Reviews
Adam Sweeting
The statistics of Whitney Houston’s career are flabbergasting in this post-CD era. Her 1985 debut album sold 25 million copies. “I Will Always Love You” is the best-selling single by a female artist in music biz history. Its parent album, the soundtrack to The Bodyguard, sold more than one million copies in a week. She had more consecutive Number One hits than The Beatles. She has sold 200 million records worldwide.But, as Nick Broomfield’s new documentary reveals, none of this could protect her from a grasping family, parasitic hangers-on, and an unfaithful husband who aided and abetted her Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Why is dust so fascinating yet, at the same time, so repellent? Maybe the fear of choking to death in a dust storm or being buried alive in fine sand provokes a visceral response to it. My current obsession with dust comes from having builders in my home over the last seven months. Despite everything being shrouded in dust sheets, a film of corrosive particles has infiltrated every nook and cranny and silently blanketed my world; so I couldn’t resist a Whitechapel Gallery exhibition devoted to this pervasive nuisance. The show begins with a photograph by Man Ray taken in Marcel Duchamp’s Read more ...
Alison Cole
As perhaps the greatest artist there has ever been – and as one of the most fascinating and complex personalities of his era – Michelangelo should be a thrilling subject for serious as well as dramatic cinematic documentary treatment. Michelangelo – Love and Death, directed and edited by David Bickerstaff, which is timed to coincide with the National Gallery’s Michelangelo/Sebastiano exhibition (just! – it closes on 25 June) duly attempts to rise to the challenge, with the publicity promising a “dramatic retelling of the life and creative journey of the original celebrity artist” and a film Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Emma Banville is almost too good to be true: a human rights lawyer who houses Syrian refugees, wins the most hopeless cases of wrongful conviction, won’t be bullied by anyone – coppers, prison wardens, the system. OK she smokes, presumably for the stress, and pints of lager don’t sit quite right in her hand. And she’s trying to adopt a child with, somewhat implausibly, John Bishop. But she’s played by Helen McCrory, who can do no wrong, and her heart is in the very epicentre of the right place.Fearless (ITV) began as a bog-standard drama about a cold case. Banville was called in to help Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Der Rosenkavalier, you might think, is one of those operas that belong in a specific place and time and no other. “In Vienna,” says Strauss's score, “in the first years of Maria Theresia’s reign” (i.e. the 1740s). But this, of course, is a provocation. For the Welsh National Opera, Olivia Fuchs updates it to, roughly, the date of composition (1910-11), or perhaps even a few years later, to judge from the flickering gunfire, and the heavy emphasis on militarism in the programme. And she supplies the Marschallin with a Doppelgänger in the person of an old lady dressed 1930s/40s, who haunts the Read more ...
David Nice
Nature’s germens tumble all together rather readily in more recent operatic Shakespeare. Following the overblown storm before the storm of Reimann’s Lear and the premature angst of Ryan Wigglesworth’s The Winter’s Tale, what's rotten in the state of Denmark rushes to the surface a little too quickly in Brett Dean's bold new take on the most challenging of all the tragedies. This is an impressive labour of love from all concerned at a level which only Glyndebourne at its best can manage, led with supreme authority by conductor Vladimir Jurowski and director Neil Armfield. Yet the score worries Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
There’s something nasty in Loch Ness – a corpse tied to a curling stone – but, this being tellyland, the real monsters lurk on its shores. The Loch aspires to be a Scottish Broadchurch – Braidkirk? – but, alas, is nothing of the sort. The fact it is set in the fictional town of Lochnafoy – clearly based on Loch Na Fooey in Galway whose name means grave-shaped lake – is an early indication that writer Stephen Brady has not gone far to find his inspiration.An early scene in which three students arrange a load of bones and offal in the shape of a beached Nessie – while Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Dorothy Parker’s take on suicide is called “Resumé”: it goes, “Razors pain you; Rivers are damp; Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live.” Although this seems to cover the terrain, Alice Birch’s powerful new play adds a couple more methods of doing away with yourself, as well as an argument for avoiding the necessity of suicide. And although this drama takes up some 237 pages of published text, director Katie Mitchell proves you can stage it in 120 minutes without a break.And what an excruciating, yet devastatingly Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Is it always the same bit of Cornish clifftop they gallop along in Poldark? Anyway here it was again, raising the curtain on the third series. As the camera flew in over a gaggle of squawking seagulls spiralling above the foaming surf crashing on the rocks, we could discern a lone horseperson charging across the skyline. But it wasn’t Ross Poldark. It was his former (or is she?) inamorata, Elizabeth Warleggan.From the quasi-orgasmic wailing sounds Elizabeth (Heida Reed) was making as she bounced atop her thundering steed, it was difficult to tell whether this equine excursion was business or Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
University, anyone? Student days? If you were ever an undergraduate, who does not remember the simultaneous sense of dislocation and excitement, the feeling of the familiar combined with a heady awareness that we might fall off a cliff, metaphorically speaking, at any moment?University life in various guises is at the centre of The Idiot. Elif Batuman is an autobiographical writer whose subject is her own intellectual and geographical adventures, imbued with a sense of discovery and emotional involvement that does not seem to depend on amatory alliances, unless you count the books and authors Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In Summer 1973, Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa” peaked at 35 on the American charts. Originally the A-side of a France-only single issued in 1972, the song had been discovered by New York DJ David Mancusso. After Mancusso repeatedly played it, “Soul Makossa” was licensed by Atlantic, charted and became integral to what was bracketed as disco music. The Cameroon-born Dibango had been making records under his own name since 1961 and “Soul Makossa” was his breakout track. So much so, he recorded a reconfigured version to advertise Toyota cars. “Happiness on the African road” was guaranteed.As a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s all there in the first few bars of Britten’s music – that unsettling tension between beauty and familiarity, and eerie, undefinable otherness. Those cello glissandi might end in glowing major chords, but the tentacle-like slides throw them into doubt. We’re no longer in a binary world of major or minor, but a harmonic landscape of infinite possibility. Netia Jones’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream delights visually in shades of grey, a gorgeous shadow-play of a production, but when she drained her designs of colour she also stripped it from the drama, leaving Britten’s opera a wan reflection Read more ...