Reviews
Tom Birchenough
Tough love doesn’t get much tougher. Ukrainian priest Gennadiy Mokhnenko has spent two decades trying to keep children off the streets, and away from drugs, in his hometown Mariupol, using methods that elsewhere in the world would count as vigilante. For him radical intervention was the only way of responding to the social breakup of the 1990s, after the Soviet collapse brought his society to a profound low point, both psychologically and economically, while those nominally in power were conspicuous by their inaction, or worse. He's been doing it ever since.Mokhnenko’s charisma is at the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Richard Gadd, The Banshee Labyrinth ★★★★★Richard Gadd wryly tells us at the end of Monkey See Monkey Do that he thought it was a good idea to put this thought-provoking show, with its deep seam of theatricality and emotion, in the comedy section of the Fringe brochure. And in truth it could sit easily as a theatre show, albeit one with frequent laughs. But at its heart is a deeply personal and highly revelatory story about an incident in Gadd's life that caused him to re-evaluate who he is both as a person and as a man.It starts amiably enough with a Trainspotting-esque chase through streets Read more ...
David Nice
It's not so long since Daniel Barenboim sat around a table with Israeli officials telling him that Wagner couldn't be played in the homeland when someone's mobile fanfared the "Ride of the Valkyries", demolishing the opposition's case. At the opposite end of the scale to all that flash of battle-lust came last night's unexpected first encore to a Wagner second half – the Act Three Prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. It foreshadows opera's most humanistic monologue, in which a deep thinking man of the people bewails the folly and delusion which so quickly knock civilization off course Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
A tousled-haired child wearing wings is framed in a candlelit casement window. It’s a beautiful, Georges de La Tour-like scene. He’s the angel of the Lord in a nativity play rehearsal: unto us a son is born, peace on earth. But hark – why is the soundtrack so piercing and Psycho-ish? And why has this little angel (Tom Sweet) left the rehearsal to throw stones at people in the darkness?This is surely the first film to formally divide its acts into “Tantrums”. There are three of them and, by today’s standards, they’re nothing major – refusing to eat dinner, barricading himself into his room, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A woman cowers beneath her bedclothes, building a useless barrier against the thing she hears creeping and scraping across the room, the thing that only appears when she turns off the light. This is the most primal image of domestic terror in the homemade short film whose viral success took its Swedish director, David F Sandberg, to Hollywood.The full-scale expansion of Lights Out he made there has a similarly effective moment, when its young heroine Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) awakes to the sound of long nails dragging along her bedroom floor, where a shadowy, long-haired figure hunches. And if Read more ...
Matt Wolf
The New York theatre is so consistently awash in "star is born" moments when one or another British actor crosses the Atlantic to copious praise that it's lovely for a change to be able to reverse the kudos. And as Phil Connors, the jaded weatherman for whom February 2 threatens to become a personal Waterloo, Broadway veteran Andy Karl in his London stage debut sends the stage musical adaptation of Groundhog Day soaring.Sure, there's plenty else to admire about a new musical that had its own sights set on Broadway well before it even opened, and that re-teams composer Tim Minchin and director Read more ...
David Nice
Southwark's golden triangle – the Menier, the Playhouse and the Union – has given us so many "lost" musicals which only a decade or so ago would have been lucky to get in-concert airings. Chief gap-fillers in the Rodgers & Hammerstein oeuvre have been the Union Theatre's charming shot at Pipe Dream, which had quirky subject matter – Steinbeck's Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday – and a few good songs, and now the Southwark Playhouse's "European professional premiere" of Allegro, which has a half-interesting, home-grown plot and not a single vintage R&H number. No amount of heart Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There is a grand ongoing project in Wales at the moment, the goal of which is to hunt for the deep ancestral DNA of the Welsh people. CymruDNAWales has already made some startling findings, in particular about a dozen all-powerful chieftains from 1500 years ago whose DNA is found in a large number of Welsh males. But enough about Welsh men and women. What about Welsh dogs?A country whose image is bound up in sheep farming doesn't seem to have a national herding dog to match. The Welsh sheepdog is the only candidate, and a few years ago it was very nearly extinct: only 80 were left in the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The mid-way point of the BBC Proms has just passed. Attention during the eight-week season will inevitably tend to gravitate towards the novelties, “events” and one-offs, but one pre-condition for the summer to be going well is that the Proms' backbone ensemble, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, which plays no fewer than 12 of the concerts, has to be on good form. Ideally, they should be playing well across a wide range of repertoire, they should be getting full or nearly full houses, and their relationship with their principal conductor should be positive and productive. On the evidence of last Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Bridget Christie, The Stand ★★★★★When Bridget Christie planned this show, it was to be a work in progress about mortality for a tour starting later this year. But then the EU referendum happened, and everything changed. Within the space of a few weeks, she had written this heartfelt polemic about Brexit, and it's an astonishingly accomplished and moving work.She tells us that, with so many bad things happening in the world at the moment, she's going to do a nice, upbeat show about gardening, her new passion in life now that she is allowed to like the pursuit because she is past 40. She is Read more ...
Saskia Baron
If one was going to write the recipe for a classic British children’s film, it would probably include the following: adapt much-loved novel; hire fresh-faced young actors and well-worn comedians; budget for steam trains chugging over viaducts; ensure messing around in boats; add lashings of pop and sprinkle with a faint whiff of jeopardy. Swallows and Amazons has all of the above, and watching it is a bit like being transported back in time, not just to the 1930s when the story is set, but to a childhood Sunday evening when settling down to watch a BBC serial was a bittersweet pleasure, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although Heartworn Highways was a unique document of a collection of country singer-songwriters who had rejected the Nashville establishment in favour of following their own paths, hardly anyone saw the film after its completion. Initially titled New Country, it was first seen at a Los Angeles film festival in 1977. Renamed Outlaw County, it was then screened in Muncie, Indiana and Flint, Michigan. In May 1981, as Heartworn Highways, it was shown over a week at a Greenwich Village cinema. Critic Pauline Kael devoted three pages of The New Yorker to it. From this point, the reputation of the Read more ...