Reviews
Barney Harsent
TV can be a powerful tool of redemption. Take Strictly Come Dancing – anything that can shift perception of Ann Widdecombe from poisonous homophobe to innocuous have-a-go hero is dark, dark magic indeed. Just this week, the Strictly dancefloor has finally bid goodbye to Ed Balls after housing him for almost as long as the role of Shadow Home Secretary, and society is opening its arms to him – a politician with a reputation as a ruthless bully. It's another example of TV-led Munchausen syndrome by proxy.In Channel 5’s fly-on-the-wall documentary, MPs Behind Closed Doors, redemption also seemed Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
Time Locker takes a simple concept first seen in Piotr Iwanicki’s 3D shooter, Superhot and repurposes it for a top-down 2D endless run & gun game. In most shooters, rapid movement and frantic aiming are the norm but in Superhot time only advances when you move. You can stand still and take in your surroundings, including the trajectory of bullets and enemies frozen in the air, and then move to dodge or intercept them. As soon as you move a millimeter, however, the clock starts ticking and everything starts moving again.Time Locker’s version of Superhot’s 3D gun battles is an endless plain Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Send in the paradoxes. Richard Rodney Bennett (1936-2012) had been so obsessed as a young man by music of the avant-garde, he would hitch-hike to Darmstadt to be in the same room as his (then) idols Berio, Maderna, and Boulez. He and Cornelius Cardew premiered important works by Boulez in the UK. And yet this was the same man who would later write, sing and play a cabaret song, “Early to Bed”, based on an endearing habit of Blossom Dearie.This was a composition student thrilled to receive his first film commission – to score a film glorifying the robustness of British insurance – and who Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Booking a ticket for a show devised by Michael Keegan-Dolan has always required an act of faith, and this is no exception. ‘If I say this is a house, it’s a house,” says the evening’s laconic compere, Mikel Murfi, gesturing with his cigarette to three breeze blocks on the floor. And if Keegan-Dolan says this is Swan Lake you’d better believe it and brace yourself for wrenching tragedy.Keegan-Dolan has form. He brought London audiences the most striking take on The Rite of Spring in living memory as well as a compelling revision of Giselle which cast the title character as an Irish line- Read more ...
Ismene Brown
An inviting gap in the market, a dark, mysterious place, was left beckoning when the dance theatres of Britain cashed in on expensive refurbs in the name of public accessibility. Putting an end to mystique, they homed in on IKEA style, all glass, pale wood and airport foyer briskness. The theatre as a continuum with our office space, blank, unprejudicing, unintoxicating, all about efficiency and the bottom line.When I was an usherette at Covent Garden, huddled cloakrooms and elvish bars could be found around every corner, each a tiny fierce kingdom ruled by an outsize ego – Irish Paddy in one Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Once they’ve died nine times, Lynne Truss’s evil talking cats become immortal. Whether Truss has such ambitions for the literary lifespan of her curiously addictive feline thrillers, this second outing, after 2014’s Cat Out of Hell, suggests a robust life-expectancy for an idea apparently sprung from a tiresomely persistent internet meme. In The Lunar Cats, we re-make the acquaintance of protagonist and widowed librarian Alec Charlesworth, hapless actor Wiggy, and feline mastermind Roger, on an adventure in the perilous universe of evil talking cats - featuring most bizarrely, this time, a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1970, The Who opened their Live at Leeds album with “Young Man Blues”, a hefty version of a song its composer Mose Allison recorded as “Blues” in 1957. Back then, it was the only vocal track on Back Country Suite, an otherwise instrumental blues-jazz album, the Mississippi-born pianist's debut long player. Allison had moved to New York in 1956 and a string of releases followed. The Who weren’t the only British band cocking an ear: in March 1965 The Yardbirds first recorded Allison's “I’m Not Talking”, plucked by them from 1964’s The Word From Mose.Mose Allison’s music was integral to the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Kenwood Chef! Intercity 125! Kodak Instamatic! Wilkinson Sword disposable razors! Bus shelters! Parking meters! They were all designed by a British genius, Sir Kenneth Grange, who appeared here as the subject of a short and disarmingly confident interview, intiating a series of such interviews. The programme marked the opening weekend of the £83m transformation of the Grade2* redundant Commonwealth Institute in Kensington into the new Design Museum, which showcases both British and international contemporary design.It was bookended with an interview with Sir Terence Conran, now 85. Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Mark Rylance was once renowned for skipping thank yous to agents, friends and everyone he’s ever met in award speeches and instead giving us a blast of Minnesotan prose poet Louis Jenkins. Now the two men have co-created an oddball meditation, first seen in New York earlier this year, in which comedy meets soul-searching on an untethered frozen lake.Rylance the writer has given Rylance the actor a typically Rylance part: charmingly guileless and gormless Ron, the loquacious and gently dotty companion of serious fisherman Erik (Jim Lichtscheidl), whose suffering of this irksome presence Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Born in Rome and taught by her artist father, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1652) led a colourfully energetic life. As an adolescent she was raped by her father’s assistant – an episode which unusually, then as now, actually came to public trial – but she nevertheless became a confident, resolute woman, and a successful artist. She was vitally ambitious, portraying herself as La Pittura in her Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, c.1638-9, an image at the heart of this exhibition.Here Artemisia is almost hurling herself at her canvas, brush in one hand, palette in the other. Wearing Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The sketch format goes in and out of favour. It was huge in the 1970s, crawled under a rock when alternative comedians found other means of expression, and was reinvigorated 20 years ago by genuinely inventive shows like Big Train and The Fast Show. Since then, easily the biggest kid on the block has been Little Britain, which married mainstream appeal with a flair for subversion.After cashing in with a live tour, its stars didn’t really have anywhere to go with the format. They had a crack at ribbing the docusoap genre in the underrated Come Fly With Me, and then went their separate ways. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Elgar Remastered (Somm)Elgar’s compositional career took a bit of a nosedive in his final decades but his sharpness as a practical musician never left him, as is witnessed by the superb series of acoustic and early electrical recordings he conducted in the 1920s and early '30s. There’s a magnificent Warner box collecting the discs he made for HMV, which should be in every home. Elgar’s swift tempi and reluctance to linger are frequently thrilling, dispelling any suggestion that this is crusty music for tweed-clad buffers. This Somm set is also mandatory listening: sound engineer Lani Spahr Read more ...