Reviews
Kieron Tyler
“Electronic music, feedback, imaginative identification with colours and art and unique sounds is our art-from. We feel we are contributing to the new ‘total sound culture.’ This culture will take its place in the world just as the Renaissance and Picasso’s blue period has.”The September 1966 press release accompanying The Creation’s second single “Painter Man” wasn’t shy. Its front page declared “We see our music as colours – it’s purple with red flashes.” If all that weren’t enough, the quote was attributed to Creation 1 v ii, as if the bible was being quoted.Just as the band’s name Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Kureishi is mostly loved for his bittersweet panoramas of suburban London, ribald and piquant with satire. The Nothing discards that broad canvas and creeps into a glittering chamber of ice, in which the only subjects are the dying urges of the manipulative, voyeuristic narcissist Waldo, told in brittle, epigrammatic style. All that’s left from Kureishi’s earlier fiction is the sex, and even that is desperate and third-hand. Waldo is a much-garlanded filmmaker in his declining years, his body gradually giving up in protest at years of hedonistic abuse. His younger wife Zee, between Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sovremennik is Russian for “contemporary”, and ever since its founding in the Soviet Union's 1950s Thaw, Moscow’s Sovremennik Theatre company has lived by the idea that it expresses new, fresh breath in Russian theatre. Unless you argue that the adjective “contemporary” by definition must reveal characteristics of its temporal surroundings, moribund is not one of the alternative meanings of the word. Or in this case one should argue positively that Galina Volchek's production of Chekhov's Three Sisters does comment subversively on today.I find it hard to see it positively. This Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Shelve with Oliver Sacks. In Sound: Stories of Hearing Lost and Found Bella Bathurst has written a fascinating and illuminating book on deafness. Of what it’s like to lose your hearing – and in her case regain it after a 12 long years. On the world of the deaf and the deafened. On loss – not just of the sense of hearing but of much to which it is allied, such as spacial awareness, and which we take for granted. On isolation, the feeling of being “stupid”, and of being consigned to the invisible world of the old.Like Sacks, Bathurst tells stories of deafness in others: the military for example Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The two main commands coming from the stage at this evening's Brighton Festival event are “Everybody jump, jump” and “Put your hands in the air and go side-to-side”. The crowd are mostly under 30 and emanate dancing energy from the moment the doors open, as DJ Molotov warms up. The set-up is basic, a DJ and some mics, but that’s as it should be for, on one level, this evening takes hip hop back to its Bronx block party origins, away from all the bling nonsense that’s taken it over. On another level, it’s a very British affair.High Focus, a Brighton record label founded in 2010, are Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Chain-smoking and charismatic, the painter, sculptor, draughtsman and printmaker Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) lived much of his life in Paris from his arrival there in his twenties. He was just in time for post-war cubism and pre-war surrealism, the energetic noisiness of the avant garde. And although he was almost always a realist, it was absolutely on his own hard-won terms, leading to his characteristically elongated human figures, based always on unbelievably extended sittings (even when figures were standing) of his nearest, close friends, family, his wife and his mistress.He was an Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
François Ozon’s Frantz is an exquisitely sad film, its crisp black and white cinematography shot through with mourning. The French director, in a work where the main language is German, engages with the aftermath of World War One, and the moment when the returning rhythms of life only emphasise what has been lost. The eponymous hero of his film is one of its casualties – we see Frantz only in flashbacks – and his death has left a gaping, if largely unarticulated wound. His erstwhile fiancée Anna (Paula Beer, a revelation) has become effectively his widow, living with Frantz’s parents. That Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
Gamers have marched up and down more eerie space station corridors than Alien’s Ripley on Ritalin. From System Shock and Dead Space via Alien Isolation, Space Hulk and The Chronicles of Riddick, most of us have done the hard yards anxiously sprinting passed bits of generic futurist interior design, like Zaha Hadid let loose on Deep Space Nine.Prey, the latest run-gun-and-get-hopelessly-lost-in-another-bloody-space-station game is heavily influenced by the aforementioned System Shock and Dead Space titles. You’re a guy or girl who finds themselves outnumbered and often out of ideas after your Read more ...
Robert Beale
Enlightenment is a wonderful idea, and the members of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment who played Bach’s six Brandenburg Concertos in Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall last night brought the wisdom of today’s period instrument movement to bear on music that most would see as belonging to the age of the pre-Enlightenment. Present-day enlightenment lies not just in historical accuracy, however, but also – from an audience point of view – in catching the spirit of its original creators.The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment do that extremely well. The expertise of their techniques is Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Was it just a coincidence that budding serial killer Sam attended Ripley Heath High? Probably not. Born to Kill, written by Tracey Malone and Kate Ashfield, was keenly aware that it followed in the bloody footsteps of both real sociopaths such as Harold Shipman and fictional ones such as Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley. And what a dance it led us!Over the past four weeks on Channel 4 we have seen the schoolboy move from the edge of things – a diving board, a wooded hollow where he hid his trophy tin, a birthday party for his only friend’s father – to the centre of a full-blown psychotic Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ricky Gervais enters the stage after recordings of some the great (and not so great) men of history – including Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King and Adolf Hitler. And then there's a portentous introduction – are we then going to hear some deep philosophical insights tonight? Well not so much, more chatty and relaxed riffing, with some of his most personal material yet.Gervais tells us he doesn't know why he titled his first stand-up show in seven years Humanity, as he prefers dogs and cats, and the bane of his life are people just waiting to be offended by his humour. He explains this Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For a demoralising period towards the start of Miss Sloane, it looks as if we’re in for a high-octane thriller about palm oil. That’s right, palm oil. Everything you never wanted to know about the ethics and economics of the palm oil market is splurged in frenetic, rat-a-tat, overlapping, school-of-Sorkin dialogue. After 10 minutes your ears need a rest on a park bench.Elizabeth Sloane (Jessica Chastain) is a hotshot lobbyist. Her peerless reputation in DC is for not having a moral bone in her body - she’s a gold medallist in ethical limbo, someone says. She’s the poster child for the most Read more ...