Reviews
aleks.sierz
It’s television, not theatre, that has real power. Real cultural force. Cultural muscle. Take the case of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s one-woman show, Fleabag. First staged in 2013 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, it has appeared twice at the Soho since then, garnering a shelf-load of theatre nominations and awards along the way.That’s great, but nobody outside the narrow world of the London theatre scene knew much about it. Then, earlier this year, this hour-long monologue was shown on BBC Three as a six-part series – and bang! Suddenly everyone was talking about it. What had started as a piece Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The period before Christmas is, inevitably, when stand-ups rush to market. With so much material now available on YouTube, fewer comics release DVDs nowadays, but some of the best still do. This is theartsdesk's selection of the best live acts caught on film.Billy Connolly: High HorseBilly Connolly, now 74 and suffering from Parkinson's disease and prostate cancer, belies the ravages of his various illnesses. His delivery may be a little less impassioned, but by golly can he still tell a shaggy dog story better than any other comic. He deals frankly and funnily with his condition: “I'm going Read more ...
Matt Wolf
This Chekhov-intensive year comes to a muted climax with a rare sighting of Wild Honey. Michael Frayn's reappraisal of the Russian master's untitled early text is more commonly known as Platonov. There was a scorching production of the play this summer at the National as part of a Young Chekhov trilogy. A separate Broadway Platonov, adapted by Andrew Upton under the title The Present and starring his wife Cate Blanchett, begins previews next week.That's a lot of airings of a supposedly obscure play. It was superlatively well served on the South Bank by the director Jonathan Kent. And here Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
John Donnelly’s play The Pass scored a slate of five-star reviews when it ran at the Royal Court early last year – theartsdesk called it “scorching” – and plaudits for Russell Tovey’s central performance were practically stellar (“a star performance from onetime History Boys student that this actor's career to this point has in no way suggested,” we raved). For those who missed that sell-out, small-stage, seven-week run, Ben A Williams’ film adaptation delivers all the impact of that experience, in an independent British production that manages the transfer from stage to screen more than Read more ...
David Nice
Praise be to the spell cast by top players on great composers. Without the phenomenon that is Leila Josefowicz, John Adams would never have created his often prolix, fitfully hair-raising Scheherazade.2, more "dramatic symphony" for violin and orchestra than a concerto like his earlier work for the same combination (though that, too, is far from straightforward). It has to be experienced in concert to make its full impact: Josefowicz, in both sound and vision, is the very epitome of the proud and defiant heroine whose task is not to charm a murderous husband but to speak truth to power.Adams Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Ebullient, prolific, loquacious and a charmingly enthusiastic historian both in print and for television, Simon Sebag Montefiore has turned his attention to the pivotal city of Vienna, nourished equally by the Danube and its central geographical position in Europe.Images, both interior and exterior, were punctuated by our intrepid explorer-historian, characteristically garbed in bright blue shirt, giving scale to street and landscape, and easily picked out by his trademark jaunty straw hat as he walked through imperial Vienna. It was history experienced on foot, matching intellectual and Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There are no cartwheels, and no one does the splits, in the new London revival of that most cherishable of Broadway musicals, She Loves Me, which immediately sets Matthew Wright's Menier Chocolate Factory entry apart from the fresh sighting of the same 1963 show that swept New York last season. What one gets instead is the most deeply felt, penetratingly acted version of the piece imaginable. Following the press night curtain call, the show's 92-year-old lyricist, a spry Sheldon Harnick, took to the stage to pronounce this production the best She Loves Me he had seen. Surely he of all people Read more ...
Russ Coffey
Now the celebrity-drug-addict phase of Pete Doherty's career seems to be over the question remains as to what sort of artist he really is. After all, Doherty's best material always appeared to be inextricably woven into his chaotic lifestyle. The new album, Hamburg Demonstrations, on the other hand, was apparently recorded entirely drug-free. It's given fans pause for thought about where Doherty-the-phenomenon ends and Doherty-the-talent begins. Before Tuesday's show one punter gave me his opinion. "The drugs were really an irrelevance," he told me, "What matters is Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Good American, a Texan no less, has landed at Tate Modern in style. This posthumous retrospective of the great Robert Rauschenberg includes a paint-bespattered, fully made-up bed hung vertically on the wall, and called – you guessed – Bed,1955 (pictured below right). A huge White Painting, 1951 – latex housepaint on seven panels, glossy and smooth – is joined by a huge, swirling, all-black painting, Untitled, c.1951, and an installation of various substances resembling bubbling mud, called Mud Muse, 1968-71. One gallery contains so-called Jammers, 1975-76, swathes of material leaning Read more ...
graham.rickson
Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom started life as a short stage play in 1984, drawing on its creator’s own experiences in the heady world of amateur ballroom dancing. That the iconic 1992 film exists at all is something of a miracle; production funding was scarce and no distributor was willing to screen it until it was accepted for the 1992 Cannes Festival. Strictly Ballroom is still an intoxicating viewing experience: a visually arresting and upbeat modern fairy tale, smartly cast and superbly performed. The credits for this stage musical version are impressive: Luhrmann was one of the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Another week, another serial killer on prime time. In Dark Angel we had the grim story of Mary Ann Cotton, the Victorian poisoner who killed her husbands for the insurance. Meanwhile John Christie continues his grim work in Rillington Place. And now In Plain Sight introduces another chilling psychopath going about his business.While Christie is memorialised in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors and in Richard Attenborough’s screen performance, viewers have far less to go on with Peter Manuel, who operated in the same post-war period as Christie and did most of his killing in Scotland. His Read more ...
David Nice
An amplified crunch in the dark, sound without vision, kicks off this take on Moss Hart and George S Kaufman's light comedy about the advent of the talking pictures. It's a typical Richard Jones leitmotif, not as fraught with horror as the baked beans of his Wozzeck or the spinning top in his Royal Opera Boris Godunov. This, bathetically, is merely the noise of "Indian" nuts being consumed by the play's holy fool George Lewis, an idiot everyone thinks is savant. The effect is sparely operated thereafter. But then nothing needs overegging in this piece of perfectly-executed seasonal froth. Two Read more ...