nation’s sovereignty. At last, it seems, a new intelligentsia is rising up in the country to replace the cultured Ukrainians wiped out in the 1930s, whose absence led Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
What would Saturday nights be without BBC Four’s regular subtitle-fests? Black Lake, their new Swedish import, has nothing in the way of originality to recommend it, but its tale of a haunted ski resort somewhere out towards the Norwegian border may help to ward off seasonal ennui as temperatures fall and the evenings draw in. The story so far: Johan (Filip Berg), an impatient young capitalist, wants to buy the derelict resort of Svartsjön, and gathers together a bunch of his buddies go and check the place out. Initially it seems like the kind of experience the average Brit Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In February 1965, Melody Maker asked John Lennon about his personal enthusiasm for Bob Dylan material and Dylan interpretations. “I just felt like going that way,” he said about the new acoustic guitar-based material The Beatles were then recording at Abbey Road. “If I’d not heard Dylan, it might have been that I’d written stuff and sung it like Dominic Behan, or somebody like that.” Despite the non-committal answer, Dylan’s impact on Lennon was clear – the cap he'd recently been wearing was evidence of that.Out of the public eye, Lennon – after being hipped to the album by George Harrison – Read more ...