Reviews
stephen.walsh
Opera directors must, I suppose, direct. But one could wish that they kept their mouths shut, at least outside the rehearsal studio. The condescension in Longborough’s programme-book interview with the director (Orpha Phelan) and designer (Madeleine Boyd) of the festival’s new Fidelio beggars belief. And when the curtain goes up, or to be exact, when you enter the theatre and are confronted with the usual “back story” of a production line of white clad, masked hospital technicians packing drugs, filling syringes, and then – unbelievably – playing eurhythmics in time with Beethoven’s Overture Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Portraying a Nation juxtaposes photographs by August Sander with paintings by Otto Dix. It's an inspired idea as both artists wanted to hold up a mirror to German society during a time of extreme change. Dix described his lucid form of critical realism as “life undiluted”, while Sander wrote “We must be able to bear seeing the truth.” “Photography”, he observed, “can depict things in magnificent beauty, but also in terrible truth.” Sander planned to create a portrait of his country by photographing people from all walks of life. Begun in 1920, this mammoth task was still unfinished Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Reading the Rocks has a provocative subtitle, “How Victorian Geologists Discovered the Secret of Life”, indicating the role of geology in paving the way to an understanding of the evolution of our planet as a changing physical entity that was to eventually support ever-evolving forms of life: but this is not so much revealtion of a secret, more a history. In a series of short pithy chapters, we are treated to a fascinating cast of characters who invented a new subject, both academic and practical, with enthusiasm and almost overwhelming energy, embracing those on the other side of the Channel Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Considering Shelleyan Orphan, Melody Maker said “someone’s been smearing themselves in art…were they artists or did they just wallow in shit?” While the late Eighties’ British music press often made assertions to seek attention, slagging off a band because they sought to follow their own path is, with hindsight, rich given that roughly contemporary cover stars such as Chakk and Set The Tone dealt in music so precisely fixed in the moment they now sound as dated as Sheena Easton’s efforts to get funky and U2’s lunges at the blues.Shelleyan Orphan – the duo Caroline Crawley and Jem Tayle – Read more ...
mark.kidel
As Wonder Woman hits screens worldwide, the publication of a book that explores the myth and reality of the Amazon seems timely. The latest of John Man’s works of popular history is opportunistic enough to end with a fascinating account of the origins of the female world-saviour originally launched by DC Comics in 1941. He relies extensively on – and acknowledges – Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman, which explains the proto-feminist origins of the female answer to Superman.The invention of Wonder Woman is one of the most recent manifestations of a mythologising thread Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Isabelle Huppert isn’t just here for the nasty things in life. Her rape non-victim in Elle was one of the most iconoclastic performances even she’s given, enigmatic yet emotionally rich, rooted and moving. She won’t get nearly as much attention for her role here as Liliane, a singer who came second to Abba at Eurovision, who’s lured out of an anonymous retirement by a besotted, 21-year-old boxer who becomes her lover and manager. Souvenir is an unashamedly breezy romcom, full of gauzy romance, wish-fulfilment, a great faux-Eurovision soundtrack by Pink Martini, and a May-December romance that Read more ...
Matt Wolf
As with life, so it is in art: in the same way that one can't predict the curve balls that get thrown our way, the American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins defies categorisation. On the basis of barely a handful of plays, two of which happen now to be running concurrently in London, this 32-year-old Pulitzer prize finalist seems to embark upon a fresh path with each new venture. Starting with its entirely unanticipated structure, Gloria at Hampstead Theatre confounds expectation to a heady and exhilarating degree, if one can apply those adjectives to so ferocious a vision of American life. Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen a movie as staggeringly awful as The Book of Henry. If it was just a touch more shrill it could have qualified as a so-bad-it’s-good camp classic, but unfortunately it teeters this side of tasteful in order to keep its 12 rating. How any studio executive ever read Gregg Hurwitz’s script and thought this was a viable scenario is truly baffling. What terrible atonement for sins in a past life led Naomi Watts to take the lead is another mystery, as is the question of how director Colin Trevorrow (Jurassic World) is going to live this debacle down and go on Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Can the theatre be a courtroom? A good public place to debate morality and to arrive at profound decisions? You could answer this with a history lesson that ranges from the ancient Greeks to more recent tribunal plays in the 1960s and 1990s. But I’ll just concentrate on Ferdinand von Schirach’s Terror, which premiered simultaneously in Berlin and Frankfurt in 2015 and now gets a British outing at the Lyric Hammersmith. It’s a courtroom drama with a gimmick – the audience gets the chance to vote on the result of the trial. But is the gimmick better than the play?Despite its deliberately Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Immigration…immigration… immigration… that’s what we need! Not the words of record-breaking, tap-dancing trumpeter Roy Castle, rather it’s the gist of a Times leader from 1853 (admittedly, fairly heavily paraphrased). It was just one of the eye-opening discoveries in Ian Hislop’s engaging BBC Two documentary about the birth of one of the most divisive political issues of the last 100 years, as he looked at surprising historical pinch points and used them to shed light on their future shocks.Britain’s open-door policy in the mid-19th century was, we were told, an issue of moral importance. For Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Recorded on disc, this cast would be extraordinary for much of the time — to look at, not so much. Royal Opera conductor Antonio Pappano lured Jonas Kaufmann to London for his first attempt on the Everest of tenor roles, and with so many recent uncertainties about his vocal condition, last night the German took his debut cautiously but beautifully — his astonishing good looks enhanced with a spritz of Mediterranean bronzing rather than the full-on Moorish blackening of yesteryear.The flattering look dilutes the dramatic effect, however. Less perfection needed. For you need to suspend Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Do the makers of the essentially unnecessary Hampstead have a secret vendetta against north London and its citizenry? The thought occurred to me midway through Joel Hopkins's wannabe romcom, which places the ever-charming Diane Keaton smack dab in the sylvan byways of NW3, only to surround her with a ceaselessly toxic array of locals that no amount of lunches at Villa Bianca could ever put right.Sure, the Heath is great (I've lived on a street adjacent to it for years), and one is indeed likely to run into Simon Callow now and again, as happens here. But even the briefest of time in the Read more ...