Reviews
alexandra.coghlan
For a play about silence – its uncanny ability to tell the truth, to “persuade when speaking fails” – The Winter’s Tale is remarkably wordy. Of the sequence of late romances only Cymbeline comes close to the dense and elliptical verbal patterning we find ourselves tangled in here. But Michael Longhurst’s new production for the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is so richly cast, its verse-speaking so expressive that we see straight through the often opaque text to the humanity and the humour beneath.After a riotous Pericles and troubled Cymbeline, this third play in Dominic Dromgoole’s farewell quartet Read more ...
David Nice
"I wish I had money," exclaims the weak-willed hero of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress and, hey presto, the devil appears to strike a deal. Auden and Kallman didn't have the last word on Faustian-pact librettos. Now writer Louise Welsh and composer Stuart MacRae, successful collaborators already on the award-winning Ghost Patrol, have had the bright idea of turning a fiendishly clever short story by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Bottle Imp, into an updated operatic subject.The Devil Inside has a gripping plot - especially if, like me, you hadn't read either story or synopsis in advance - and Read more ...
Marianka Swain
The death of a child is an unnatural loss. There’s no reassurance that the departed lived a full life, rather the jagged edge of one cut short. In the case of Becca and Howie, it’s also nonsensical: their perfectly healthy four-year-old son struck by a car in a freak accident while chasing their dog onto a quiet suburban street. How to find meaning in such absurd horror?The central problem of American playwright David Lindsay-Abaire’s empathetic, Pulitzer-winning work is that their respective coping mechanisms have taken them down different paths, opening up a chasm between them. Becca ( Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This slightly ludicrous programme is really a chance to see a charming range of dogs and cats, based on an assumption that by comparing cats and dogs we humans can decide which species is best. But best for what? As pets, domestic companions, survivors in the human jungle?Both species have survived indeed by attaching themselves in one way and another to various human societies, and even managing in certain societies to be worshipped as divine beings, Egypt being a prime example, while now some Asian countries see dogs as a food source. Well, they eat guinea pigs in South America; one country Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Even if the evening had turned out to be rubbish, there was always going to be a warm welcome for Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer's return to live performance with 25 Years of Reeves & Mortimer: The Poignant Moments. Aside from the obvious room for nostalgia, Mortimer almost didn't make it; this tour could start only after he had emergency triple bypass surgery last year. Thankfully, it hasn't affected either his or Reeves' gift for utter silliness, as their appearance at Dave's Leicester Comedy Festival proved.The show starts with a series of clips from their career, made in grainy Read more ...
David Nice
Demons, trolls and dead souls have a habit of latching onto Ibsen's bourgeois Norwegians. Surely the best way for actors to handle them is to keep it natural, make them part of the furniture and, in Dostoyevsky's words, "render the supernatural so real that one is almost forced to believe it". But very little seems real or spontaneous in Matthew Warchus's production of The Master Builder. It certainly doesn't help that chilling events from the past or visions of the paranormal are underlined with creepy music and lighting when they should be torn from the characters' insides, the sounds Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In 2005, Lynn Alleway made a film about Kids' Company founder Camila Batmanghelidjh called Tough Kids – Tough Love. In June last year, Alleway was invited to film her again. It wasn't spelled out in this new documentary, but you'd have to assume Batmanghelidjh was hoping to enlist some sympathetic media coverage, since the management and funding of Kids Company was coming under a gathering crescendo of scrutiny.Certainly, Alleway got plenty of access to Ms B, whom we saw speaking at length in the backs of cars, in corridors, on pavements, on phones and in her office. Alleway, behind the Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"One... Two... You know what to do": that coolly delivered rehearsal intro from a trombonist called Cutler (Clint Dyer) could serve as a synoptic appraisal of the simply overwhelming National Theatre revival of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. The play in 1984 launched the late August Wilson on to Broadway, where I first saw it, and here announces itself as a bellwether achievement in artistic director Rufus Norris's still-young National Theatre regime and as, very possibly, the finest Ma Rainey yet.For that, credit the surpassing empathy of a director in Dominic Cooke, who brings much the same easy Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
All three Grieg violin sonatas in a single recital may seem like too much of a good thing. The similarities between them outweigh the differences, which are more of quality than intent. But, when heard in chronological order, they provide a fascinating précis of Grieg’s artistic development, from the youthful and cheerfully unsophisticated First, through the terser and more tightly argued Second, to the Third, the composer’s undisputed masterpiece in the genre.Norwegian violinist Henning Kraggerud (main picture) is clearly a native speaker when it comes to Grieg. Folk music plays different Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Lolita Chakrabarti’s impassioned debut has only gained topicality since its 2012 Tricycle incarnation. Trevor Nunn’s all-white Wars of the Roses and #OscarsSoWhite, among others, have fanned its flames, while quips about a paranoid Russian regime and the limits of English openness to change seem all too pertinent. Cameron might well borrow the woolly idea of “new based on the old” during the European referendum debate.Brooking no compromise is rule-breaking African-American actor Ira Aldridge (Adrian Lester), who, in 1833, succeeded the celebrated Edmund Kean as Othello at the Theatre Royal Read more ...
David Nice
Why have all attempts to make French comic opera funny to British audiences fallen so flat, at least since ENO's 1980s Orpheus in the Underworld? That company's La belle Hélène simply curled the toes, while Opera North managed to make a pig's-ear "special edition" of Chabrier's Le roi malgré lui. L'Étoile in its first staging at the Royal Opera fares better, not least because it's mostly performed in impeccable French, but does it ever reach the potentially hilarious pitch of Gilbert and Sullivan?The case for Chabrier's Star twinkling again is made by his first (1877) steps in a very Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This debate about the future of the BBC might be missing the point. In the black corner scowls the Dark Lord of Swingeing Arts Cuts John Whittingdale, while in the fluffy corner is everyone who doesn’t want anything to change. By their “I heart Lyse Doucet” shall you know the latter. We’re all of us, on both sides of the fence, of a certain vintage. The kids, who like it or not seem an absolute dead-cert shoo-in to inherit the future, haven’t got a dog in this fight. Why? Because they don’t watch TV. Any more than they buy newspapers. They watch YouTube. If they like the BBC it’s as a Read more ...