Reviews
Marina Vaizey
Dan Cruickshank, that enthusiastic architectural historian, who likes nothing better than some scaffolding he can clamber up to get a better look, revealed that as a child of seven he moved some 60 years ago to Warsaw with his family. His father, then a member of the Communist Party, was posted to the Polish capital by the Daily Worker as their correspondent.The young Cruickshank took to his adventure with alacrity. He precociously drew the view over Old Warsaw visible from his family’s apartment. Visiting his old home 60 years later, there was the view again to compare to his preserved Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Two plays for the price of one. What’s not to like? Particularly when they resonate so strongly with each other on a hard, uncompromising theme. Broadly, that theme is love and war, sex and death, but more specifically, both plays home in on the truth games played by a man and a woman at critical moments of intimacy.Howard Barker is a hard, uncompromising playwright, and that may partly explain why his plays (some 60 published since 1970) aren’t more often revived. Rising director Robyn Winfield-Smith is on a mission to put that right, and it was apparently her idea to pair these discreet one Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Last night Rebel Heart began to make sense. For over two hours, performing from the album, her back catalogue, and a couple of well-chosen covers, Madonna sustained both a diversity and intensity in her approach to singing about love and sex that probably no-one else could match. We all knew she could sing “Material Girl” or “Like A Prayer” till the lid came off the O2. When she followed those with Edith Piaf, sung to the ukelele, and held nearly 20,000 people in rapt silence, she gave us a much better idea of what makes her rebel heart beat.The first 40 minutes was a barrage of the new album Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Don’t you just love celebrity hype? Kim Cattrall’s name alone sold out this show, which runs over the notoriously difficult Christmas period. But sometimes star-casting backfires, and when she had to withdraw from the production for medical reasons, the theatre had to find a replacement. Step forward Noma Dumezweni, an Olivier-award-winning performer who’s due to make her directing debut at this venue next February. But that’s enough, for the moment, about celebrity – what about the writer and the play?The story, written by playwright Penelope Skinner, starts off with Linda Wilde in action. Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Young Bulgarian writer-directors Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov have made a tight, bleak, suspenseful drama in The Lesson (Urok), driven by a commanding, unforgiving performance from actress Margita Gosheva who leads the film. Clearly made on a tight budget (though that doesn’t intrude on production values), their first feature tells an often remorseless story of what happens when the money runs out, which replays themes familiar from the Balkans while also attaining an almost existential dimension.For a story set in the countryside, and in the summer, their cinematographer Krum Read more ...
David Kettle
Christmas has kicked off early in the Scottish capital’s theatreland, with traditional panto Snow White over at the King’s Theatre, and the Lyceum’s high-class offering – as befits the theatre’s 50th anniversary year – in the form of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Don’t count on any "he’s behind you" audience participation here, though – this is a far more traditional theatrical experience, a faithful adaptation of CS Lewis’s beloved children’s fable by Theresa Heskins, lovingly delivered in director Andrew Panton’s enthusiastic, energetic production – and warmly family-friendly, of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
We can keep blaming Frank Capra for the lingering notion that Yuletide has magical powers which can turn Scrooges into yo-ho-hoing Santas and convert blood-spattered family feuds into tearful hug-ins by a roaring log fire. To prove it, this would-be seasonal sackful of joy from director Jessie Nelson doesn't shrink from quoting It's a Wonderful Life, both visually and verbally. It's more like an SOS than a homage, though.Prematurely doomed by the concrete overcoat of Steven Rogers's screenplay ("I keep hearing myself trying so hard to be funny," says Olivia Wilde's Eleanor – a struggling Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Reputations and popularity rise and fall and rise again in cycles, and so with the redoubtable Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879). Now considered one of the finest photographers ever, she was an amateur gifted with incredible tenacity, intellectual and physical energy, and stamina. Stubborn and ambitious, for her class and gender she was unusually interested in business. She sold her work, which indeed she copyrighted, through the printsellers Colnaghi’s, and she was always experimenting and thinking of ways to promote her achievement.One of the seven Pattle sisters – classical Victorians Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
"Exhibition on Screen" is a logical extension of the recent phenomenon of screenings of live performances of opera and theatre. Initiated with the Leonardo exhibition of 2012 at London’s National Gallery, this is its third season, and the format remains unchanged: a specific show provides the pretext for a bespoke film that goes beyond the gallery walls. Acting as an introductory biography, it interweaves the narration of an artist’s life and work with an illuminating visit to the exhibition; the high-definition, large-screen experience of the cinema more than trumps television, computer or Read more ...
David Nice
Send in the clowns, as they sing in this palace-of-varieties first act, not for Pagliacci, Leoncavallo’s sole foothold on today’s operatic repertoire, but for the fool-for-love heroine of a sparkling, swooning rarity. Musically, Zazà is a notch above Mascagni and Giordano for orchestral delights, just below supreme genius Puccini, but its admittedly thinly-spread plot ends by being rather remarkable. Our heroine-artiste may be temporarily broken by her infatuation with a bourgeois theatregoer who turns out to be married, but she’ll return to the stage, and she even manages to expose him for Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It might sound hackneyed but Sculpture can only be described as truly psychedelic. They achieve this via a thoroughly original stage set-up. Dan Hayhurst, in a black tee-shirt and military cap, manipulates sounds on a laptop, with a rack of magnetic tape loops to his left which he carefully plucks up and sets on reels, but what makes the London duo a unique proposition is the zoetrope-style visuals of Reuben Sutherland.Moustachioed and clad in an eye-watering multi-coloured poncho, long stripey socks and what appear to be plus-fours, he places cards of images on a vinyl turntable with a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 1986, the Russian state honoured Mikael Tariverdiev with the People's Artist of Russia award, a mark of respect given to only the most significant figures in the arts. The Tbilisi-born composer was the head of the Composer’s Guild of the Soviet Cinematographer’s Union and had written concertos, operas, ballet music, song cycles (Russian poetry was a favourite), music for television and for 132 films. He was prolific, saw few boundaries and, in 1956, had set Shakespeare sonnets to music. The following year, he did the same for Japanese poetry. But his film music resonates most as it was Read more ...