Reviews
Adam Sweeting
Having served her time as dutiful, self-effacing Anna Bates in Downton Abbey, here's Joanne Froggatt grasping with both hands the role of Mary Ann Cotton, "Britain's first female serial killer". No more wearing herself out desperately trying to save Mr Bates from the gallows. This time she's turning the tables, and making sure useless men aren't going to hold her back any longer. After a short prologue in which our anti-heroine was preparing to meet her maker, we joined her as she returned to her mother and stepfather's pub in Seaham, County Durham in 1857. She had eloped to Cornwall Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander fell in love in real life while making The Light Between Oceans, which lends an extra dimension to a morose period weepie that needs every bit of excitement it can get. Reminiscent of the laboured celluloid romances of a bygone era that could once have starred Robert Taylor, the film is as vacuous as it is pretty, and if director Derek Cianfrance cut some of his stars' lingering glances, it would have the added virtue of being short.As it is, 132 minutes is a long time for a movie whose narrative more or less demands that the audience is several steps Read more ...
David Nice
Do we see enough in the UK of continental European drama in translation? No. Is what we actually get the best? Probably not in the case of popular German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz's The Nest. Still, it's rendered into pithy, convincing vernacular by no less a writer than Conor McPherson, well enough directed by Ian Rickson and plausibly characterised by two fine Irish actors.A greater play could take a fuller outline of its contents than can be given here without depriving the reader of more to chew on as spectator. Let's just say that Caolifhionn Dunn and Laurence Kinlan, who've just Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Given the horrors lurking in the composer’s more familiar operas, the warning that Maria de Rudenz is “perhaps the darkest of Donizetti’s tragedies” carries no little weight. A Gothic spectacular with echoes of The Castle of Otranto and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Maria’s dramatic excess is tempered by a fine score, full of atmospheric chorus writing and some particularly lovely arias for baritone. Staged by the same team that delivered the ghostly fantasy of a Guglielmo Ratcliff at last year’s festival, the opera is a stylish Halloween hit, welcome as trick or treat candy, but dissolving just Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Romesh Ranganathan has had an astonishing rise in comedy. The former teacher did his first full-length show at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013, having made his debut there in 2010 in the newcomer competition, So You Think You're Funny? Now he's a television panel-show regular, and the second series of his travelogue Asian Provocateur is currently on the BBC. His success, he deadpans, is because, with his Sri Lankan heritage and a lazy eye, he ticks not one but two diversity boxes.It's down to talent, of course, and Ranganathan, a great student of comedy, knows what appeals. In truth his Read more ...
David Nice
It felt oddly disrespectful showing up in time for Schumann's wake on the fifteenth and final day of this year's Oxford Lieder Festival. Having started with the early piano music and many of the chamber works before moving on to Schumann's annus mirabilis of song, 1840, with frequent leaps backwards to influences and forwards to the influenced, pianist Sholto Kynoch’s labour of love reached the troubled final years dogged by whatever that insanity for which Schumann was institutionalised might have been – bipolarity, syphilis, poisoning for the mercury used in its treatment. Fortunately the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Humans is of course not about humans. Or not mainly. But if Channel 4 had called it Synths, which is what/who it is mainly about, maybe fewer would have signed up to watch, presuming it to be an eight-part series about Eighties pop. Synths, if you missed series one, are a species of robotic service provider with a humanoid appearance who perform menial tasks like scrubbing, babysitting and issuing parking fines. Inevitably a few of them got ideas above their station and started thinking like humans. Series two promises the same only more so.The first episode moved the scene on to Berlin where Read more ...
Florence Hallett
In Monster Field, 1938, fallen trees appear like the fossilised remains of giant creatures from prehistory. With great horse-like heads, and branches like a tangle of tentacles and legs, Paul Nash’s series of paintings and photographs serve as documents, bearing witness to the malevolent lifeforce that, unleashed by their undignified end, has taken hold of these apparently dead trees.Like the trees of Monster Field, piles of wrecked World War Two aircraft at Cowley Dump, removed from their proper environment in the sky, take on a new and disturbing life of their own, shifting and stirring, Read more ...
David Nice
What a relief to find Semyon Bychkov back on romantic terra firma after his slow-motion Mozart at the Royal Opera (performances speeded up somewhat, I'm told, after a sticky first night). On his own, dark-earth terms, there's no-one to touch him for nuanced phrasing, strength of purpose and the devoted responsiveness he wins from the BBC Symphony Orchestra - foot-stamping its approval at the end, a rarity - in Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. This week's two concerts in his "Beloved Friend" Tchaikovsky series both hit the heights and plumbed the depths, if not always entirely where expected.The Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Two personable musicians, who win on all fronts: at the pinnacle of their highly competitive and skilled professions, highly articulate, and perhaps unlikely partners in their art. In one corner, ladies and gentlemen, the composer, world-leading jazz trumpeter, teacher, head of Lincoln Center Jazz, the New Orleans-born Wynton Marsalis, 55. In the other, Nicola Benedetti, 29, the Scottish classical violinist, teacher and leading campaigning proselytiser for the importance of music in all spheres.Miss Benedetti played the premiere of Wynton Marsalis’s Violin Concerto in D, with a mere 100 Read more ...
graham.rickson
Josquin: Masses The Tallis Scholars/Peter Philips (Gimmell)Listeners hoping that Josquin might have deployed aleatoric, Cageian techniques in his Missa Di Dadi might feel short-changed here, though the musical virtues of this disc are never in question. The emoji-like dice graphics which Josquin placed at the head of the tenor part in several movements mostly function like musical performance directions, their score combinations giving the singers information about note and phrase lengths. Peter Phillips’s scholarly, entertaining sleeve essay makes a valiant attempt to explain the process, Read more ...
David Nice
So many words, starting with the title - we're told we can call it iHo - and so many lines spoken by anything up to nine characters at once. But as this is the unique world of Tony Kushner, it's all matter from the heart, balancing big ideas and complex characters and leading them beyond the realms of any safe and simply effective new play, in this case towards a father-and-daughter scene as great as anything you'll see in the theatre today.This is a different sort of epic style to the freewheeling mastery of Angels in America. It's unusual to find a Kushner play where you can nominally Read more ...