Reviews
Ed Owen
How much you enjoy this new version of Alice Through The Looking Glass will be directly proportional to how much you revere Lewis Carroll’s original text. If you love the original you will be perplexed, wondering if you have come into the correct screening. But if you don’t mind some liberties taken with the story or, more than liberties, if you don’t mind the original story kidnapped, wrapped in chains and thrown into a well, or if you just don’t know the book, then you might actually enjoy what’s on offer.Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland was an early experiment with modern 3D, taking more Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Seventy years ago, almost to the month, Welsh National Opera took to the stage for the first time with a double bill of the terrible twins, Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci; and fifty years later the company celebrated with the same two works directed by Elijah Moshinsky, designed by Michael Yeargan. To repeat the exercise in the same productions after another twenty years might seem an egregious piece of navel-gazing. But Moshinsky made a clever point with his 1996 staging, about stylistic distances travelled and technical standards raised. And since that same point is if anything even Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
From time to time theatre managements hit on the idea that danced drama should be part of their remit. Nick Hytner flirted with it at the National in his day with a run of productions for Lloyd Newson and his company DV8. Now Matthew Warchus, his feet barely under the desk at the Old Vic, has commissioned a show from a young choreographer who has Matthew Bourne’s crown in his sights.Bourne has always been clever in his choice of stories, drawing on familiar plots to counter the obvious drawbacks of dance in the explaining department. Drew McOnie may think he’s following suit in Jekyll & Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Trouble remembering in which country Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers cross paths? Branagh’s panting paean to Fellini will sort you out. Stylish as a monochromatic Vogue spread, and as self-consciously Italian as Bruno Tonioli guzzling lasagne in a gondola, it’s not exactly a triumph of cultural nuance. Capulet is a sharp-suited mafia don who makes an affected entrance sipping espresso, the Prince is a fascist enforcer, al-fresco dining is interrupted by fiery gesticulation, and every loss is met with operatic wailing.In this context, the high-speed courtship and resulting fallout seem Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This is one of those films where it really is better not to have seen the trailer first. Much of the pleasure is in the narrative twists and the developing characters, and the publicity gives too much away. Nevertheless, Money Monster is an enjoyable soft-liberal satire on American TV shows and the wickedness of Wall Street.Playing in real time, its engaging performances and tight direction veer from thriller to comedy. Director Jodie Foster keeps the plot moving along swiftly with some well-placed suprises and comedic touches in the first half, after which it's too easy to guess how the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
In Going Going Gone Nick Broomfield was fighting to get access all over again – but it wasn’t exactly the same kind of challenge he’d faced with Sarah Palin or some of his previous targets. Doors were closed, but the keepers of the keys here were anonymous local council functionaries, or the “media department” of Cardiff docks (who’d have known?). Broomfield seemed bemused more than anything else when told he couldn’t just turn up and film in the latter’s public spaces; of course, he kept the camera rolling anyway.Intimidating, it wasn’t. Instead the prevailing feeling behind these two films Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The second exhibition staged by Damien Hirst in his stunning Newport Street Gallery is of work from his collection by the American artist, Jeff Koons. Hirst was still a student at Goldsmiths when, in 1987, Charles Saatchi showed Koons and other young Americans at his gallery in St John’s Wood. Hirst was blown away by the freshness and ambition of work that took Warhol’s love affair with consumer culture one stage further. This mini-retrospective can be seen, then, as a tribute both to Saatchi and Koons – inspirational figures in the 1980s. A huge, sugar-pink bowl filled with Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Berlin are, misleadingly, an arts unit from Antwerp, Belgium. They’ve been around for well over a decade and major in artily constructed documentaries that are presented in the manner of experiential installations. Their focus is usually the slow, commentary-free dissection of a geographical quirk or circumstance, hence past films have been about and titled Jerusalem, Moscow, Iqaluit (Canadian Inuit capital), and Bonanza (a tiny Rocky Mountains community).This time it’s the turn of Zvizdal, a Ukrainian village that falls within the Chernobyl isolation zone, and its two remaining inhabitants, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is there any point to political satire? The great thing about the glory years of this genre in, say, the early 1960s was that the jokes punctured people’s deepest held beliefs in a deferential society, or that, as in say the 1980s, they had a target that was an unbearable person, Maggie Thatcher.But today, when cynicism about politics is widespread and nobody trusts any authority, reality often seems to be more crazy than any satire: Donald Trump, the Brexit campaign... Director Max Stafford-Clark would doubtless disagree, and his evening of five short playlets makes the case for laughter as Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
New operas are a risky business, or so the Royal Opera’s past experience teaches us. For years, visiting the company’s Linbury Studio Theatre was like rolling the dice while on a losing streak: vain, desperate hope followed inevitably by disappointment. Glare, The Virtues of Things, Clemency, the failed experiment that was OperaShots. But recently things have taken a turn. Gradually, thanks to works from Birtwistle, Haas and more, the risk has begun to pay off. Now Philip Venables’s 4.48 Psychosis – the first opera to emerge from the Royal Opera’s joint Composer-in-Residence doctorate with Read more ...
Miriam Gillinson
Running Wild is a theatrical safari with no expenses spared. This latest stage adaptation of a novel by Michael Morpurgo (of War Horse fame) boasts a jungle-full of puppets – a majestic elephant and some affectionate orangutans included – and a tsunami that sweeps right over the audience. The puppets may steal your heart but the play itself, which peddles a stern conservation message, left me cold – and not just because it was a nippy night outdoors in Regent's Park. The story occupies classic Morpurgo territory and once again features a bereaved kid who finds solace and purpose in the Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This programme looked like a non-starter on paper, a long sequence of short Bartók dance settings, followed by a second half that was dominated by works for children from Bartók and Kurtág. But it worked, largely thanks to Cédric Tiberghien’s conviction in these short works and his ability to make imposing and decisive statements with a minimum of musical material.The programme of the first half was organised chronologically, from the 15 Hungarian Peasant Songs of 1914-18, through the 8 Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs of 1920 to the Piano Sonata of 1926. That allowed Bartók’s Read more ...