Reviews
Katie Colombus
Olly Murs seems to have monopolised the market on teenage girls and their middle-aged mums - the ultimate X-Factor audience that's followed his journey from the show eight years ago. Doe-eyed kids and their over-zealous chaperones at the O2 are equally doolally when it comes to whooping in response to Olly's laddish flirtation, waving their arms in the air, crooning along, or boogying when invited to "party like it's a Saturday night".Ever the showman, Olly brings an abundance of energy to his set, which is a great mix of his popular chart toppers like "Heart Skips A Beat", "Dear Darling", " Read more ...
David Nice
"È un'immensa pietà" - "it's heartbreaking," rather than "it's a huge pity" - sings consul Sharpless of "Butterfly" Cio-Cio San's fatal belief that her American husband will return to her. Heartbreak is what we expected from Ermonela Jaho after her lacerating performances as Puccini's Suor Angelica at the Royal Opera and Leoncavallo's Zazà at the Barbican, and heartbreak is what we got in the most nuanced of interpretations. How much richer it was, though, in perfect accord with Antonio Pappano, who knows and conducts this most beautiful and, ultimately, most devastating of scores better than Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ben Wheatley’s sixth film in a prolific, unpredictable career is a shoot-‘em-up in the most literal sense. Setting a superb international cast led by Brie Larson and Cillian Murphy down in a big, grim warehouse, he lets them blast bits off each other for 70 of Free Fire’s 90 minutes. After Wheatley’s most obviously ambitious film, his J.G. Ballard adaptation High-Rise, suggested narrative structure wasn’t always his and co-writer/editor Amy Jump’s strength, this locked-room massacre focuses his skills.The set-up is a gun deal gone wrong in 1978’s USA, a period high on lurid disco fashion and Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Record shops are now doing good business in the UK. Just five years ago, who’d have thought that could happen? So does the current fetishisation of vinyl mark a growing desire to be back to physical formats, rather than disembodied technologies? Almost certainly not but it's of no matter, those that want to enjoy records now can, en masse, and theartsdesk on Vinyl is here to critique the very best sounds on plastic, taking in every imaginable style, as well as a few genres that we didn’t know existed until the needle hit the groove. Dive in.VINYL OF THE MONTHVitalic Voyager (Citizen)French Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
In musical performance, if you get the start right and the end right, you can get away with a lot in between. In last night’s LSO concert under François-Xavier Roth there was a mixed bag of more and less successful beginnings and endings, but lots of fine playing sandwiched in the middle.Mahler was only 24 when he began work on his first symphony, but it is a work of astonishing ambition and mastery for such a young composer. It originally had a detailed programme note narrating the story behind the music, and a descriptive name: “Titan”. By the time of the revised version Mahler had thought Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Updating the classics is not without its pitfalls. How can a modern audience, which has a completely different set of religious beliefs, relate to a 17th century morality tale in which the lead character behaves really badly, but gets his comeuppance by being roasted in hell fire? This is the case with Molière’s Don Juan, or The Feast with the Statue, which was originally staged in 1665. In 2006, playwright and director Patrick Marber took this classic and pummelled it into shape as a play for today, complete with contemporary references aplenty. Now it’s being revived, with some rewrites, in Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A decade ago Romanian director Cristian Mungiu took the Palme d’Or at Cannes for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a gruelling abortion drama set in the dying days of the Ceauşescu dictatorship. The cold intensity of that film made it a key work in the remarkable movement that came to be known as the Romanian New Wave, which directed a pitiless eye at the reality of the country as it struggled to throw off the burden of decades of Communism. Back at Cannes last year with his new film Graduation (Bacalaureat), Mungiu won the Best Director award. Graduation is set in the Read more ...
David Nice
A wife dies to save her husband; a hero goes to hell and back to retrieve her from the underworld. Nothing of this dark myth, other than a rollicking row across the Styx from a bass singing Charon, ferryman of the dead, remains in Handel's incidental music to Alceste, a play on the subject by Tobias Smollett (of Roderick Random fame) which never reached a putatively extravagant Covent Garden staging and which has vanished from sight. Instead we have a masque-like score in which the principle characters don't sing. In the company of an inventive little serenade by Boyce and a great Concerto Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Japanese Ghost in the Shell phenomenon is celebrating its 25th birthday, and already has a long history in manga cartoons and animated movies. Now Hollywood has clambered aboard, though this live-action version, finally helmed by British director Rupert Sanders, has taken 10 years to reach the screen.There’s been some controversy about the casting of Scarlett Johansson as the central character, The Major, with some onlookers contending that it’s an outrage to hire a Caucasian superstar instead of a Japanese actress. Others (including Mamoru Oshii, who directed the 1995 Japanese anime Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You may be having a moment of déjà vu, as Ian Hislop and Nick Newman’s new play (which lands in the West End after a UK tour) was previously a BBC film (shown in 2013), and a very fine one too, covering as it does a true story from the First World War. Now, with added music by Nick Green, they have turned The Wipers Times into an intimate stage piece.In the mud and mayhem of Flanders, in a bombed-out building in the Belgian town of Ypres (mis-pronounced Wipers by British Tommies), two officers – Captain Fred Roberts (James Dutton) and Lieutenant Jack Pearson (George Kemp) – discover an Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The annual London Handel Festival is dutifully working its way through every one of Handel’s operas in a cycle that will eventually take us from Alcina to Xerxes before, presumably, starting all over again. But each year, alongside these headliners, we also get a pasticcio – an opera stitched together by Handel from the shiniest and most decorative musical scraps by his European colleagues. It’s these unknown works that often throw up the biggest surprises, giving us a wide-shot of a broader musical landscape now all but obliterated by Handel’s popularity.The term "pasticcio" originally meant Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
The latest instalment in this massive open world sci-fi role-playing game joins the 2017 party in full swing, with both Horizon Zero Dawn and Breath of the Wild raising the bar for the RPG genre. But with the Mass Effect games considered the very cream of the crop, the pressure to perform at a new zenith appears a little too much for a trilogy that looks like it has seen better days.To understand the flaws in this fourth Mass Effect title, you must first take a 600-year commute, from the early 22nd century, aboard an intergalactic pathfinder en route to the Andromeda Galaxy, where humanity Read more ...