Reviews
Ismene Brown
The late David Storey spoke movingly, elsewhere on The Arts Desk, of his sense of overwhelming powerlessness at the challenge of accepting his father’s death. “I was quite racked by his death, and what death had become as an abstraction - in other words, what's my death, what's death itself?” he said.The question that shapes his 1989 play, The March on Russia, is the equally overwhelming prologue to that particular state, what you might call pre-death, the purgatorial existence between the end of your working life and identity and death. In the case of two old people married 60 years, what Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Anyone who likes playing “Spot the weirdo” will find themselves instantly at home in Howard Brenton’s new play, which has its world premiere in this West End fringe venue, a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus. Its subject is Swedish playwright and writer August Strindberg, and the psychological crisis which he suffered while he was living in Paris in 1896. He documented this experience of breakdown and hallucination in his autobiographical novel, Inferno, written in fury while he was experiencing paranoia and other delusions. Helping Brenton make sense of Strindberg’s plight is Jasper Read more ...
David Nice
“I’m not in the mood” – “non sono in vena” – sings aspiring poet Rodolfo as he settles down to write a lead article. Was it me, or had the mood not settled by the premiere of the Royal Opera’s first new production of Puccini's structurally perfect favourite for 43 years? The singing was good to occasionally glorious, Antonio Pappano’s conducting predictably idiomatic and supportive. So was it wrong to expect our most imaginative opera director, Richard Jones, to have found his own idiosyncratic angle on a fairly unsinkable masterpiece?At the time of directing Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There are two Williams brothers – Jack and Harry – who are mainly known for two series of The Missing. No chance of the Williamses going missing. Quite the reverse. As of today – Monday 11 September – they seem to have cloned. Two new drama series by the Williams boys have started on BBC One and ITV at exactly the same minute, and they will both conclude at the same instant six episodes later. One can only imagine that the writers begged and pleaded one or both channels to separate them in the schedules, but it didn’t happen and here we are.On ITV there’s Liar. On BBC One, bid welcome to Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Could handsome, successful, designer-stubbly Ioan Gruffudd really be a rapist? Yes, according to schoolteacher Laura Nielson (Joanne Froggatt). No, according to Gruffudd’s character Andrew Earlham, a distinguished surgeon and widower apparently horrified to be accused of such a thing.As you may have heard, the scriptwriting Williams brothers (Harry and Jack) – famed for, among other things, The Missing – have been busy. Their six-part mystery Liar kicked off at exactly the same time as their six-part thriller Rellik on BBC One, a coincidence almost as uncanny as three hurricanes tearing up Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Sometimes you can find yourself hankering after those old-fashioned TV dramas where you got a self-contained story every week, so you can drop in on it at any time and still keep up with what’s going on. With Tin Star, on the other hand, you need to stick with it for at least four episodes before the scope of the story begins to reveal itself and it starts to exert a painful grip.For a while, it’s like Fargo meets Fortitude, with perhaps a squeeze of Lilyhammer. Surly British cop Jim Worth (Tim Roth) has moved to the chilly wilderness of Alberta to become sheriff of a no-horse town. With his Read more ...
Robert Beale
Every 21st birthday deserves a party, and the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester celebrated the anniversary of its opening with a weekend of fun and "access" events, ending with a recital by four pianists on its four Steinway pianos – playing them all at once, in eight-hand arrangements.It was very different from the opening 21 years ago, when orchestras dominated the programmes. This time even Manchester Camerata, the chamber orchestra with which the hall co-promotes events, moved round the corner to play in the gallery at HOME, a newer arts centre. But one of the early discoveries about this Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The Last Night of the Proms is always a beautifully choreographed event, and this year’s was no exception. The format changes little, but each year a new selection of works is chosen to fill the slots. The BBC Symphony Orchestra, always the backbone of the season, somehow manages to sound fresh for their final outing. And the audience was dependable as ever, listening attentively through the first half, but then taking control of the second, and by the end making events onstage more or less irrelevant.By recent tradition, the Last Night opens with a premiere. The commission presumably calls Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Over his long career – 23 novels, memoirs, his painfully believable narratives adapted into extraordinary films (10 for the big screen) and for television – John le Carré has created a world that has gripped readers and viewers alike. He has literally changed the landscape of thrillers and spy fiction, criticising bureaucracies, governments and corporations and other even broader sweeps of society along the way, turning genre into trenchant and critical observations about the post-war world. Along the way he has created fictional characters so well observed they live in the mind long after Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Once heard, 1969’s Spirit of the Golden Juice is not forgotten. F. J. McMahon’s sole album is imbued with the heavy air of desolation. Its nine country tinged songs are also melodic and as good as those by Tim Hardin and Fred Neil, with whom McMahon is most often compared. Unlike them, McMahon had not steered a path through the folk circuit to achieve recognition. Instead, Spirit of the Golden Juice was pressed in the low hundreds by the small California label Accent and had no distribution. McMahon’s label mates were guitar instrumentalist Buddy Merrill, a past his sell-by-date Dick Dale and Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The Vienna Philharmonic makes a beautiful sound, no question about that: the question is what to do with it. Michael Tilson Thomas has some ideas, but they are mostly low-key. He is currently touring with the orchestra, and seems to have been chosen as a safe pair of hands, offering elegant and lyrical interpretations, but without any extravagance. The result was a concert that was all about the orchestra, and although the players had a few rough patches, it fully justified their world-class standing.Even so, it was often hard to shake the feeling that Tilson Thomas was playing it safe. His Read more ...
Barney Harsent
When the ITV comedy drama Cold Feet returned last year after a 13-year break, it seemed something of a risk. Looking back, after the near-universal acclaim and excellent viewing figures, it’s difficult to think it could have been anything but a sure-fire hit. Like inviting friends you haven’t seen in years to stay and lingering, pre-weekend nerves dissipating as soon as they walk in the door, something felt entirely right about it. Time had passed, people had changed, but the feel of them was the same. The start of the latest series suggests that this is set to continue with economy Read more ...