Reviews
Jasper Rees
All’s fair in love and law in I Know Who You Are. BBC Four’s latest Euro-import hails from Spain and, as per the channel’s practice, is coming at you in intense double doses, two 70-minute episodes every Saturday night. Already it’s hard to imagine how the drama can possibly be spun out to the end without viewers getting RSI from repeatedly bitten fingernails, mopped brows and also scratched heads. It might be helpful to construct your very own wall map to keep track of the cat’s cradle of conflicting loyalties and rivalries that seem to be standard in both family life and legal practice in Read more ...
David Nice
The message must be getting through. On the First Night of the Proms, Igor Levit played as encore Liszt's transcription of the great Beethoven melody appropriated as the European Anthem; in Prom 2, Daniel Barenboim unleashed his Staatskapelle Berlin on Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance following an inspirational speech about European culture, education and humanism. Yesterday afternoon's manifesto was a given, showcasing the finest of all European bands under a Dutch citizen of the world who resided for many years in London. Bernard Haitink is also the world's greatest living Mozart conductor now Read more ...
David Kettle
"You drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint. And that’s it." So goes David Lynch’s memorable description of what he calls "the art life" in Jon Nguyen’s frank and engaging documentary. It’s a life that Lynch imagined himself living as a student and a young man – surrounded by the detritus of a disorderly studio, working all hours at his latest visual creation. And for some of his early life, at least, it’s exactly the life that Lynch lived.It’s this early period in Lynch’s creative life that’s the subject of Nguyen’s film, charting his childhood and student years as a driven, Read more ...
Susan Sheahan
Much loved, yes. But Dickens’s novel is probably little read by modern audiences and so a chance to see a new adaptation of this tale of discontent, riot and general mayhem set in the French revolution and spread across London and Paris in the late 1700s should be a genuine treat for theatregoers. And on paper Matthew Dunster’s version for Regent's Park of this intense exploration of injustice (billed, in fact, as "a new play") has it all: love, death, comedy, revolution and the promise of a provocative exploration of the underlying issues of power, oppression and tragedy connecting how we Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Katya Kabanova is an ideal fit for Opera Holland Park’s verismo-focussed programming. It’s Czech, of course, but the dramatic style is very close to the Italian opera of the day, the story all gritty realism, the music punctuated with intense emotive episodes. This staging, a revival of Olivia Fuchs’s 2009 production, does the work full justice, a straightforward account that doesn’t overcomplicate the clear-cut narrative and morality. Musically, too, this was an impressive performance, with Sian Edwards (pictured below with the orchestra) leading a well-paced account, nuanced but with no Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Five thousand miles away from her native Lake District, I first understood the eerie magnetism of Sarah Hall’s fiction. As a regional judge for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, I’d travelled to join the jury’s deliberations in Sri Lanka. I was keen for Hall’s debut novel, Haweswater, to prevail but unsure what my fellow-judges – both from the Subcontinent – would make of this local drama set in a bleak English backwater. Hall’s hardscrabble uplands scarcely resemble Wordsworth’s. Yet under a gnarled bodhi tree on a hotel lawn in Kandy, with the highland rainforest behind us and the sacred lake Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Time Has Come was issued in late 1971. Anne Briggs’ second album and her second to reach shops that year, it followed an eponymous set released that April. That was on the folk label Topic and produced by the pivotal A. L. Lloyd, who had been key to propagating Britain’s traditional music since the late 1930s. The Time Has Come was issued by CBS and produced Colin Caldwell who, at that time, was also working with the rock bands Aynsley Dunbar and Curved Air. The time had come for Anne Briggs to dance with the mainstream.In the liner notes of this new reissue of The Time Has Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The ideal First Night of the Proms sets the tone for the season, perhaps flagging up some of the themes to be followed up later, offering a blend of novelty and familiarity, and preferably ending with a roof-raising choral blockbuster. This programme successfully ticked those boxes, but took until the second half to really catch light.Unlike last year, which took place under the shadow of a terrorist in France, the 2017 edition could be more straightforwardly celebratory. And unlike the Last Night, although there are First Night conventions, there was no danger of the tail of licensed foolery Read more ...
David Nice
Unless you're an undiscriminating fan of bel canto, the lesser Italian and French operas of the 1830s and '40s - that's to say, not Verdi's Nabucco and Macbeth or Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini - need to be approached with caution. Once you've lowered expectations to a simpler level of compositional style, you then have to hope for stylists of the first order to make it work. That doesn't happen too often these days, but the inspirational company Opera Rara, responsible for this often spectacular programme of operatic excerpts, knows where to find them. In soprano Joyce El-Khoury, tenor Michael Read more ...
David Nice
Rippling outward from the initial story of a seemingly nice WASP woman who finds herself having to adapt in a women's prison, Orange Is the New Black quickly developed into the most multilayered, almost indigestibly rich of American TV dramas. By the second series, it had become a tricky-to-balance polyphonic symphony, giving its mushrooming cast of important characters a plethora of vital story-lines, combining themes, forging unlikely alliances. Season Five, scripted by 11 writers including the creator Jenji Kohan, had a brainwave of an idea: focus on the three-day life of a prison riot, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
An isolated girls' school finds its hermetic routine shattered by the arrival of Colin Farrell, who wreaks sexual and emotional havoc as only this actor can. Playing a Civil War deserter with a gammy leg, Farrell's Corporal McBurney is at first rendered exotic, not to mention eroticised, by the distaff community into which he has stumbled in 1864 Virginia only in time to be eviscerated by them. Tennessee Williams, one feels, would have had a field day with the same scenario – less Suddenly Last Summer than Suddenly Cold Mountain, to cite an earlier film inhabiting this same period that Read more ...
stephen.walsh
About The Magic Flute there’s a certain amount of domestic theatre and a great deal of pantomime. It calls for fun, sentiment, movement, a measure of spectacle, and plenty of direct communication with the audience. But like the mechanicals’ play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream it needs no excuse, no big ideas.At Longborough, Thomas Guthrie flirts briefly with such things. A boy lies in bed reading, I suppose, a fairy-tale; Papageno appears brushing his teeth; Tamino and Pamina come on, inexplicably, as puppets (that return momentarily for the ordeals). But these are fleeting concepts, swiftly Read more ...