Reviews
aleks.sierz
The family is a war zone. Bam, bam, bam. For some people, it can be the most dangerous place on earth. Its weapons include domination and betrayal, blackmail and abuse, and its frontline is memory – what really happened, and who is most to blame? In actor-playwright Nathaniel Martello-White’s new drama, this war zone is crossed and re-crossed with passionate vigour in a minimalist production that has some strong points and some frustrating aspects too.A young woman, Angel, has called a family meeting because she wants to discuss what happened to her when her mother swapped lovers, and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If you happened to catch the second part of the Bridget Jones story – Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004, directed by Beeban Kidron) - on terrestrial television recently, or have read the character's creator Helen Fielding's novel Mad About the Boy, you may be confused by the opening sequence of the third instalment in the film franchise, Bridget Jones's Baby. It begins with Bridget, single and childless at 43, sitting alone in her flat on her birthday, with a glass of wine and a cake with a single candle, singing along to “All By Myself”. Didn't Mark Darcy, the love of her life, propose Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
What price a human soul? That’s the question Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus asks – a question whose answers are rooted in faith and theology. But in a society with little use for faith and still less for theology, how do you reframe the question? Director Maria Aberg offers a deft if not always entirely coherent answer in her breathless, punky take on the play for the RSC.In this monologue of an age, an era in thrall to the selfie and the narcissistic navel-gazing of the blogosphere, our ambitions and loves are turned inwards, but also our fears. It follows that a contemporary Faustus is fascinated Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sixty years of sitcoms in 60 minutes? That's a big ask, but the makers of this whizz-through of British sitcoms tried, with a mega session of clips and comedy experts opining about them in a one-off documentary charting the importance of sitcom in British broadcasting history.The set-up was to talk about firsts and breakthroughs: it started with Hancock's Half Hour, now regarded as the UK's first sitcom, and worked consecutively through many more, with a short clip and one or two people talking about each programme mentioned. It ended, for no apparent reason, with Gavin & Stacey, which Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
You wait ages for a Norma, and then three come along at once. English National Opera saw something nasty in the woodshed back in February with their 19th-century American take on Bellini, while up at the Edinburgh Festival this summer the opera’s original Romans and Druids traded togas for Tricolores and relocated to Nazi-occupied Paris. Now, bringing things right up to date, the Royal Opera give us a contemporary clerical fantasy of a production courtesy of La Fura dels Baus’s Àlex Ollé.The “fearful wood” of Felice Romani’s libretto remains, but is here transfigured by designer Alfons Flores Read more ...
Alison Cole
Guiseppe Penone’s lyrical and tactile works, made from the simple elemental materials that typify the 1960s Italian Arte Povera movement (of which he is a key exponent), belong largely to the outside world of woods and gardens. But they also find an ideal setting in the serene light-filled spaces of Marian Goodman Gallery, where Penone’s perennial fascination with the relationship between man, nature and art is fruitfully explored in an exhibition entitled Fui, Sarò, Non Sono (I was, I will be, I am not).This is one of two complementary Goodman shows, staged simultaneously in London and Paris Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Ralph Fiennes has long felt at home in the Russian repertoire, whether onstage in Fathers and Sons near the start of his career or, in 1997, taking the Almeida's Ivanov to Moscow as the first UK company to bring Chekhov home, as it were.Add in screen credits that include starring in the Alexander Pushkin novel-turned-film Onegin, directed by his sister Martha, and it begins to makes sense that here Fiennes is speaking what sounds to this untutored ear as very decent Russian in a film adaptation from the director Vera Glagoleva of Turgenev's A Month in the Country that appears to minimise Read more ...
aleks.sierz
We’re living in the age of the small play. Although there are plenty of baggy epics around on our stages, they are outnumbered by the small and short two-hander, whether it's John O’Donovan’s gloriously titled If We Got Some More Cocaine I Could Show You How I Love You at the Old Red Lion or the equally gloriously acted Counting Stars by Atiha Sen Gupta at Theatre Royal Stratford East. And, sure enough, the latest new play at the ever-enterprising Orange Tree, Zoe Cooper’s Jess and Joe Forever, is small and short. But it is also a hugely enjoyable romcom.Cooper’s choice of theatrical form Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Australian stand-up Tom Ballard was nominated for best newcomer in last year's Edinburgh Comedy Awards for Taxis & Rainbows & Hatred; last month he went one better with The World Keeps Happening, which gained him a nomination for the main award.It's a loose follow-up to the 2015 show – more political observational comedy with a strong social conscience, but with rather less about him being gay. The blokey-looking 26-year-old mentions it early on with a gag about Grindr, but it's a minor element among the political and social comment.He starts with some easygoing gags about his Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I had never been to the Last Night of the Proms until last night, nor really paid much attention to it in recent years. To the extent I did, I have been resentful of the fact that to many people it represents the Proms as a whole, with its flag waving and fancy dress, although in fact it is utterly atypical. But I went in the spirit of trying anything once and I’m glad I did, although once is probably enough.In a way, critiquing the Last Night of the Proms makes as much sense as critiquing a children’s birthday party, and is as likely to end in tears. The Last Night does not function like a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1969, the Australian band Tamam Shud improvised as a film was projected onto the wall of a recording studio. The results were heard on the Evolution album. Playing original music live to accompany a film screening isn’t commonplace these days but eyebrows are no longer raised when it happens. Pere Ubu have played along with Carnival of Souls and It Came From Outer Space. Mogwai have done the same for the documentary Atomic. Of course, this was no surprise in the silent era and in the early Eighties Bill Nelson echoed the past by playing his soundtrack for Das Kabinett as the film Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Tradition – a choral spectacular for the penultimate night of the Proms – but with a twist – a youth choir and period instruments. Marin Alsop this evening led a spectacular Verdi Requiem, not least for the sheer scale of the chorus, the BBC Proms Youth Choir some 200 strong. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment provided chacterful accompaniment, though sometimes struggled to compete, and the four soloists all delivered, particularly Tamara Wilson, here confirming her reputation as one of today’s leading Verdi sopranos.The BBC Proms Youth Choir brings together four youth choruses from Read more ...