Reviews
Marina Vaizey
The marvellous National Gallery of Ireland, founded in the 1860s, has opened its doors to its brilliantly revamped, updated and expanded galleries. As a spectacular bonus in its opening summer, Vermeer and Masters of Genre Painting reposes in the enfilade of the newly re-done permanent galleries for temporary exhibitions.After half a dozen years effectively closed for refurbishment, the new National Gallery of Ireland joins a roster of other modernised and expanded institutions. Just a year ago the Switch House opened at Tate Modern, and at the end of June, the V&A will open its massive Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Reviewed this month with the windows open, in weather hot enough to warp records, this month theartsdesk on Vinyl casts two ears over 34 releases, starting with a striking foray into elegant songwriting and ending with Now That’s What I Call Classic Rock. Along the way, expect encounters with everything from decade-old hip hop reissues to brand new sludge-punk metal, as well as two of the most influential bands that have ever existed.VINYL OF THE MONTHThe Fiction Aisle Heart Map Rubric (Brighton’s Finest)Overdue vinyl release for the debut from Electric Soft Parader Thomas White’s latest Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Opera-lovers coming to St Martin's Lane may feel confused to be confronted by an unrecognisable Coliseum, which now has huge girder-like structures adorning the stage and ceiling and a rather ugly skyscraper looming out of the wings, called Falco Tower. Happily, the producers had left a copy of the bogus newspaper, The Obsidian Times, on every seat, which offered some handy background about the plot of Bat Out of Hell - the Musical.Obsidian (a bleak anti-Manhattan) is falling into slum-infested wrack and ruin under the despotic leadership of Falco, the Commander-in-Chief. However, his wife Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Hugh Laurie, in his new role of forensic neuropsychiatrist Eldon Chance, tells us that he works with those who are “mutilated by life”, and we soon see that Chance himself falls into that category. He’s in the midst of a divorce, he only sees his daughter Nicole at weekends, and his work seems to fill him with a kind of morbid weariness.This is Laurie playing the flip side of Dr Gregory House, the brilliant and fearless diagnostician happy to break every rule and offend whomever it may concern in pursuit of the right result. Chance, on the other hand, is timid and full of doubt, and even his Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The Paris-based Ensemble InterContemporain brought a wide-ranging programme to the Wigmore Hall. They are known as new music specialists – the group was founded by Pierre Boulez as the house band for the IRCAM electronic music studio – so Ravel and Debussy are early music for them. In fact, those venerable names were included to give context to more recent French and Italian compositions. Leading mid-century modernists were also included – Messiaen, Maderna and Berio – but the real substance was provided by two living composers, Philippe Schoeller and Matteo Franceschini, both offering Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Donald Trump’s electoral success was, we have been told, fuelled by the anger of the American working class. But how do you show that kind of anger on stage, and how do you criticise its basis in traditional masculinity? One way, and this is the path chosen by playwright and performer Taylor Mac in Hir, a satirical comedy which was first staged in New York in 2015 and now gets its European premiere at the Bush Theatre, is to view the family from a transgender perspective. And, at first, this strategy looks very promising.Hir is set in a settlement somewhere in California’s Central Valley, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There has always been an air of incipient doom hovering over Ripper Street, since the show is more of a laboratory of lost souls than a mere detective drama. Now, as it embarks on its fifth and final season, there’s every reason to suppose that the going will get seriously apocalyptic, not least because the unspeakably evil DI Jedediah Shine has been brought in to helm the Leman Street police station in Whitechapel.Studious viewers will recall that Shine, the godfather of all bent coppers, was not only the murderer of the Elephant Man but also the arch enemy of Matthew Macfadyen’s Edmund Reid Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.” I’ve quoted these words by John Berger many, many times. They are in my bloodstream, as it were, since they provided me with an explanation for my experience as a young woman in the world. The 1972 television series and accompanying book Ways of Seeing from which they came also changed the way people looked at and thought about art. The clarity and conviction of Berger’s observations about how we Read more ...
Will Rathbone
Hampstead Theatre Downstairs' habit of sending shows southward to Trafalgar Studios continues with Richard Bean's Kiss Me. A character study set in post-World War One London, it's a two-hander concerning the attempts of a war widow to conceive a child via an arranged liaison with a younger man. As slight as it is smart, it is grounded by two astonishing performances from Claire Lams and Ben Lloyd-Hughes, returning to roles they originated in Hampstead last year.Bean, of course, is best known for grander comedies like One Man, Two Guvnors. This is cut from very different cloth. A period Read more ...
Guy Oddy
The Supersonic Festival is Birmingham’s annual gathering of the sonically weird and wonderful pitched at “curious audiences” happy to lend their ears to sounds that would ordinarily be difficult to discover without a lot of effort. An urban event, spread over a weekend and a number of indoor venues, is usually the way to go in the UK before summer festivals take hold. In years past, revellers have been glad of the protection from the elements. This year, however, fierce heat and humidity gave the proceedings a Mediterranean sheen and turned some of the gigs into saunas. But with plenty of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Heaven alone knows we've pressing anxieties enough to preoccupy us, but if you have the emotional bandwidth to accommodate more, the iPlayer can oblige. Available now on BBC Three is the latest in what now becomes a trilogy of heartrending dramas with Murdered in the title. Murdered by My Boyfriend and Murdered by My Father, both of which won Baftas for actors in leading roles, is now followed by Murdered For Being Different.As expected of this immensely impressive strand, it doesn't get any less unbearable to watch an innocent young woman fall victim to inexplicable violence. And yet this Read more ...
Matthew Wright
In a voice of distinctive, high-pitched nasal whimsy, comic essayist and memoirist David Sedaris finds humour with the precision of a mosquito after blood. British readers will likely have first encountered him through his Radio 4 series Introducing David Sedaris, and may know the voice, and the author’s ability to extract comedy from the everyday. This collection of diaries gives us the first draft of his experiences, before they are crafted into the exquisitely timed and phrased pieces that made his name.Sedaris is most often encountered today in the rarefied pages of The New Yorker; Read more ...