Reviews
Liz Thomson
We are now firmly in the post-truth era as defined by Oxford Dictionaries: "adjective - relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief." Never have we been more in need of honest discourse, but dishonesty – or what Alan Clark memorably described as “being economical with the actualité” – has somehow become the order of the day.We don’t expect honesty from Fox or the Daily Mail but other media sources we once believed existed to tell the truth no longer feel compelled to do so: The Times Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Robert Harris’s first book about Hitler told the story of the hoax diaries which seduced Rupert Murdoch and Hugh Trevor-Roper. After Selling Hitler (1986) came Fatherland (1992), another fake story about the Führer. In that alternative history the Third Reich had stuck to a non-aggression pact with Britain and expanded unopposed into the lebensraum of the Soviet Union. One founding fact of the thriller was that at Munich in September 1938, Britain and Germany made a commitment to peace in our time.That infamous piece of paper has lured Harris back to Nazi Germany after 25 years. This time he Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Breathing through an oxygen mask with a busted diaphragm and rib after shooting a single scene in mother!, Jennifer Lawrence had rarely suffered more for her art. Nor have we. Darren Aronofsky's latest begins as an enjoyably enigmatic, Polanskiesque waking nightmare, as the Mother (Lawrence) and her beloved Poet (Javier Bardem) find creepy strangers barging into their happy home. It ends in ineffectual, flailing chaos.The blurring of mythic dreams with supposed reality begins in the first minutes, as a fire-razed mansion reconstitutes itself around Lawrence as she sleeps. Big close-ups and Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
After all the talk and anticipation, at last some music. Simon Rattle took up the reins of the London Symphony Orchestra last night – as its first ever “Music Director” – with a programme dedicated to home-grown composers whose lives span the lifetime of the orchestra. It set out Rattle’s ambition for his leadership of the LSO, who duly responded with performances of intelligence, passion and power.Of the five composers featured, four are still alive and, as Rattle had maintained in an interview, “Elgar is so lively he’s basically a living composer”. Most have a connection to the LSO or to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Jack Cardiff was one of the all-time greats of cinematography, the man who shot such Powell and Pressburger classics as The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death, worked on John Huston’s The African Queen with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, and lensed Marilyn Monroe in The Prince and the Showgirl. He was renowned as “the man who makes women look beautiful”, but despite this he didn’t shrink from shooting Sylvester Stallone in Rambo: First Blood (Part II).Terry Johnson’s new play for Hampstead Theatre depicts Cardiff in his twilight years, reliving chunks of his past while his Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The charm quickly palls in Victoria and Abdul, a watery sequel of sorts to Mrs Brown that salvages what lustre it can from its octogenarian star, the indefatigable Judi Dench. Illuminating a little-known friendship between Queen Victoria in her waning years and the Indian servant, Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal), whom she invited into her inner sanctum, the busy Stephen Frears and his screenwriter Lee Hall could use considerably more of the incisiveness and wit that made Frears's similarly royalty-minded The Queen soar. Instead, we get a characteristically deft character portrait from Dench Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
History comes to the stage of the Globe only rarely – at least if you compare the frequency of productions there from that segment of the Shakespearean canon against the tragedies and comedies – which is certainly one reason to welcome Boudica. Much more importantly, however, Tristan Bernays's new play offers a crackingly powerful central female role, one which puts the first-century British queen right at the centre of the narrative. It’s one that has the kind of sheer dramatic grandeur that admits contradiction of character, and Gina McKee has made it her own.Given that Bernays has written Read more ...
David Kettle
You’ve got to hand it to David Greig. The artistic director of Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre has shown quite a knack for surfing the zeitgeist with his programming – and more importantly, tackling urgent political issues in a properly theatrical way.He did it with last year’s season opener, Aeschylus’s The Suppliant Women, and its parallels with today’s refugee crises. He did it in August with Rhinoceros for the Edinburgh International Festival (a production that returns to the Lyceum in February), Zinnie Harris’s new Ionesco adaptation as a thinly veiled critique of Trump and how easily people Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
The first Destiny game cost an eye-watering $500 million to produce and promptly banked $500 million from first-week sales. It was the biggest new franchise launch of all time. Following the lead from Hollywood, the equation of big budget equals even bigger business rang loud from the cash tills.Why so popular? Mix the slick sci-fi shooter antics of the award-winning Halo games (Destiny 2 is built by the same developer), with the addictive character levelling and multiplayer action associated loosely with the World of Warcraft titles (the most successful MMO to date). Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The gallery walls of Tate Britain have been taken down so turning a warren of interlinking rooms into a large, uncluttered space in which Rachel Whiteread’s sculptures are arranged as a single installation. What a challenge! And curators Ann Gallagher and Linsey Young are to be congratulated for pulling off this difficult feat so seamlessly. Seeing the work altogether has a profound effect, though. It reveals the exceptional beauty of everything Whiteread has produced and emphasises the uniformity of her vision. After all, she has spent the last three decades making casts in plaster Read more ...
Barney Harsent
While Horizon, on BBC2, was telling us that the first person to walk on Mars could well be walking among us now, ITV's 100 Year Old Driving School suggested that the space mission could take a major setback if that wannabe astronaut were to encounter Joan Beech on the roads. She was one of the (mainly nonagenerian) drivers who had agreed to have their driving assessed to see whether they were still roadworthy. In the case of Joan (pictured below), it was a firm "no". Wrong gear, a failure to distinguish between different gears (or, indeed, left and right) and the identification of a Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This is the sixth revival of David McVicar’s production of Die Zauberflöte at Covent Garden since its debut in 2003. It was heard most recently in 2015, and is modestly described in the Royal Opera’s own publicity as a “classic”. Having not seen it until now, I enjoyed the singing and was impressed with the set and lighting, but I found the staging in some ways neither fish nor fowl.Last year, Alexandra Coghlan for theartsdesk found Simon McBurney’s production at English National Opera to be “revelatory” in its inventive theatricality. Here McVicar, and revival director Thomas Guthrie, dip Read more ...