Reviews
Jasper Rees
The masochistic reality show heralds a culture with an inferiority complex. There have been documentary re-running the race to the South Pole. Countless series place modern Britons in historical contexts where the dietary, sanitary and heating arrangements leave much to be desired. At the heart of them all is an anxiety that mod cons – radiators, white goods, frozen readymeals – have softened us. Are we simply not fit to lace the boots of our forebears?The latest endurance test is possibly the genre’s horriblest yet: a reboot of the journey undertaken by Captain Bligh and his loyal sailors Read more ...
David Nice
Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics; Royal Concertgebouw Amsterdam; NHKSO Tokyo. Would you have thought of putting the Japanese orchestra in the same league as the top Europeans? I certainly wouldn't, at least not until last night. While there isn't the same blended warmth, the sound is never clinical or cold; and the revelation is an incisiveness unlike any other, no doubt encouraged by Chief Conductor Paavo Järvi's digging deep in the amazing march-mania at the heart of the finale in Mahler's Sixth Symphony.The ocular proof of that hard work could be seen in the physical movement and Read more ...
Steve O'Rourke
When a great game presents itself, all its moving parts sing in harmonious unison. The intriguing and engaging story supports the beautiful visuals, the varied and challenging gameplay sits perfectly within the narrative and the gameworld feels full of promise and potential. Repetition doesn’t repeat itself, there’s no grind - just the experience of exploration and adventure and at its very best you just can’t get enough of it. Welcome to the fantasy world of Horizon Zero Dawn: you won’t be disappointed.With a hype introduction like that you could expect this PS4-exclusive single player Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Love, we know, will tear us apart again. And again. And yet again. It will shred our nerves and rip through our guts; it will fill us with anguish, and then douse us in regrets. It will expose our weaknesses, and then make us say what we can never unsay. It will embattle our egos, and then stamp on our ids. It will. It really will. And before you ask why the bedroom is so cold, I can tell you that all this is the effect of some passages of debbie tucker green’s new play, which will henceforth be known as the one with the long-dictionary-definition title, and which has national treasure Meera Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There have been three versions of King Kong and only one of them answers the question of how they get a massive ape back to New York. In 1976 they shipped him in an oil tanker, but the vessels in RKO’s 1933 original and Peter Jackson’s 2005 homage were nothing like big enough.The new Kong is so colossal that there is no thought of monetising him back in the Apple. How would they airlift him off? This 3D neo- monstrosity stands 60 foot tall, twice the size of any previous screen appearances. They’d need a fleet of helicopters to lift him, and he doesn’t like choppers: a fleet of them are soon Read more ...
David Kettle
March 2017 is MacMillan month in Scotland – well, in Glasgow at least, with certain events spilling over into Edinburgh and other cities too. It’s not as if we don’t already get to hear quite a bit of Sir James’s music north of the border, but it’s a valuable celebration all the same, and one that also serves to bring together several of the nation’s musical institutions – the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, among others – at what’s a particularly prolific time in his career.And what better way to kick off the event than with a Read more ...
mark.kidel
Intimacy is a mixed blessing: Richard Twyman’s close-up exploration of sex and violence in his production of Othello for Bristol’s Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory takes the audience on a gripping emotional journey, but one that is at times almost beyond close for comfort.This is theatre in the round with a vengeance: the low-ceilinged space, with the audience seated within feet of the stage, in a 360-degree embrace, leaves no room for escape. Twyman has accentuated the sense of claustrophobia – because yes, intimacy can feel stifling – with a mixture of one-directional vertical top Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
George Saunders has written a historical novel. Of course, this being Saunders, author of four volumes of dystopian short stories about contemporary America (the wonderful Tenth of December is the most recent), it’s unlike any other. This is a tale told by ghosts, three in particular, who inhabit the graveyard in Georgetown where Willie, Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son, dead from typhoid, lies interred.The urbane voices of hans vollman, roger bevins iii and the reverend everly thomas (their names are lower-case throughout, perhaps because they are shadows of their former selves) recount the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
By the time Buzzcocks recorded the 12 tracks heard on Time’s Up, they had played with Sex Pistols twice. They had also shared bills with The Clash, The Damned, Eater, Slaughter & The Dogs, Stinky Toys and The Vibrators. After singer Howard Devoto (then known as Howard Trafford) read about Sex Pistols in the 21 February 1976 NME he and his friend Pete Shelley (Peter McNeish) saw them on the 20th – the weekly paper was available in their home-town Manchester from Thursdays rather than the date of the issue – and the 21st in High Wycombe and Welwyn Garden City. They recorded the latter show Read more ...
Saskia Baron
From the opening shot of a distant train making its slow journey toward the camera across flat plains ringed by Montana’s mountains, the audience knows they’re in for one of those subtle, low-key American art films. Kelly Reichardt, who doesn’t just direct her movies but edits and writes them too, is the queen of the slow-burn 21st-century Western. Subtly feminist, she paints a portrait of women making their way in a male landscape, steeped in pioneer history and overshadowed by economic disappointment. Certain Women is adapted from three short stories by Marile Meloy, but it could have Read more ...
David Nice
It's official: if you want to be guaranteed an infallible musical adrenalin boost in London, you can always be sure to find it with Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo and his BBC Symphony Orchestra. And it's not just a question of splashy excitement: Oramo is a rigorous rehearser. Detlev Glanert's fiendish new tone poem Megaris would not have been half as vivid or pleasurable without extraordinary preparation. As for Nielsen and Sibelius, there is no conductor in the world I'd rather hear today in their music than Oramo.This was a concert of journeys, sea-girt in the first half, with plenty of Read more ...
Bill Knight
Lending its name to a major photography prize for the 12th year running, Deutsche Börse has joined the ranks of business organisations known to many for their involvement in the arts rather than what they actually do. Unlike Taylor Wessing or Man Booker, the clue is in the name: German Stock Exchange is reasonably self-explanatory, at least if you speak the language.The nominated projects from the shortlisted artists for 2017 occupy the gallery's upper floors. Entering the fourth floor you are confronted with Dana Lixenberg’s large black and white portraits from the Imperial Courts housing Read more ...