Reviews
Jasper Rees
You are a massive cock. A gigantic tool. You are a monumental prick. Grayson Perry did not mince his message as he concluded his portrait of modern maleness with a tour of the City of London. At the end of each programme he has presented the subjects of his study with an artistic response to their world. The men working in so-called financial services inspired him to create a work called Object in Foreground (pictured below) in the shape of a giant penis. Exhibited on an empty floor of the Shard (the most giant penis of them all), its contours mirrored the silhouette of the phalluses Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
In the long tradition of fictional characters who embody their monikers, the naming of Nick Bright hardly counts as the most colourful, but it has a sardonic edge. Clearly the young American banker at the centre of Ayad Akhtar’s tight political thriller is too bright for his own good. A commodities trader for Citibank currently working in Lahore, he has been mistaken for his big-shot boss and kidnapped by Islamic militants who are holding him hostage in rural Pakistan while they wait for his employer, or the US government, to cough up $10 million to set him free.Fat chance, he reasons, and Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“Choleric humour, pathos and kindliness are mingled in conflict," wrote Robert Simpson of Nielsen’s 1928 Clarinet Concerto. The work was written for a player with a complex character, full of contradictions. Last night’s soloist, Mark van de Wiel, the Philharmonia's principal clarinettist, gave a fluent performance of the work convincing on its own terms, portraying the protagonist as an introvert and anti-hero. He mostly looked down, sometimes appeared anguished, occasionally tapped his feet in rhythm, and only sought out the conductor with his gaze in order to ensure that the more complex Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Brighton Festival’s guest director speaks in a sort of rapid-fire drawl, ideal for her debut as a stand-up comic, which she claims was tonight’s Plan A. This half-century veteran of performance art is more slippery than that, proffering a discursive, unreliable, funny and profound master-class in shaggy-dog philosophy, with the festival’s theme of home at its arguable core.The hit single “O Superman” was Laurie Anderson’s vital calling-card to pop culture, her marriage to Lou Reed a brief downtown New York art nirvana, addressed elsewhere in the festival. But the life she zigzags through Read more ...
Heidi Goldsmith
The foyer of Brighton Dome for Brighton Festival director Laurie Anderson’s Song Conversation would have had a PR executive flummoxed; from punks in their 20s licking the rim of a plastic pint to a hobbling couple clutching programmes. The breadth of audience is surely a testament to Anderson’s unique career of performances combining pop melodies with countercultural performance art. As the seemingly ceaseless passings of pop eccentrics litter our newsfeeds, it’s a relief to see the former NASA artist-in-residence and “O! Superman” composer alive and electronic.The performance is a Read more ...
Bill Knight
Asking theartsdesk's theatre photographer to review Photo London is like asking a car mechanic to review the London Motor Show. "Remember the big picture!" I kept telling myself as I tried to deconstruct the lighting of a particular shot or measure the depth of field.And big picture it certainly is. Now in its second year at Somerset House, Photo London aims to be the best photographic fair in the world – "the first photographic fair of the smartphone generation" – with over 80 galleries and 480 artists exhibiting. The exhibitors are a selection of London galleries alongside a range of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Tom Hanks is reaching world treasure status, like some third-century heritage site protected by UNESCO. His everyman allure makes him today’s only equivalent to James Stewart. Stewart shocked fans when he played a vengeful man-hunter in Winchester '73, and maybe it’s time Hanks defibrillated us all by playing a cold-blooded killer. In the meantime, here’s A Hologram for the King in which Hanks is very much Hanks and the main reason to pay up.The source material is the much praised 2012 novel by Dave Eggers. Eggers, author of the super-ludic memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the end, the swirling fragments of Marcella all fell together quite nicely, though Anna Friel's portrayal of Marcella Backland never made you think you were watching a real detective in action. Afflicted with memory loss, blackouts and intermittent "fugue states", she was more like a series of devices and obfuscations to make sure you never had a fighting chance of being certain about what was going on. It was like guessing at a crossword from which somebody had Tippexed out a few clues, though I do have an intuitive friend who guessed the killer's identity several episodes back – pure Read more ...
aleks.sierz
The sense of humour is a funny thing. It raises questions about whether what we find funny can tells us anything about who we are, or what we might become. The case of Screaming Lord Sutch, the semi-legendary rock singer and founder of the satirical Official Monster Raving Loony Party, begs the question: is his wild eccentricity an example of our national pride in tolerating bonkers people, or just an individual act of wonderful silliness? And what does it say about our political system that although he lost every one of the 41 parliamentary elections that he stood in as a candidate, he still Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
What larks! The first run of Zoo Quest – itself the first of the wildlife programmes – started 62 years ago, in 1954. It was thought it had all been filmed in black and white, on small 16mm cameras, but in fact a condition imposed by the BBC was to shoot in colour to produce a sharper image in black and white. Discovered in the archives a few months ago were perfectly preserved canisters of colour film, six hours' worth in all. This was all a decade before colour came regularly to television.So, perfectly timed for Attenbourgh's 90th birthday, the story of Zoo Quest was retold in this Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Gender deconstruction, fraught feminism and the perils of hook-up culture: George Bernard Shaw’s comedy of manners, penned in 1893, shows we haven’t come as far as we might think. It’s a point rammed home by Paul Miller’s choice of modern dress, but this otherwise pleasantly conventional production cushions its provocations, with the real challenge coming from a near-three-hour running time.Leonard Charteris (Rupert Young), the eponymous philanderer and a loose Shavian self-portrait, is caught between the woman he loves, sophisticated widow Grace (Helen Bradbury), and the woman who loves him Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's getting mighty crowded in the superhero lounge. After the underwhelming Batman v Superman and the overwhelming Captain America: Civil War, here's the X-Men posse back on the warpath, once again under the bombastic helmsmanship of Bryan Singer.The extended opening sequence is a mesmerising standalone episode. It sets up the action by whisking us back to ancient Egypt and introducing the infinitely ancient Apocalypse, a self-styled god who has spent aeons gathering ever-increasing powers by transplanting the gifts of assorted mutants into himself. As pyramids tumble, Singer zooms us back Read more ...