Reviews
Javi Fedrick
Julian Cope is one of pop music’s outsiders, a singer and author who began his career in the post-punk pop band The Teardrop Exolodes but whose solo career has drifted gleefully off-radar, more recently releasing albums that blend psych, Gaelic music, blues and prog rock at the rate of about one a year. He takes to the stage decked out in his usual leather vest, knee-high leather boots, and beige three-quarter-lengths, with his grizzled mane poking out from under a navy cap and sunglasses. He’s greeted by a rowdy yet well-intentioned audience, who’ve evidently grown up with his music, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
To Westminster and Meet the Lords, a series which Radio Times assures me follows “the larger-than-life characters” in one of our “most idiosyncratic and important institutions”. Obviously it was shot well before the current Brexit deliberations in the Lords, and this first of three films was largely concerned with the passage of the government’s housing bill last year. This perhaps offered a taste of what their Lord and Ladyships hope to do with Brexit, as they roused themselves indignantly from their post-prandial slumbers against aspects of the housing legislation, and forced the government Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Other Room, dating from the late 1930s, is the largest painting in Dulwich Picture Gallery's landmark retrospective, the first show to be dedicated to Vanessa Bell since a posthumous Arts Council show in 1964. In it, three women inhabit a space crowded with sofa and armchair, flowers and a vase, a comfortable interior and yet also oddly mysterious: their body language hints at complex relationships. A great window looks out at a view of misty greens, slashes of warm pink somehow unify a complex composition.It is a quietly dazzling summary of her preoccupations as a committed, even Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Translating terrorism is tricky. Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s The Student is an adaptation of a play by the German writer Marius von Mayenburg which was staged in London two years ago under its original title, Martyr. One exchange in this story (which is set in and around a school) references what might happen if Christian extremists pursued their beliefs with a fervour we associate more with militant Islam. The two concepts don’t quite combine in English as they did in Russian, which used the title (M)Uchennik, a play on the two words which caught the associations of both. Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The first series of Broadchurch was a gigantic hit four years ago, though 2015’s follow-up suffered a bit of a slow puncture. Can this third and supposedly final outing restore the show to its former glories?Episode one made a tidy and reasonably tense starter, though with seven more to go, you knew that whatever happened here was merely slapping on the undercoat for the (presumably) astounding and stunning revelations scheduled for later on by writer Chris Chibnall. Also, revisiting the same picturesque Dorset coastal town for the third time inevitably means its original freshness and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If only the recent American election had been similarly rectified. That was surely the thought on many people’s lips as the 89th Academy Awards ended in confusion with the news that the evening’s expected winner, La La Land, had in fact lost to Moonlight – an upset immediately amplified by easily the biggest cock-up in Oscar history. A musical about Hollywood losing Hollywood’s top prize to an intimate indie film about a gay black man’s coming of age in Miami is already pretty big news, coming after several years of #Oscarssowhite-led complaints that diversity had been discarded Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Miles Jupp starts by telling us he’s trying to fathom the kind of comic he should be, after he overheard a comment by an audience member at a show on his previous tour: he was nice, the man proffered, but what he said had taken him by surprise. So should Jupp now be full and malice and predictable?The answer, without spoiling it for you, is no. Instead Jupp is his usual gentle and fogeyish self that listeners to Radio 4's News Quiz, which he hosts, television panel shows on which he regularly appears, fans of Rev and The Thick of It, and those who have seen his previous stand-up shows, know Read more ...
graham.rickson
Opera North’s updated version of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel takes place in what looks like a down-at-heel Leeds housing estate, the titular siblings shown filming the story using simple domestic props and back projections. Quite how the impoverished pair have acquired a high-end video camera isn’t made clear; presumably the assorted boxes of Christmas decorations scattered around Giles Cadel’s spare set fell off the back of the same lorry. This Hansel and Gretel is overstuffed with musical delights, but Edward Dick’s production often wilfully obscures and complicates what should be an Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's something to be said for encountering a playwright fresh out of the starting gate. Since his debut play Speech & Debate premiered Off Broadway almost a decade ago, Stephen Karam has gone on to write two altogether wonderful plays, the most recent of which, The Humans, won last year's Tony. This fledgling effort isn't in that league but has its charms, and Tom Attenborough's defibrillator production further marks out the fast-rising Patsy Ferran as a talent busily making her own way towards the big time. Ferran's success in the play's pivotal part of Diwata is doubly notable Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Yiyun Li’s fiction comes garlanded in praise from authors and journals that don’t ladle it out carelessly, so it feels almost churlish to cavil over a memoir written during the course of two years while the author battled serious mental health issues.Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life – a quote from Katherine Mansfield’s personal journal – is not actually a memoir even in the most broad-brush sense of the term. Rather it’s a collection of essays – meditations one might call them – on depression and life and what makes it worth living. Reading this book you wonder, so don’t Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In May 1956, the Texan label Starday issued a wild rockabilly single by Thumper Jones. Its top side, the kinetic “Rock It”, was primal, uncontrolled and wild. The flip, “How Come It”, was less frenzied but still driving and infectious. Original pressings of the two-sided pounder in either its 45 or 78 form now fetch at least £200. This is not your usual rockabilly rarity though. The record’s label credited the songs to a Geo. Jones. Thumper Jones was a pseudonymous George Jones (1931–2013), who was cashing in a hip style: the only time he did so with rockabilly.At this point – the Thumper Read more ...
Matthew Wright
There’s scarcity value in a Tanita Tikaram gig these days. Like seeing a rare bird, you feel special for simply having been there. Last night, in a programme spanning her whole career, she made a strong case to be a songbird of unique character. Her originality is not ostentatious; it charms its way into your heart like a lullaby. Yet despite not inhabiting an obviously radical sound-world, by the end of a long and generous set, she had become compelling. She can’t be mistaken for anyone else.If we’re brutally honest about it, Tikaram lost her star quality 20 years ago. But she has continued Read more ...