Reviews
Helen Hawkins
An incendiary play has opened at the Marylebone, the adventurous venue just off Baker Street. Bigger houses were apparently unwilling to stage it, fearing anti-Israeli protests. Their loss.Nathan Englander has expanded his short story of the same title and brought it bang up to date. He was mid-writing when the October 7 attacks occurred, so rewrote the piece with Patrick Marber, factoring developments since into the dialogue. Any issue somebody might have with the current state of modern Judaism is examined here, at full volume, by two Jewish couples, one ultra-orthodox, one not so much. It’ Read more ...
James Saynor
It’s common to say that Shakespeare would have liked such-and-such a modern story, but I think he actually might have gone for this one. The Bard’s eye was drawn to cruelty at every turn, and bad-to-the-bone cruelty seeps from each scene of The Apprentice, a drama about Donald Trump’s rise to fame and gain.There will be many more Trump biopics over the coming century, but this early contender (leaving aside the Funny or Die spoof of 2016, which no one is laughing at now) is a venomously good start. Republicans have attacked its release date, three weeks from the 2024 election, as dirty pool, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Christian Gerhaher, the most compelling and complete interpreter of German Lieder of our time, makes no secret of the fact that – unlike his devotion to, say, Schumann – his relationship with the songs of Brahms has never been comfortable.In a memoir published in 2015, he explained a “certain antipathy” towards the composer: the singer demurs from being cast in the role of a mere conduit for melody “like a viola”, He says he sometimes feels “under attack” from the words, and he is also very mistrustful of Brahms’s motives in espousing the German folk song idiom.And yet the result of all this Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Straddling the USA Presidential elections, Simple8’s run of Land of the Free could not be better timed, teaching us an old lesson that wants continual learning – the more things change, the more they stay the same.We open on the Booth family kids rehearsing Julius Caesar (a motif that runs through the play) with John Wilkes Booth already displaying narcissistic tendencies in kids’ squabbles. That changes when their father, a successful British-born actor with a murky past, returns from touring to dominate the space, physical and mental. It’s easy to spot the damage done to Wilkes and one’s Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
How many times does a politician survive wave after wave of attack from rivals, surf the waves of fickle voters and tiptoe around every policy mishap, only to be undone by an appalling error of judgement in their private life, a skeleton in the closet, their own, flawed personality? And how many times, on the downfall of a British PM, does the television news take us back to the moment the disgraced politician stood on the steps of No 10 in their moment of victory?With this in mind, it’s a neat touch for Robert Icke to open his adaptation of Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus with his Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
For his latest pick’n’mix sortie into the world of the women’s picture, François Ozon has gone back to the 1930s and a popular play of the time, Mon Crime (1934). In his hands it emerges as an île flottante of a film that slips down easily but isn’t that nourishing, even though he adds some crunchier elements along the way.The nub of both the play and two earlier film adaptations is a knotty plot featuring an innocent woman accused of a crime that paradoxically makes her fêted and successful. Ozon’s heroine is another such, a pert ingenue blonde actress, Madeleine (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), who’s Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There’s a moment in writer/co-director, Jonathan Brown’s, gritty new play, Knife on the Table, that justifies its run almost on its own. Flint, a decent kid going astray, is "invited" to prove he’s ready for the next step in his drug-dealing career by stabbing Bragg, another "soldier", who has become more trouble than he’s worth.I immediately thought of The Godfather and the iconic, seductive, even beautiful language in which this rite of passage is labelled "making your bones". So much gangster culture is framed by the script, cinematography and charismatic acting of Francis Ford Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“I knew he was risky, but like fuck it, everyone’s risky.” A young woman (Kelley Jakle) poses for pictures on a deserted mountain road in Wyoming in 1977, telling Rodney, a charming, award-winning photographer (Daniel Zovatto), about the boyfriend who walked out on her when she got pregnant. She cries, grateful for his attention, and he listens sympathetically. Suddenly, his expression changes and he attacks her, strangling her, then revives her, then attacks again.Anna Kendrick directs for the first time and also stars in this gripping drama, written by Ian McDonald and based on the true- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Just before the five-minute point, a Mellotron’s distinctive string sound is heard. Three minutes earlier, a guitar evokes Robert Fripp’s characteristic shimmer. Uniting these might result in King Crimson but, instead, these are just two elements of “I Cover the Mountain Top,” the wild, 22-minute opening track of Catching Fire, a studio-quality live album recorded on 20 January 2017 at Oslo’s Nasjonal Jazzscene.At the show, a union of prodigious Norwegians, Elephant9 were collaborating with guitarist Terje Rypdal. As it has been since Nikolai Hængsle (bass), Torstein Lofthus (drums) and Ståle Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A programme of less-loved siblings – Shostakovich’s gnarly Second Cello Concerto and Rachmaninov’s “not-the-Second” Symphony No. 1 – gave John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London the chance to do what they do best: force an audience to take a second look.The Shostakovich has benefitted over the past few years from the advocacy of Sheku Kanneh-Mason – an unexpected choice for a young cellist who stormed to victory at the BBC Young Musician competition in 2016 with the more obviously ingratiating Concerto No. 1, whose signature is singing warmth of tone and breadth of melodic line.There’s Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Sir Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which set out in 1914 only to be marooned until August 1916, was a failure but a “glorious failure”, in the words of one crew member, the meteorologist Leonard Hussey. It is also perhaps the greatest survival story ever told.In a legendary feat of perseverance, Shackleton kept a crew of 30 men alive for almost two years in brutal conditions – and on a diet of penguins, seals, and their own sledge dogs – after his ship, Endurance, became trapped in pack ice and sank in the Weddell Sea.“I have marvelled often at the thin line that Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It’s not often that a classical music concert offers to take you beyond the stratosphere and back, but this intriguing evening from the City of London Sinfonia did precisely that with considerable élan. All too frequently there’s a considerable gap between a fantastic idea and its satisfying execution, yet this musical trip from the Antarctic to the Arctic via different cloud formations proved to be as stimulating as it was passionately engaging.That was due in no small part to the contribution of Dr Simon Clark (pictured below, far right), an atmospheric scientist who’s the author of a book Read more ...