Reviews
stephen.walsh
Until yesterday my only experience of the Welsh language in the opera house was a few isolated passages in Iain Bell’s In Parenthesis last year and the surtitles WNO routinely put up alongside the English in the Millennium Centre. Now Guto Puw, a 46-year-old composer from north Wales, has written an entire opera for Music Theatre Wales and the Carmarthen-based Theatr Genedlaethol in this beautiful language of which I’m ashamed to say I know not a single word apart from a handful of road signs and the unexpected pepperings of English (“Electric – Price – Bloody Job” was one whole phrase I Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Watching tango dancers Gisela Galeassi and Nikito Cornejo own the apron of the stage during the second half of m¡longa, the brain finds it difficult to process what the eyes are seeing. The pair seem to be one writhing, dark-toned dervish of jutting, sensual, passionate movement. Back and forth they go, he spinning her round his body like a silk scarf, fluid as mercury; her feet attacking the stage, staccato, kicking out, kicking down, so fast it really is the proverbial blur. Nigh on two hours of tango with a 20-minute interval might sound like too much, but with only the smallest of lulls Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Yasmine Hamdan has gone from being an indie star in Beirut a decade ago with her adventurous band Soapkills to being a bona fide solo star with a couple of sophisticated albums behind her, the latest Al Jamilat recently released.She sings in Arabic, is based in Paris, has a Belgian label and has a multi-cultural band and treads an inventive cultural tightrope between orient and occident. The melody of “Douss” sounds almost Chinese and could be sung in a Hong Kong karaoke bar but is actually about the let-down of the Arab Spring “feeding us lies, deceit and slogans”.The packed Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Television dramas about catastrophic events in broken Britain are meant to be cathartic. They knead the collated facts into the shape of drama for millions to absorb and understand. Then we all somehow move on, sadder but slightly wiser. The Murder of Stephen Lawrence. Hillsborough. The Government Inspector. And still they flow onto the screen: only recently there’s been Damilola: Our Loved Boy, The Moorside and Little Boy Blue.Now Three Girls, in which over three nights on BBC One redemption was dealt out with extreme parsimony. You knew it was going to end complicatedly when the guilty Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Liam Scarlett must be worked off his feet. Just at the Royal Ballet, he made a full-length work, Frankenstein, last year and is currently working on a new Swan Lake; and now last night he has premiered a new abstract work, Symphonic Dances at the Royal Opera House. A one-acter, but at 45 minutes a substantial one, set to the work of the same name by Rachmaninov, this premiere was an important moment for Scarlett, whose last two new works for the company, Frankenstein and Age of Anxiety, received at best mixed reviews. Symphonic Dances is not a masterpiece, but it's the best Scarlett I've seen Read more ...
Matt Wolf
You have to hand it to Felicity Kendal: this ever-game actress is fearless about treading in the footsteps of the British theatre's grandes dames. In 2006, she starred on the West End quite creditably in Amy's View, inheriting a part originated on both sides of the Atlantic by Judi Dench. And here Kendal is at that ongoing West End incubator, the Menier Chocolate Factory, reviving the 1987 play, Lettice and Lovage, that the late Peter Shaffer wrote as an extravagant bouquet for his beloved Maggie Smith. The flowers on this occasion, alas, are starting to wilt. The problem partly rests Read more ...
David Nice
It could have been your standard Russian touring programme: Tchaikovsky ballet music as hors d'oeuvre, Rachmaninov piano concerto, Shostakovich symphony. But the symphony was hardly the usual (Sixth rather than Fifth or Tenth). And any chance should be taken to hear London-born Freddy Kempf, a phenomenal artist incapable of playing a routine phrase, on his relatively rare visits to his native city.Kempf is a pianist in a million. At first you may wonder if the bucking and circling around the keyboard is absolutely necessary. But it produces the sound: the deep staccatos which highlight only Read more ...
bella.todd
A whacking great story has gone largely untold in British theatre: the legacy of colonialism in India, including the cultural ghosts the British left behind. With the 70th anniversary of Indian independence just round the corner this summer, poet and playwright Siddhartha Bose has set out to address this "historical amnesia". Premiering at Brighton Festival ahead of a UK tour, No Dogs, No Indians shuffles three periods in Indian history and aims to deal big questions about the values of remembering and forgetting, resisting and assimilating, loving and leaving. Let’s just say we had the word Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
EastEnders habituees will be familiar with the colourful past of Alfie and (especially) Kat Moon, who have both been AWOL from the mothership since early last year. But they’ve used the time wisely, preparing busily for this new spin-off drama in which they’ve shipped out to the seaside village of Redwater, County Waterford, to track down Kat’s long-lost son. She gave birth when she was scarcely more than a child herself, and the infant was whisked away from her and taken to a convent.It started quite promisingly. It was the summer of 1994 (or so the caption said), and we saw a pair of small Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Imagine a doctor has just told you that you have only a year to live. What would you do? Learn to sky dive, spend every last penny you have, be brutally honest with anyone who has crossed you, or curl up in a ball and wait for the inevitable? Producer and director Sue Bourne decided to talk to people who have indeed been told they have only a little time left, and A Time to Live on BBC Two is the remarkable result.“This is a film about living,” her voiceover told us at the beginning of the hour-long documentary, and it turned out to be the case. One after another, the 12 participants – people Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Jeremy Hardy is very happy to mock his audience and they love it. One of the biggest laughs of the night is when a punchline refers to us as a collection of “middle class white people”. Being Brighton, he goes further, explaining how tolerant the city is but that everyone’s frustrated as they have no-one to tolerate. Any immigrants, he explains, take one look and head down to Devon “where they have cream teas”. His “demographic”, as he refers to them, are certainly an older crowd, mostly retirement age, probably Radio 4 listeners who’ve heard him on endless quiz shows, but the comedian is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Guy Ritchie is back birthing turkeys. Who can remember/forget that triptych of stiffs Swept Away, Revolver and RocknRolla? Now, having redemptively bashed his CV back into shape with the assistance of Sherlock Holmes, the mockney rebel turns to another of England’s heritage icons in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.Do, however, dump that fantasy of yours of a triumphant return to the multiplex for medieval chivalry and courtly romance. Messrs Malory, Tennyson and dear old Lancelyn-Green can start rotating in their tombs now because King Arthur is basically Lock, Stock and One Stonking Sword, Read more ...