Reviews
aleks.sierz
As a subject for drama, theatre history is always popular in the West End. Between Mr Foote’s Other Leg, which has recently closed at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, and Mrs Henderson Presents, which opens soon at the Noël Coward Theatre, comes Nell Gwynn, a West End transfer of the popular show from Shakespeare’s Globe, with Gemma Arterton as the eponymous heroine. But is this rowdy Restoration romp deserving of the lavish praise it has already garnered?The story of Nell, which begins in the 1660s once the anti-theatrical Puritans have been sent packing, is well known. Her rise from orange- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A "guests-from-hell" saga on a panoramic scale, Luca Guadagnino's A Bigger Splash is a reworking of Jacques Deray's 1969 sex-and-jealousy movie La Piscine. The action has been transported from the south of France to the island of Pantelleria in the Strait of Sicily, where rock icon Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton) is recuperating after a throat operation with her filmmaker boyfriend Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts).The couple sprawl luxuriously and nakedly around the pool at their idyllic island eyrie, where the view offers both craggy hillsides and sun-baked plains stretching away to the sparkling Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Sitting near the front at a Pina Bausch piece always provokes anxiety. As my neighbour in the fourth row remarked, "at best, we'll get offered a cup of tea; at worst, anything might happen." Fortunately for those of a nervous disposition, ...como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si si... (Like Moss on a Stone), the last piece Bausch made before she died in 2009, is much tamer than the 1980s pieces which Tanztheater Wuppertal have brought to Sadler's in the last few years: those in the front rows suffered no agony worse than being given fruit and having their spectacles polished, while those Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Jack is an alcoholic. Stephanie is a whore. Joseph is stupid. Stevie is a broody neurotic. These identifiers are proudly proclaimed in the first minute of Matthew Perry’s debut play, but if you weren’t paying attention, fear not: they will be repeated, loudly and often. This is theatre as group therapy, and there is nothing left to the imagination.Though Perry (pictured below with the cast) has been wary of calling The End of Longing autobiographical, it’s not hard to read his character Jack as an avatar: the single, 40-year-old addict who masks self-doubt with sarcasm. But if Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
"It’s all very well, but you can’t call it a symphony". So said William Walton of Mahler’s Third, all six movements and a hundred minutes of it. Jakub Hrůša conducted the Philharmonia last night on fine if hardly infallible form in a performance notable for its restraint in a work remarkable for the excess which raised Walton’s eyebrow.There is a Czech tradition of Mahler which means something in the Third most of all his symphonies. Not for Kubelík, Neumann or Běhlohlávek the heaped-up schmaltz or knife-edge Modernism of Mahler from further West. Hrůša is eminently worthy of that tradition. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
If one says, accurately, that Richard Bean’s Toast is a comedy about Hull’s lost bread industry, trade unions and the poor working man, you will possibly yawn and turn the page. But it is no more just about that than Henry IV, Part II is about Tudor pub culture. Toast is a gloriously madcap blast about men’s insecurities and pomposities, with a groanworthy taste in jokes. For one thing, Bean originally wanted to call it Wonderloaf, a fine ironic pun on its subject, which is the artform that yesteryear's unionised working man made of loafing about on a break, all strictly legal.In his gap year Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.” Miss Bennet has been a busy Lizzy. In recent years she's popped up in a British Bollywood setting (Bride and Prejudice) and in the present day (Lost in Austen), and solved a murder mystery (Death Comes to Pemberley). Her latest outing – as played by literary pin-up of the moment Lily James – is as a sword-wielding, pistol-toting scourge of the zombie hordes. Naturally, she’s very good at what she does.The title tells it exactly like it is. In Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Read more ...
David Nice
2015, Sibelius anniversary year, yielded no London performances of the composer's last masterpiece, the Prospero's farewell of his incidental music to The Tempest. With Shakespeare400, 2016 has already made amends: even if the Bardic input came solely from Simon Callow doing all the voices, and summing up the plot – "elsewhere on the island", "meanwhile..." – Osmo Vänskä served up more of the original numbers for the 1926 Copenhagen production than I've encountered live before.Previous "editions" from Neeme Järvi and John Storgårds gave us more of the play, the last with an abridged version Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“It’s routine, it’s procedure.” “It’s wank, it’s toss.” As you can tell, Happy Valley is back. If Sally Wainwright made bespoke ironmongery or dry stone walls or exceedingly good cakes, her work would come by royal appointment. Instead you can tell she’s good because she accumulates awards, including most recently a couple of BAFTAs for series one, and attracts actors from the farthest-flung corners of northern drama such as Cucumber and Downton’s downstairs, all gagging to speak her pearly dialogue.The BBC iPlayer has been running a five-minute recap of where we’re up to pending this second Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is the first feature by writer-director Stephen Fingleton, and has earned him a BAFTA nomination for Outstanding Debut. Set in Fingleton's native Northern Ireland, it's a pared-down tale of post-apocalyptic struggle, compensating for its lack of budget with rigorous economy and a watchful intelligence.Martin McCann plays the titular survivalist, a gaunt and unsmiling homesteader who guards his shack in the forest, around which he cultivates his own vegetables. Dialogue has been kept to a bare minimum, so McCann has to create his character largely through facial expressions (suspicious Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The music of Louis Andriessen is instantly recognisable but frustratingly difficult to define. The American Minimalists are a strong influence, but so too is Stravinsky, and through him, Bach. Those figures provide the context for Andriessen’s works in the Barbican mini-festival M is for Man, Music and Mystery, which this Britten Sinfonia concert inaugurated. The connections proved strong – in this case with Steve Reich – even if they did little to counter the image of Andriessen as a radical and utterly unique voice.The concert began by exploring a different direction of influence, from Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“Warning: this show is not a ‘comedy,’” wrote comedian Louis CK in an email alerting fans to the impending arrival of the second episode of his new show, Horace and Pete. “I dunno what it is. It can be funny. And also not. Both. I believe that ‘funny’ works best in its natural habitat. Right in the jungle along with ‘awful’, ‘sad’, ‘confusing’ and ‘nothing.’”Just over a week ago, without any prior warning, American stand-up and writer Louis CK launched a brand new show, the first episode available to download from his site for $5. It’s a distribution model that has worked well for his stand- Read more ...