Reviews
aleks.sierz
Sex workers come in all shapes and sizes. Everyone knows that. But why do they do it? Why does anyone take the risk of being intimate with a stranger for money? This new show, which was not only devised with the help of genuine prostitutes, but is also acted by them, introduces us to both the enormous variety of sex workers and to their wide range of motives. The play, which was created by director Mimi Poskitt and playwright Molly Taylor, takes us by the hand and gently ushers us into a darkened room, designed by Katrina Lindsay, to show us a slice of life that is mainly invisible to most of Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Before this Sadler's Wells Flamenco Festival-opening performance of Israel Galván's show FLA.CO.MEN, my guest wanted to know what the show would be like. And if I struggled lamely for words in response, it wasn't because I thought it would be bad – au contraire – but because Galván tends to defy both prediction and description.The 90 minutes that followed proved that any prophecy would indeed have been a waste of breath. He smashes a ceramic flamenco boot (after playing it like a flute). He pretends to read his dance steps off a score on a music stand, while wearing a chef's Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The only British gig in Josh Ritter’s so-called work-in-progress tour took place in the somewhat unlikely venue of St Stephen’s Church, Shepherd’s Bush, a rather fine example of gothic revival style. It’s almost opposite Bush Hall, which would have been a more logical venue: an altar was not perhaps the most obvious setting for the Idaho-born alt folkie though the acoustics were splendid.But there Ritter stood, pulpit to his right, flying-eagle lectern (the symbol of St John the Evangelist) to his left. The numbers of last Sunday’s hymns were still on display. Leonard Cohen liked to mix sex Read more ...
David Kettle
In the end, it’s all about Mamillius. It’s he – the young son of Leontes of Sicily – who launches director Max Webster’s really quite magical new production of Shakespeare’s credibilty-busting tragedy-cum-comedy at Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre, suggesting it’s all a child’s made-up story in the first place. It's he who fast-forwards us 16 years just after the interval.And it’s he – superbly played by young Will Robertson on press night (the role alternates between two youngsters) – who provides the uncanny sense of innocence and wonder in Webster’s production, as though it’s all seen through Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
As its title foretells, Moonlight is a luminous film. It shines light on experiences that may be completely different from our own, drawing us in with utter empathy. Director Barry Jenkins shows his lead character finding his way out of darkness, through pain, to attain a tentative revelation of self-acceptance. Yet this is no direct or glaring light: Jenkins shows himself a master of nuance, working with a script that is light on words but speaks unforgettably in the primal language of cinema itself.It’s an independent film in the essence of that term, something that makes its progression to Read more ...
David Nice
Hated the Schaubühne Hamlet (same lead actor, same director as this latest Shakespeare auf Deutsch); loved Ivo van Hove's Toneelgroep Kings of War, with Hans Kesting's Richard III on the highest level alongside the Henrys V and VI. Thomas Ostermeier's Berlin ensemble is nowhere near as vivid overall as van Hove's Dutch team, but everything that didn't work for me about Lars Eidinger's Prince of Denmark turns to fool's gold in his brilliant take on the bunch-back'd dissembler turned mass-murderer. It's a performance which takes you further than you thought possible.And the stage - in Jan Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Wagner’s Tristan left a huge mark on fin de siècle art, on the symbolist poets, even on their pseudonyms; Debussy himself toyed with a four-act opera on the subject. And his version, if he had ever composed it, would have been an intriguing precedent for the Swiss composer Frank Martin’s Le Vin herbé (The Drugged Wine), since both are, or would have been, derived from the same source, Joseph Bédier’s turn-of-the-century novel, Le Roman de Tristan et Isaut, a much more detailed and anecdotal conflation of the various medieval legends than Wagner’s.Martin’s so-called Oratorio profane (1938-41) Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The Great Wall is David Icke’s worst nightmare. David Icke (if you weren’t there in the 1980s) was a BBC snooker presenter. After ingesting a brain-rotting anti-elixir, he transmogrified into a doolally conspiracy theorist in a turquoise shell suit. He had a showpiece theory about lizards. Lizards – “tall, blood-drinking, shape-shifting reptilian humanoids,” he specified – were hiding in underground bases and were “a force behind a worldwide conspiracy against humanity”. There are half a dozen scriptwriters credited on The Great Wall. Icke isn’t one of them but Universal Pictures should Read more ...
aleks.sierz
There are few modern literary fables that really resonate in the wider culture. And most that do are dystopias. Think of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or even Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And, of course, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. This 1962 novel explores the myth of the unique violence of modern alienation in a hectic parable which is told in “nadsat”, a teen language of the future which mixes Russian with English while sporting a distinctly Shakespearean cadence.This is a testosterone-heavy, noisy and boyish Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Tom Stoppard’s humungously funny play Travesties was born out of a piece of James Joyce doggerel about how a British diplomat sued him for the cost of two pairs of trousers. It’s like this. Joyce was organising an expat amateur production of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in Zurich; the British consul Henry Carr agreed to play Algernon on the understanding that he would choose his own trousers and – crucially – have two full costume changes.As is the way in theatre, heads butted when the box office takings came in, and Joyce wrote in an outraged ditty about the incident: "We paid all Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Tasmania, Down Under is like Canvey Island (although somewhat larger): everyone knows where it is but no one wants to go there. The Kettering Incident reveals why: the bleak but beautiful landscape is blasted by Antarctic gales and the natives, with few exceptions, are ugly devils, resentful of strangers and quarrelsome with their neighbours. And that’s just the humans.This eight-part “supernatural” drama began with a shot of a column of rock thrusting out of the sea between a V-shaped cleft in cliffs. Alas, what followed was also a load of cock. We’ve seen it all before, many times.This is Read more ...
Katie Colombus
The idea of a heavy metal rock band for children might be somewhat lacking in appeal for some. Images of leather and chains, frightening make-up, Anthrax-style roaring into a microphone and satanic lyrics for dear little Jonti, all a bit overwhelming. But in Finland, where hard rock is a way of life, of course there’s a heavy metal group for kids.Obsessed as we are by the culture of Nordic cool, Imagination Festival on the Southbank has pushed the boundaries of British sensibility, and here we are. Any fears melt away as five dinosaurs bound onto the stage, like friendly-faced cartoon Read more ...