Reviews
Mark Sheerin
Something like a parked zeppelin sits on three mirrored legs on a museum lawn in Belgium. It’s a cigar-shaped steel fabrication that, were it to float free of its three legs, could also pass for a UFO. But given the context - a sculpture park outside Antwerp - we can rest easy. Never Mind is a work of art by Richard Deacon.Deacon’s works are all puzzles. This 765cm-long mirrored capsule offers few clues about its ultimate agenda. Was it sent here to frighten us, like an airborne invader? Is Never Mind (main picture) a tribute to the 1991 breakthrough LP by grunge band Nirvana? Or is it a Read more ...
Richard Bratby
“The subject is neither political nor religious; it is fantastical” wrote Verdi to the librettist Piave about his opera Macbeth. “The opera is not about the rise of a modern fascist: nor is it about political tyranny. It is a study in character” adds director Elijah Moshinsky in the programme for this opening production of the 2017 Buxton International Festival. To which (at least if your last encounter with Macbeth was Welsh National Opera’s production last year, seemingly set in a Travelodge somewhere near Edinburgh Airport) it’s tempting to respond, for this relief much thanks.Moshinsky Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Readers have been committed fans since 1992, when the sometime crime reporter Michael Connelly turned novelist. Connelly’s best-known sequence has featured, over three decades now, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detective Hieronymus Bosch, also known as “Harry” – Vietnam veteran, haunted by the past, and a man of the utmost original integrity – in gritty police procedurals lifted high above the ordinary by mesmerising and believable characters and a passion for the southern California setting.In 2005 the cast of the series was amplified by the Lincoln Lawyer, Mickey Haller, a low- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In February 1983, New Musical Express ran a cover feature categorising what it termed “positive punk”. Bands co-opted into this ostensibly new trend were Blood & Roses, Brigandage, Danse Society, Rubella Ballet, Sex Gang Children, Southern Death Cult, The Specimen, UK Decay and The Virgin Prunes. Writer Richard North – a member of Brigandage – said the unifying factors were “mystical/metaphysical imagery”, “the sub-world of Crowleyan abyss” and personal style taking in backcombing, blue hair, long black skirts, red trousers and bootlace ties. The Doors were, he said, an influence. So were Read more ...
Bill Knight
Now in its 48th year the veteran photography festival is in better shape than ever. You can walk through the French sunshine to more than 20 exhibitions, hear a talk, meet the snappers and shop on the fringe. It's not just a show; it's a holiday, reaching out to the world, this year notably, to the photographers of Colombia and Iran.Their images give an unmediated view of their lives and troubles - Colombian women staring down the camera "like men"; sad pictures of remembrance from Iran (pictured right: Shadi Ghadirian, Qajar, 1998). Some pictures are truly shocking. Here, for example, are Read more ...
james.woodall
Can The Tempest open on stage without a tempest – of crashing, shrieking and torment – and thus without what can become five minutes-plus of inaudibility? In Gregory Doran’s 2016 Stratford production for the RSC, revived at the Barbican Theatre, the answer is, as so often, no. Joe Shire, Darren Raymond and Caleb Frederick, playing mariners, have lines to deliver but against giant-wave effects and the supersonic demolition of a ship, they might as well stay mute. Not one bellowed word comes through, though Joseph Mydell as the kindly elder Gonzalo makes a good go of it.As a show starts, Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Manchester International Festival – a biennale of new creative work – this year has a new artistic director in John McGrath, and there’s no large-scale new opera or prominent "classical" work, it would seem, other than Raymond Yiu’s song cycle, The World Was Once All Miracle, performed on Tuesday by Roderick Williams with the BBC Philharmonic. But the BBC Philharmonic also teamed up with Icelandic composer-photographer-creator Jóhann Jóhannsson for an ambitious premiere at the Bridgewater Hall, Last And First Men, that McGrath clearly sees as one of the festival’s most substantial Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If you're going to cobble together an entirely pro forma film, it's not a bad idea to give Shirley MacLaine pride of place. At 83, this redoubtable pro is no more capable of falsehood now than she ever was. It means that, although individual moments of The Last Word may find you rolling your eyes, its central performance rivets attention from first to last. MacLaine plays Harriet Lauler, a snarly, walled-off divorcee of means who potters around her immaculate California pile of a home glugging wine and snapping at anyone unfortunate enough to cross her path (the household staff, for Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The precocious Steve Winwood joined the Spencer Davis Group when he was 14, when the Sixties themselves were still young, and hasn’t really stopped ever since. True, it has been nearly a decade since his last album of new material, Nine Lives, but he has toured with Eric Clapton and Tom Petty, pops up at assorted festivals and live events, and has put together a highly capable live band that can bend his songs into shapes you might never have thought possible. His voice and abilities on guitar and Hammond B3 organ (a wonderfully quaint instrument which looks like a small wardrobe) remain Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Catholic Church hasn’t enjoyed a good press on screen lately. Nuns punished Irishwomen for their pregnancies in Philomena. Priests interfered with altar boys in Spotlight. And in The Young Pope a Vatican fixated on conservatism and casuistry elects a pontiff who sees himself as a rock star. Broken was Jimmy McGovern’s agonised absolution for a church in crisis.Over six parts on BBC One, Broken has felt like walking along half a dozen stations of the cross. McGovern’s portrait of a broken priest – and by extension, a broken priesthood – was exceptionally short on levity or solace. The Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
First introduced into the burgeoning “Marvel Cinematic Universe” in last year’s Captain America: Civil War, Tom Holland’s incarnation of Spider-Man is another triumph for this exuberant franchise (even if some might feel a pang for the fine and still-recent pairing of Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone under director Marc Webb's helmsmanship). What the Marvel flicks have got, and their DC Comics rivals conspicuously haven’t, is a capacity for bringing some wit and a lightness of touch to their stories, no matter how much computerised spectacle is exploding all around.Holland, previously on the Read more ...
Heather Neill
German writer Daniel Kehlmann’s light-touch 90-minute comedy is a chic satire on the slippery business of making art – and especially on the difficulty of assessing it. Whose judgement matters, after all? This production now in the West End was first seen at the Ustinov Studio in Bath where director Laurence Boswell is making a habit of introducing the work of European playwrights previously barely known in the UK. Florian Zeller was a particularly spectacular discovery. His The Father and The Mother were translated by Christopher Hampton, who once more turns in a flowing, natural-sounding Read more ...