Reviews
mark.kidel
Andrew Hilton’s new production of All’s Well That Ends Well makes the most of the complexities of a "problem play", neither comedy nor tragedy, and navigates this startling mix of emotional depth and light farce with great deftness. This is Shakespeare as master trickster, playing with narrative genres, the tricks of his characters matching the sleight of hand and suspension of disbelief displayed in a story that combines the simple manicheism and magic of fairy tale with the realities of gender politics, reflections on the inconstancy of human nature and the inifinite and sometimes Read more ...
Stuart Houghton
So... what the hell is Miitomo? When Nintendo announced it was moving into mobile apps, the smart money seemed to be on iOS and/or Android ports of choice titles from the company’s deeply-stacked library of classic games. Maybe a mobile Super Mario Bros conversion, a phone-sized dose of Super Metroid or the chance to re-live The Legend Of Zelda on your iPhone.But no. Nintendo has released Miitomo - a title that is sorta, kinda, possibly a game but in fact is something closer to a social network. In some ways, it is a sort of spiritual successor to the old Everybody Votes opinion poll channel Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It can be given to few commercial galleries to have sustained a relationship with the same artist for over 130 years, but such is the link between The Fine Art Society and James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903).The FAS was founded in 1876, and is still in its purpose-built original home in New Bond Street. The frontage was designed by EW Godwin, who also designed Whistler’s White House in Chelsea. It has many firsts to its credit, including commissioning Whistler to produce his superbly atmospheric etchings of Venice, which were published by the gallery in 1880. In 1883 Whistler’s monographic Read more ...
Nadine Meisner
On Thursday the Mariinsky Ballet and Orchestra swooped into Cardiff for the ballet company’s only UK dates this year. Appearing at the Wales Millennium Centre for just four ballet performances, plus a family concert of Peter and the Wolf, the Mariinsky’s arrival does seem an extravagant indulgence by its backers, especially with the decision to show exclusively contemporary, Western-style, ballet programmes.Like the Bolshoi, the Mariinsky has at times acquired contemporary Western ballets, even during Soviet days, but in the past two decades the drive to westernise has intensified and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Is there anything left to say about Sandy Denny? Sadly, she cannot say anything herself, as she died in 1978. So it’s left to what she released during her lifetime, posthumous appraisals and reappraisals, and packages and repackages to do the talking.In 2010, the career-spanning, 19-disc box set Sandy Denny was issued. That could have been the last word and was measured against her issued discography of four solo albums, the three with Fairport Convention, and one with Fotheringay, as well as sundry collaborations. Fotheringay were recently the subject of a box set and her solo albums have Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The playwright Anders Lustgarten has spent a considerable chunk of his life reading and writing and thinking about China, and clearly wants to set a few points straight. Tired of the persistent Western view of that country and its people as inscrutable and mysterious, and exasperated by what he sees as the clumsy anti-Maoist propaganda of popular works such Jung Chan’s Wild Swans, he has written a play that looks at the effects of the Mao years on a gaggle of ordinary people in one ordinary village – the fictional rural backwater Rotten Peach.The thrust of his argument is that the Chinese Read more ...
joe.muggs
Kathryn Williams has a lot to live up to. The last time I saw the Liverpudlian singer-songwriter play live was a completely unamplified gig in the Tricycle Theatre some nine years ago, and its intimacy and intensity remain seared in my memory as one of the most powerful performances I've ever experienced. So I was feeling some trepidation about seeing her play in my local south London parish church as part of the Sydenham Arts Festival: while her recent Hypoxia album is up there with her best, she can be inconsistent on record, with the occasional drift too far into daytime Radio 2 territory Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s not the first time that young French conductor Alexandre Bloch has been in front of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra – he took them on a well-received short Scottish tour last summer. But it was his first main-season gig with the band, and he certainly had something to say. "A bit of French and Russian atmosphere," was how he modestly described his concert in the concert progamme’s intro: it was certainly that, but plenty more besides.As shown in his opener, Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks, one of the pieces he’d toured with the SCO last summer, and which the players clearly knew inside out. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This is an unashamed, fulsome, extravagant tribute from Peter Greenaway to his cinema idol. The British director – though that description is probably more point of origin these days than allegiance – has long acclaimed his Russian-Soviet counterpart Sergei Eisenstein as the most adventurous figure that the film industry has ever known, one whose ground-breaking experiments and discoveries are as alive today as they ever have been.There’s experiment aplenty in Eisenstein in Guanajuato, making the result much more of a fiesta than we have had from the director in a long time; the energy levels Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There aren’t many opera choruses I’d want to hear singing Brahms’ Requiem, and still fewer I’d rush to hear. But the Olivier Award-winning ENO chorus is a different beast altogether – as responsive and flexible of tone as it is skilled with an all-out musical punch – and more than capable of finding the interiority as well as the intensity in this choral classic.Singing the English translation in the composer’s own arrangement for chorus, soloists and piano-duet, the ENO choristers showed their full dramatic range in a performance that all but blew the doors off St George’s Hanover Square, Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Why do young British Muslims go to join the so-called Islamic State? Since the entire media has been grappling with this question for ages now, it is a bit puzzling to see our flagship National Theatre giving the subject an airing, especially as this is a verbatim drama, which uses the actual words of interviewees, and is thus not so very different from ordinary journalism. But if Gillian Slovo’s Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State aspires to be a stage piece, how does it work?The interviewees’ accounts are never questionedThe 95-minute show begins with examples of IS Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The exhibition starts promisingly. You can help yourself to an orange from Roelof Louw’s pyramid of golden fruit. Its a reminder that, for the conceptualists, art was a verb not a noun. Focusing on activity rather than outcome, these artists were committed to the creative process rather than the end product. The idea was what mattered, and if it led to an open-ended exploration, so much the better.For centuries, the whole point of art had been its longevity; now mutability and destruction were welcomed as part of the creative process. Left intact, Louw’s pyramid of oranges (pictured Read more ...