Reviews
Hanna Weibye
I could tell you what the German word "Betroffenheit" means by giving a dictionary definition, etymology and connotations and so on. But I won't, because this dance-drama hybrid by Jonathan Young and Crystal Pite is precisely not about pinning down definitions or making sense through words in a descriptive, iterative sort of way, but about capturing feelings or states of being in a much more metaphorical, experiential, immersive way. Betroffenheit is in one sense, then, the feeling you have after watching the show Betroffenheit.But it started from a very specific and personal experience. In Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The release of Louise Osmond’s biographical film about the director Ken Loach, who turns 80 on 17 June, has been timed to perfection. Twelve days ago, Loach’s I, Daniel Blake won him his second Palme d’Or. He came out of retirement to make it after the Conservatives won the General Election last year. “Bastards,” he calls them, with a schoolboy-ish smile, at the beginning and end of the documentary.Except in the first half of the Thatcher ’80s, Tory policies have specialised in eliciting Loach’s fiercely oppositional cinema – so have anti-socialist Labour policies. For 53 years, he has been Read more ...
Richard Bratby
“Our Shakespeare” is the name of the CBSO’s current season. They're making the same point that Ben Elton makes slightly less subtly in Upstart Crow: that Shakespeare was basically a Brummie. And by implication, that four centuries of musical Bardolatory, from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen to Verdi’s Falstaff, is all on some level Made in Birmingham. Falstaff, conducted by Edward Gardner, is coming next month; the usual Shakespearean warhorses (Prokofiev, Walton, Tchaikovsky) have already been despatched. That left tonight’s “Seven Ages of Shakespeare”, which, like any concert that puts Purcell Read more ...
Matt Wolf
If you're disabled, it certainly helps to be as indecently rich as you are handsome while you make plans to end your life: that, in short, is the preposterous take-away message from Me Before You, the film version of the Jojo Moyes bestseller which Moyes herself has adapted for the screen. I haven't read the book and would imagine that the material's multiple irritations, both large-scale and small, might be somewhat more tolerable not blown up into celluloid dimensions.But as brought to the screen by OIivier Award-winning theatre director Thea Sharrock, who has spent her stage career Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
One can only speculate about the mysterious allure which dictators seem to hold for Jonathan Meades, and perhaps one should keep one's conclusions to oneself to avoid reprisals. Having previously turned his perverse eye and tumultuous vocabulary on Stalin (Joe Building) and Hitler (Jerry Building), Meades arrived perforce at Ben Building, in which (with director/cameraman Frank Hanly) he took a trip around Benito Mussolini and the cultural trappings of fascist Italy.For all his militaristic grandstanding, operatic posturing and enthusiasm for quasi-imperial fancy dress, Mussolini was unusual Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“A porno film where the point was the plot?!” The Nice Guys asks you to make quite a few imaginative leaps: to find Russell Crowe endearing and Ryan Gosling funny and to believe that anyone in 1977 would set out to shoot a skin flick with a storyline. Implausibly, but delightfully, all of the above come to pass in a buddy caper in which Crowe and Gosling partner up to crack jokes, bones and crime in 1970s Los Angeles.Gosling plays Holland March, a widowed private investigator of low morals and lower ability who exploits confused old ladies for an easy living. He’s hired by one such to Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Suzy Klein, writer and presenter of this three-episode series, is a trained musician and a ubiquitous presence in cultural programmes across a wide spectrum. This opening film, "We Can Be Heroes", was an engagingly populist piece about a complicated subject as she enthusiastically described a major cultural shift in the way musicians and composers engaged with patrons and audiences across Europe.The catalyst was a combination of the industrial and political revolutions that began to transform European society and culture 200 years ago. In the course of this initial journey we visited Vienna, Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Alexander Payne’s adored 2004 film adaptation of Rex Pickett’s semi-autobiographical novel didn’t just pick up an Academy Award – it led to a plummeting in sales of Merlot, and Pinot Noir becoming the drink of choice. What might Pickett’s theatrical version accomplish?The good news is this midlife-crisis comedy will certainly encourage visits to the bar, if not to California’s Santa Ynez Valley. (Canny ads and paired wine tastings stoke the flames of the latter.) Both parody of and love letter to the oenophile, it savours the rituals and jargon, as Pinot fanatic Miles (Daniel Weyman) takes Read more ...
David Nice
Common wisdom has it that the prolific output of 20th century Czech genius Bohuslav Martinů is very uneven, a judgment surely made without a complete hearing. Some listeners shrink from his fidgety polystylism. Many of us on the fringes of the Martinů hardcore, though, have found ourselves giddy with each new discovery of music we didn't know before: last year, string duos on a CD from viola-player Maxim Rysanov, this year piano trios from the Czech label Supraphon and now two one-act operas, this time live from Guildhall students.Before voicing any reservations, it has to be spelled out that Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Theseus was a tablet-carrying dictator, Lysander a sweet-faced asthmatic, and Peter Quince rechristened Mistress Quince in the agreeably unexpected presence of Elaine Paige: those were among the innovations of Russell T Davies's larky reworking of what must these days be Shakespeare's most frequently performed play. (A third London production in as many weeks starts performances May 31 at Southwark Playhouse.)On paper, such textual intervention sounds like so much jiggery-pokery, and I could have done without the action-movie theatrics that at one point saw an imperiled Hermia (Prisca Bakare Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Rob da Bank’s Faustian pact with the weather gods continues apace with the second year of Common People, which takes place simultaneously in Southampton and Oxford. The forecast for days beforehand had predicted a cold front bearing relentless drizzle but, in the event, wellies were left packed away as the elements chose instead to offer blazing summer sunshine for the 30,000 revellers who attended the festival's second day at Southampton.I went with my two daughters, aged 13 and 18, and the attention to detail, which makes da Bank’s festivals (Camp Bestival, Bestival) so appealing, is Read more ...
Ed Owen
With the Olympic Games starting in three months, it’s time to cash in with those inspiring stories of competition. Jesse Owens embodies the Olympic spirit, winning four track golds at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, comprehensively refuting Hitler’s message of race hate. Owens’s track medal tally remained unmatched until Carl Lewis, 48 years later. It’s difficult to think of a more perfect Olympian.Like buses, Race is the first of three Owens biopics to come along. Disney’s adaptation of Jeremy Schaap’s Triumph is in production, as is another starring Owens lookalike Anthony Mackie. While first out Read more ...