Reviews
caspar.gomez
It’s a Tweet-age Glastonbury aftermath. It’s monsooning grey outside. The real world’s back, consensus reality fast encroaching. Everything’s moved on, spun to the next thing as we A.D.D. onto Wimbledon, Hard Brexit or whatever. Even my 14-year-old daughter knows the “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” chant (to the riff from White Stripes “Seven Nation Army”) that rolled across this year’s Glastonbury crowds like a steady rumble of perturbed destiny. “Jeremy Corbyn isn’t just Jeremy Corbyn, he’s a thing now,” she explained. And I sort of know what she means.I woke up today with Rag’n’Bone Man’s chorus Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Baby drives like a deranged bullet. Edgar Wright’s “diegetic action-musical” choreographs the bank-heist getaways of angel-faced Baby (Ansel Elgort) as physically exhilarating pure cinema, a rush that’s rare. It’s also pure, adrenalin-pumping rock’n’roll, a combination built into the plot: Baby can only drive so long as his tinnitus-drowning cassette mix-tapes play, giving him the rhythm and focus he needs. Doc (a lugubrious Kevin Spacey) is the boss he owes, who keeps his pedal reluctantly to the metal, never quite reaching the promised last job, and forced to work with increasingly violent Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This sparkling display of some four score watercolours from the first decade of the last century throw an unfamiliar light on the artistry of John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), the last great swagger portrait painter in the western tradition. None here is a portrait in the conventional sense: rather Sargent is, so to speak, off duty, painting for himself with a glorious spontaneity, a professional on holiday. Among friends, he created images for himself in a medium that needed great skill, lent itself to experimentation, and produced immediate results. This is not a retrospective, concentrating Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
“The northern white rhinos are just a symbol of what we do to the natural world,” as one of the contributors to this haunting documentary put it. “We witness them disappearing in front of our eyes.” The programme ended with names of endangered animals jostling for space on the screen, from hawksbill turtles and the South China tiger to whales, orangutans, the red panda and the snow leopard.This story of the 43-year-old rhino Sudan, named after the homeland from which he was whisked away as a baby to be installed in Dvůr Králové zoo in Czechoslovakia (as it then was), was a terrific Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Labels have their uses but they can also be a blight. The works of the Scottish playwright James Bridie – with their regional accents and domestic settings – bear many of the hallmarks of so-called Kitchen Sink drama but didn’t make the canon. Not grimy enough, perhaps, not English enough, and certainly not angry enough. The playwright is better remembered as a founder of Glasgow’s Citizens’ Theatre and the Edinburgh Festival.All power to the Finborough then in its campaign to save Bridie’s writing from terminal neglect. Last year saw the first production in 70 years of Dr Angelus, a play Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Broadway so frequently fetes its visiting Brits that it's nice when the honour is repaid. That said, it's difficult to imagine audiences anywhere remaining unmoved by Audra McDonald's occupancy – "performance" seems too mundane a word – of the wrecked glory that was Billie Holiday toward the last months of her life in the Lanie Robertson musical play, Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill. A monologue fleshed out with three (excellent) musicians, one of whom doubles as a sounding board of sorts, Lady Day was originally intended to run in London this time last year when pregnancy unexpectedly Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Julian Assange’s white hair marks his public persona. To some he’s an unmistakably branded outsider, or a lone white wolf hunting global injustice. Hollywood would cast him as the coolly enigmatic superhero who’s revealed as the supervillain in the last reel. Laura Poitras’ Risk shows him as a slippery character in his own spy film, dying those famous locks brown as he alters his appearance under his adoring mother's gaze, before making a Bourne-like motorbike getaway under the authorities’ noses, to become a cramped citizen of Ecuador.Poitras’ extreme access films several such pivotal Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The recent general election result proves that the power of the rightwing press has diminished considerably in the digital age, but there was a time when media magnate Rupert Murdoch could make grown-up politicians quake in their socks. James Graham, whose This House, his National Theatre play about the 1970s hung parliament, was a big success in the West End recently, now looks at the origins of the Sun, and its Frankenstein-like rejuvenation in 1969, when Murdoch was a young Australian tyro whom few took seriously. He is played by the ever-likeable Bertie Carvel in a theatrically confident Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is meat murder? Will people eat anything if it’s cheap? Is the taste of bacon really what stops us half the western world turning vegetarian? Okja is a commercial stretch, a partly subtitled children’s fable from South Korea which unstintingly confronts all of these deep moral questions. But it does so in the most – if you will – palatable manner. After the briefest release in the cinema, it makes the short on-trend transition to a streaming service, and it’s on Netflix that it should be consumed by anyone and everyone with a strong enough stomach to enjoy an enchanting adventure with a Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
It’s often said that Ariadne auf Naxos is all about The Composer – not only Richard Strauss but an affectionate parody of his younger self – and Katharina Thoma takes this idea seriously in her Glyndebourne production. In the role, Angela Brower plays an important if silent part in the Opera proper, and brings an upbeat flourish to an absorbing if rather pensive reflection on this uncategorisable piece of theatre.Part spoken play, part tragedy, part commedia dell’arte, Ariadne is 100 percent meta-opera. From the outset, place and time are established so firmly – wartime Glyndebourne – that it Read more ...
David Nice
Why stage a stiff opera about half-frozen royals by a not-yet-divine Mozartino? The best Mitridate really deserves is one of those intimate concert performances with brilliant young singers at which Ian Page's Classical Opera excels. Yet this is the third revival of a 1991 Royal Opera production by Graham Vick, never among his more probing psychological studies (which in any case the 14-year old Mozart, impressive but no teenage genius here, hardly deserves). The best in show is Paul Brown's colourful if restrictive costuming, and this latest cast looked very promising on paper. The actual Read more ...
David Nice
Perfect comedies for the country-house opera scene? Mozart's Figaro and Così, Strauss's Ariadne - and Britten's Albert Herring, now 70 years and a few days old, but as ageless as the rest. With the passing of time it's ever more obvious that this satire of provincial East Anglian tricks and manners also has universal appeal and stands with the best. Eric Crozier was surely Britten's finest librettist once Auden stepped aside after Paul Bunyan, his Da Ponte or Hofmannsthal. The sharp wit of text and music needs absolute focus and playing it as straight as possible. It got both from a splendid Read more ...