Reviews
Ed Owen
The last film to feature the Chilean coup was No from 2012, which explored the referendum that finally rid the country of General Pinochet and returned the country to democracy. There a genius adman plotted a brilliant campaign to get the right answer. Perhaps worthwhile viewing for those planning referendums?In The Colony Daniel (Daniel Brühl) is an activist graphic designer and photographer based in Chile, making posters and flyers backing socialist president Salvador Allende immediately prior to Pinochet’s 1973 military coup. Daniel's air stewardess girlfriend Lene (Emma Watson) arrives Read more ...
stephen.walsh
“It doesn’t need me,” Sebastian Thomas writes in this season’s Longborough programme, “to labour the idea that the content of a theatrical or musical piece should find some relevance to our own lives.” No, indeed. Practically every director one could name labours it already, sometimes with very odd results.For some reason, the 1950s are a current favourite touchstone of relevance. So it’s a mild relief that Thomas Guthrie has chosen to locate his new production of The Marriage of Figaro at the start of the First World War, like some binned episode of Downton Abbey. Count Almaviva appears Read more ...
Ismene Brown
How often are you charmed by one of Shakespeare’s sylvan romances while literally under a greenwood tree? Even if this summer is proving rather generous with the rough weather, it is an unusual pleasure to wander around a fine woodland garden while Rosalind and Orlando pursue their light-hearted crossdressing courtship in the forest of Arden, and white sheets inked with bad love poems flutter from the trunks of many oak trees.The Crown Estate's Savill Garden in Windsor Great Park is worth a trip for itself, but for the past two midsummers it’s had the additional treat of evening performances Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The huge and gorgeous Titian, The Vendramin Family, c.1540-c.1560, displays a frieze of males of all ages, three or four generations – and an adorable lap dog held close by the youngest boy – in marvellously sumptuous costume. The painting is surrounded with portraits by an ardent admirer of Titian's, Anthony van Dyck, our interest in the Titian deepened by the fact that Van Dyck once owned it. It is but one of the stars of this fascinating sampling of the collecting habits of artists themselves.These consummate portrait painters are separated by nearly a century but we are told that Van Dyck Read more ...
Dylan Moore
Before playing a version of “Out of Time”, the lead single from Blur’s 2003 album Think Tank, Damon Albarn explains that “at Glastonbury, it really was out of time: there was a problem with our monitors and we were about a bar a half out.” Last night’s rendition at Royal Festival Hall was not perfect, but the Syrian National Orchestra’s backing was enough to earn a fist pump from Albarn, who skipped off the stage theatrically as if to underline his pleasure.The night’s imperfections – a rare frog in Albarn’s throat for The Beatles’ “Blackbird”, a couple of technical hitches, the odd bit Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It begins with “Never Never Let Me Down” by Formulars Dance Band. “You’re the only good thing I’ve got,” declares the singer of a garage-band answer to The Impressions over a rough-and-ready backing where a shuffling mid-tempo groove is driven along by wheezy organ and scratchy lead guitar. When the band unites to sing harmonies, the massed vocal is distorted: a sure sign of an overloaded microphone. If this were America, “Never Never Let Me Down” would have been an obscure independent soul release issued around 1966. But this was Nigeria and Formulars Dance Band – whose personnel are unknown Read more ...
David Nice
All 23 of Massenet's mature operas boast memorably melodious quarters of an hour and fastidious orchestration, so why Werther’s special status as a repertoire staple? Three or four great arias may have been enough to clinch it. There’s also the fact that the source, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, confers a highbrow status the opera, a pale shadow of the original, doesn't really deserve. At any rate it came over last night as no more than an after-dinner mint to a dark day's dining on scorpions.The chief reason for going to this third revival of Benoît Jacquot‘s under-nuanced Read more ...
Marianka Swain
It begins promisingly, a dark Gothic fairy tale – both Grimm and grim. The writhing witches (four, oddly) are summoned from a pile of dead bodies, Stefan Fichert’s eerie puppetry all chopped-up limbs and interchanging demonic heads, hands scuttling across the floor like a spider, and disembodied voices chanting and haunting. Then the spell is broken and “what seem’d corporal melted”.Unfortunately, that’s also when the air goes out of Iqbal Khan’s lacklustre production, which plods along from one incident to the next without any clear intent. Ray Fearon’s Macbeth is a mellifluous speaker Read more ...
graham.rickson
Aukai Markus Seiber (Aukai Music)In a week where there’s been rather too much news to get one’s head round, a spot of ambient calm is very appealing. Aukai is the pseudonym of German guitarist and ‘soundscape artist’ Markus Seiber, and this debut disc is a sequence of 13 brief instrumentals. No notes are provided other than a list of Seiber’s collaborators, but this eloquent, appealing music has enough charm to stand up on its own. The pace is unhurried and the textures are spare; think of this disc as a more consciously melodic backward glance at Brian Eno’s 1970s ambient LPs. Similar Read more ...
Barney Harsent
And so we come to the end of the most spiteful, divisive and downright deceitful political campaign in living memory. And while we’re on the Ds, I’ll have disingenuous too, thanks. The remain camp was captained by a mildly Eurosceptic prime minister, who called the referendum in an attempt to secure an election victory, while Brexit has been spearheaded by a shambolic, and mildly Europhile, thatched homunculus, who simply wants the other guy’s job. We are, essentially, collateral damage in a spectacularly damaging career move.But with the shouting is over, it’s time for the really important Read more ...
Katie Colombus
There are often times as adults, that we feel ill-prepared for dealing with situations that arise. There is no equivalent of a Brownie’s badge for “taking responsibility” “progressing the career ladder”, “finding your life partner” or “coping with grief”. But by age 30, somehow, inexplicably, we’re supposed to have it all under control. Rachel Tunnard’s debut feature film departs from this social norm, and takes a look at what happens when the dream is derailed.Anna is a sub-functional almost 30-year-old living in a shed at the foot of her mother’s garden. She dresses, acts and speaks like a Read more ...
David Nice
ENO's new artistic director Daniel Kramer must regret having gone on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week to talk about suspending Janáček "and other obscures" from the company's repertoire for several seasons to come. Good God, if Jenůfa, Janáček's first searing masterpiece, can't move an ENO novice to tears then something's wrong. I can only repeat what I wrote about the recent concert performance, that I'd always recommend it as the first port of call for anyone who loves theatre and is wary of opera.Fortunately everything is right in this revival of David Alden's industrialised Czech setting, Read more ...