Reviews
Ismene Brown
This House arrives in the West End with magic timing - a comedy about the farcical horrors of being a government with a wafer-thin majority, frantically wheeling out dying, suicidal and breastfeeding MPs to vote, horsetrading with "odds and sods" to keep their nails on power. James Graham’s play about the 1970s Labour travails, produced by the National Theatre/Chichester Festival, opened in 2012 to a mixed reception, but its reappearance on Charing Cross Road acquired some serendipitous overnight oomph as Tory fellow-traveller Zac Goldsmith lost his seat to the Lib Dems yesterday, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The pilot and the sniper have a lot in common for Clint Eastwood. In his previous US blockbuster, American Sniper, Chris Kyle’s cool shooting under pressure helped extract his comrades from overwhelming assault in Iraq, as part of at least 160 kills confirmed by him there. On January 15, 2009, Captain Chesley Sullenberger kept his head to land his failing airliner on the Hudson, saving all 155 on board. The achievements are opposite in effect, but the professionalism Eastwood so admires is the same. “We did our job” is said in Sully like an article of faith. Kyle’s myopically racist view of Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For anyone disposed to treat the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse as hallowed ground – and such issues have gained much currency at the Globe recently following the announced early departure of artistic director Emma Rice – The Little Matchgirl may seem like a wanton deconstruction of its space, which is cheeked into a knowing update that comes close to Edwardian music hall, and with aperçus stingingly relevant to the venue’s recent backstory (“Candles are much more atmospheric than electricity” is one such textual quip). For those less reverentially inclined, this adaptation of Hans Christian Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The Dardennes brothers' latest tale from the grim streets of the industrial suburb of Liège in Belgium is another quietly powerful masterpiece; it’s perhaps their best film since The Child. Re-edited since it debuted at Cannes to mixed reviews, it fuses elements from social realist cinema, morality play and a whodunit murder mystery. The result is a wholly gripping narrative told with understated eloquence.The film opens with no introductions: a young woman, stethoscope in ears, is listening to a patient breathe. Beside her is a man wearing a white coat. There’s shouting from outside the room Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Anyone hoping for a few laughs and a nice bit of catharsis after enduring the eight unstintingly miserable episodes of The Missing would have got none of the former and hardly any of the latter. Writers Jack and Harry Williams had sprung most of their biggest surprises in earlier episodes, such as the revelation that the real Alice Webster was still alive and being held captive in Adam Gettrick's Swiss Alpine cottage, and indeed that Gettrick was the abductor of the girls around whom the story has revolved.Some loose ends were at least tied up. We saw how Gettrick (Derek Riddell) had killed Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“This is an emergency. Homicides in Chicago, Illinois have surpassed the death toll of American special forces in Iraq.” This news bulletin forms the opening of Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, pronounced Shy-Rack, a stylised, bombastic take on the gang violence that’s decimating Chicago’s South Side (7,916 Americans have been killed there since 2001, as opposed to 6,888 in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). Based on the ancient Greek play Lysistrata by Aristophanes in which women ended the Peloponnesian war by withholding sex, Lee’s advice is for the ladies of the ‘hood to do the same until their men Read more ...
Robert Beale
With two of the biggest parts of the tetralogy already behind them, it might have seemed that Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé would aim simply at as near a perfect recording-cum-concert of Das Rheingold as possible, to get one more in the can and head for the final straight in a year or so’s time. But this Bridgewater Hall performance was more than that: a magisterial account of the score – done in one continuous take of two-and-three-quarter hours – and the recording based on it and its rehearsals, when it appears, will no doubt be a notable and probably great one.It was also an entertaining Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
Howard Brenton (Christie in Love) and Ruth Rendell (Thirteen Steps Down) are just two of the many writers inspired by the sordid goings-on in 1940s Notting Hill. John Reginald Christie was a postman, a policeman and a psychopath who, as a back-street abortionist, enjoyed killing for company. A fantasist with an iron grip, he ensured that his lodger, Tim Evans, was the first to be hanged for his crimes.Ludovic Kennedy’s 10 Rillington Place, which highlighted the miscarriage of justice, ensured that Christie’s necrophiliac corpse would never rest in peace. It took 10 years for Kennedy’s book – Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Leonard Bernstein once said that his favourite piece of Stravinsky was whatever one he happened to be listening to. I have a similar feeling about Mozart piano concertos: I love them all in their turn, and last night I heard Mitsuko Uchida bring two of the greatest of them to life, as pianist and director, alongside the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.The template is clearly the successful “Beethoven Journey” in which Leif Ove Andsnes spent four years touring the Beethoven piano concertos with the MCO, culminating in three scintillating Proms in the 2015 season. Combining two concertos with a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tom Allen may have started life in Bromley, a non-descript south London suburb, but there was always a touch of Oscar Wilde about him – whether in his dress sense or his way with words, as we have learned from previous shows. It was obvious to him – and to school bullies – that he was not like them, a gay, bookish, clever boy with a very distinct way of expressing himself.It's his suburban background that Allen mines for his latest show, Indeed, which debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe. At first sight, it may appear to be his most biographical hour, featuring as it does a lengthy anecdote about Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Thomas Søndergård stood in for this concert at a day’s notice – Valery Gergiev is apparently recovering from a knee operation and unable to travel. He left behind a curious programme, centred around Prokofiev’s quirky but dour Sixth Symphony. It’s a difficult work to schedule, but Gergiev added two sweeteners, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet and First Piano Concerto. Søndergård clearly has the measure of all three works, and all came off well, making this concert, his first appearance with the London Symphony, an impressive debut.Dynamism and focus are the key qualities of Søndergård’s Read more ...
David Nice
Having musicalised the madness in the method of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, what would that wackiest of composers Gerald Barry turn to next? Why, dear child, what else but the method in madness of Lewis Carroll's Alice books. Except that method is mostly discarded in the shards of nonsense extracted from Carroll, and to be found only in the musical art of compression.Usually you look sceptically at a cast which includes both the Mad Hatter and Humpty Dumpty as portent of a watered-down Alice compendium. But this savage parade, given its European premiere in last night's Barbican Read more ...